The Free Musics by Jack Wright, Spring Garden Music Editions, Jan. 2017, 316 pages

The two free musics are free jazz and free improvisation, genres begun in the sixties that continue today under different circumstances. The musicians’ approach was originally exploratory free playing, which encouraged the maximum range of sound and feeling. In Europe they were and still are accepted genres for career professionals. In North America this is only true for free jazz, which maintains the original style as a tradition and a strong jazz-oriented audience. Free improvisation on the other hand is not based on jazz idiom or feeling and is more open to a wider range of sound. It's history is erratic and discontinuous, and although it often attracts free jazz listeners, it is not widely known.

Musicians play freely as often in private sessions as in performance, and what they do is first of all aimed at their own satisfaction. Otherwise they would not be said to have a specific aesthetic they adhere to. It follows their moment-to-moment intuitions while interacting with one another, based on trust and imagination. Sometimes partners are very selectively chosen; other times it is quite random and accidental. Its strength is to enter play with the lightness of “Let’s see what happens," without expectations about the results or that it will please others.

This book has been provocative, since it views the situation players find themselves in and ignores the perspective of consumers, the media, and academics. It explores their assumptions and practices--their musical approach, relations to the music world, to each other, and to the social order. It traces the changes in these conditions since the origins of these musics. The response to it from musicians has been very strong, many saying it puts their own thoughts into words.

Chapters follow a rough chronology: 1. Jazz as the Prehistory of Free Musics; 2. Sixties Free Jazz; 3. Collapse of the Free Jazz Movement; 4. Free Jazz in Revival; 5. The Situation for Jazz-based Music; 6. British Free Improvisation; 7. Free Improv in North America in the 1980s; 8. What Good is Free?; 9. Derek Bailey’s Concept of Improvisation; 10. Free Playing; 11. Free Playing and the Real World; 12. Resurgence of Free Improv to the Present

Jack Wright is a saxophonist who turned to free playing in 1979 and has played it exclusively ever since. At 80 he still tours widely in North America and Europe, for which the late guitarist Davey Williams called him "the Johnny Appleseed of free improvisation” back in the eighties. He is open to playing with others, experienced or not, and approaches his own playing with a questioning spirit. See springgardenmusic.com for more information.

The book is available directly from me for $15, including postage within the US, and will include a CD. Send me an email and paypal to jackwri555 at gmail dot com (a check also possible), and be sure to click on "friends and family." It is also available from the Downtown Music Gallery (including the CD) and Amazon (without the CD)

Outside the US the best option is Amazon in your country, since it is also printed in most European countries, China, Japan, and others.

For libraries, the book is catalogued in the LC as ML430.7 .W75 2017 and for the Dewey system: 781.36

Comments and Reviews

Ben Watson, the author of Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation: "The Free Musics will probably be considered the most important book on free playing since Derek Bailey's Improvisation. He's actually doing what Derek said musicians never do, talking about what it's like to improvise, and with a really nuanced understanding of Free Jazz and the 60s revolution, Free Improvisation, the Free Jazz Revival...His playing with guitarist Zach Darrup is extraordinary, packed with unexpected detail." And in an email, "Your book is going to stir so many thoughts in so many heads you are not going to live long enough to catch up with all the repercussions!"

Michael Hefferly, author of Northern Sun/Southern Moon--Europe's Reinvention of Jazz : "Recommend it highly for its seasoned and savvy insider's view, richly laden with erudite weave of voices from disciplines and discourses in larger culture beyond the special one of its focus. His style in that work is the best of what academic writing purports to be--interdisciplinary discourse, a conversation between people who know a lot about what they're writing about and who know how to write clearly and creatively (ie., readably.)

Evan Lipson, bassist and touring partner: "What a ride! I'm so accustomed to your voice as a bold, insightful, and often profound essayist and informal (i.e. driver or passenger seat) lecturer, but this is a different voice entirely. Your convctions and insights dealing with this history (avoiding the hagiography you mention) in a longform context are nothing short of revelatory."

Andrew Drury, percussionist and partner of many tours: "This is exciting. Sure to be a classic. To say Jack Wright is an excellent musician, an amazing one, or a philosopher, or trickster, or one capable of blowing minds and inspiring people to think in new ways and do strangely courageous things, is all very true but still doesn't adequately make the case of why I think just about everyone I know should buy his book (and his cds, and see him live!). A recommendation built on hype is not a smidgeon as fun as actually hearing or seeing him play, hanging out, and or hearing and engaging with what he thinks. So just try it! Go for it! Now that he has bound some of his writings within one spine and cover we have another point of entry into his unique oeuvre and the world of music in general which in this period of history has been given a Procrustean bed kind of treatment to fit the socio-economic context. Jack, for decades, has travelled uncharted territory and engaged with music as aesthetic practice, as profession, and as way of life with as much integrity, adventure, fun, thoughtfulness, etc. as anyone I've met. Seriously."

All About Jazz, Review by Dan Barbiero

Michael Kaler, in Critical Studies in Improvisation

The Wire, May 2017: "'Despite my briar-patch underground preference, I sincerely want my playing to be available to anyone who will listen...For outsider musicians the problem is not that our music is judged negatively but that it doesn’t get judged at all'. Thus veteran saxophone improviser Jack Wright, whose book, he writes, "aims to provide insight into the subjectivity behind a kind of playing that alienates all but a few".
He stresses that this volume is not the history of free jazz and free improv that still needs to be written. Part I deals with the New York origins of free jazz. Part II is on free improvisation, beginning with the UK, including links to free jazz and experimental music. Part III is on the resurgence of North American free improv in the decade from 1996, and the story up to the present.
Wright gave up an academic career as an historian in 1972, and a few years later turned to playing free jazz, based mainly in Philadelphia – discovering free improvisation, which was then a tiny scene in the States, and today is not much bigger. Terminology is tricky here, of course. But according to Wright, in the US unlike the UK, there is really no "scene", which implies audience, for improvisation that doesn't reference the high, continuous sound, emotion, and volume of free jazz. His long experience includes involvement with European reductionism in the early years of this century, and at 74 he's still a tireless organiser of sessions and gigs.
Wright has an historian's keen concern with the applicability of labels. "Free improvisation", he writes, "is a title used so loosely and infrequently in North America as to be useless except for its practitioners' self-identification". For this reason, Wright uses "free playing": "Free playing is rooted in the session...because the only external stimulation is from others similarly engaged". He interrogates Derek Bailey's aim of "non-idiomatic" free improvisation, but applauds the way that artistic imperatives thrive when commercial success is a remote possibility.
Wright is a highly perceptive commentator, in particular on how the market often drives stylistic change. Sunny Murray is quoted as saying "[free jazz] is the music of our era, no matter how much they hate it" – yet, as Wright comments, "it was defeated as the next step for jazz". Commenting on how Ornette Coleman's music arose from blues, gospel, modern and even cool jazz, he writes that "Unable to hear this at the time, many were shocked and violated...We cannot reconstruct those ears or the music's divisiveness".
Wright is sceptical of the inclusion of free improvisation under the umbrella of “experimental music”: "When free improv is grouped together with formal art, the approach of playing freely is obscured". "[It] has never functioned as even a marginalized option on American culture", he adds.
A key theme is the opposition between African-American and European avant-gardism – which I wonder if Wright overstates. He describes the sound of white free players like Jimmy Giuffre as closer to a classical sound – when surely it's a jazz sound. He denies that post-1965, Coltrane moved towards the "modernist avant-garde", on the grounds that Trane didn't narrow the gap with Western concert modernism – but can't jazz have its own "modernism"? Braxton drew on the work of Konitz and Warne Marsh, however alien the results seemed to these white players; Derek Bailey brought the traditions together in Company Week. But it's true that Wright focuses on the New York scene, in a narrow period – and even here, he sees interesting affinities between the Free Form Improvisation Ensemble, in a 1966 recording, and British free improvisation.
Disagreements are a sign of a writer with a lot to say, of course. Wright closes with penetrating thoughts on the contemporary scene, in what is a very valuable book – not an easy read, but full of insight.
------Andy Hamilton

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From Ch. 2, p. 23-24. "[Ornette] Coleman had a profound and irreversible impact even on those who resisted his music. It was behind the scene, in rehearsals and discussion, that musical self-determination and the orientation of musicians to each other developed. Coleman wanted them to listen in the moment rather than follow what the score literally told them to do. For instance, the professional norm was for the leader to shape the music as he wanted it played in performance, and to instruct the bassist accordingly. Contrary to that, he told his bassist Charlie Haden to make up the harmony himself; this made the player a shareholder in the composer role and somewhat displaced the leader.

As this kind of listening/playing extended to all Coleman’s players, it released them as music creators with almost equal responsibility. He rehearsed a group in L.A. for his 1958 album “Something Else!!!” (exclamation points in the original) and changed the composition at each rehearsal, and even on the recording date itself. This ignored the usual progression from rehearsal to perfected piece, which, outside the latitude of the jazz soloist, had been standard for all musical production. He may have done this without conscious intent, but he apparently didn’t feel inhibited by the conventional practice. His players would have to listen, roughly follow the score, and depend on their own initiative, a kind of forced confusion. He insisted on this over his partners’ objections; they had to believe in Coleman’s vision beyond what they felt was right. This brought the rehearsal more in line with the leaderless private session, which continues in free playing today. The two modes of off-stage playing--rehearsal and session--had usually been carefully distinguished, maintaining the separate roles and integrity of skilled professional and self-motivated creative artist. Coleman transformed the rehearsal into a means for making musicians flexible and open to a variety of possibilities, to think creatively in the widest possible way in the moment. This brought musicians in direct contact with each other rather than mediated through the leader.

Since the twenties there had been a firm distinction between musical director/score-provider/paymaster and hired player who executed his will on pain of dismissal. This is a master-servant pattern of leaders hiring soloists and sidemen to do the leader’s selected and often self-composed music. For those under Coleman’s tutelage the players led themselves, progressively dispensing with chord progressions and later even with time-keeping. The musical director had brought the players to the point where he could withdraw—and they’d still get paid. This led to the possibility of a group choosing its own members, without a leader financially in charge. Here began the radical shift to players as mutual partners of each other, even friends, as Steve Lacy said. This arrangement would be in tension with the industry standard of sidemen and leader, who negotiated the contract for the gig or record, got the most credit in the press, and got paid extra, often double.

Ch. 10, p. 186 "Free playing lacks the continuity of progressive development, as one can expect from a genre like jazz in its heyday, when players seeking to outdistance rivals ended up altering the code for others. It is on the cusp between visionary possibility--it can move in any direction--and singular actualities, which would include Coltrane’s long solos, free sessions today. The urge to play freely has brought different players together at different historical junctures with no causal links between them, such as learning from the masters provides. It is then fortunate that in North America free playing has no recognized masters to be followed. Only a music world [institutions such as media, music schools, and funding sources] can churn them out; and its radar does not notice anything of such small commercial value as free playing.

This creative freedom is cognitive, musical ideas potentially multiplying by intermixing and creating mutants no one recognizes, including the players. The instrument does not dictate inherent rules for making music, as presumed in music schools, but is a mere vehicle for sound. A cheap, even broken instrument might hold an advantage over one acclaimed as exemplary for the correct sound. The traditional love of the instrument is transformed from veneration for its access to tradition, like a sacred relic, to appreciation for whatever about that specific instrument enables endless mutation."

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The Improv Campout in Quest NM, June 1990. Wright is the shirtless one.