Herbie Hancock
Morphine
Herbie Hancock
Morphine
^ my internet connection is slower than a turtle (not thee turtles) right now and i don't know Morphine but Herbie Hancock ain't free jazz. he made some out there avant-garde-ish shit later in his career, between the album you posted from ("Fat Albert Rotunda") and his breakthrough album "Headhunters".
i think Hancock's album "Sextant" is suitable for this thread tho, have y'all heard it? i think especially you will like it Taskmaster, it's also one of my favorite Hancock albums. it's not strictly free jazz, but it definitely has heavy avant-gardistic elements and was so strange that it became a tipping point to the more commercial viable and upbeat "Headhunters". "Sextant" is dark, sinister, strange, atmospheric, agressive and funy - sometimes all at the same time. you got a clarinetist, trombonist and a trumpet player, a great drummer (Billy Hart who's backed up with congas and percussion by Buck Clarke), and Hancock playing a wide array of different synths, mellotrons and keyboards, sometimes backed up by another keyboard player named Patrick Gleason who didn't really do jazz. and then of course there's Buster William's electric bass which is fantastic! as you can imagine there's a lot of NOISE going on... in a way it is reminiscent of "On the Corner" by Miles but it's definitely it's own entitity. it should be noted that both Hancock, Bennie Maupin and Billy Hart played on the "O.T.C." sessions shortly before though.
LOL that took like an half an hour just to post that track so you better enjoy it motherfucker!!!! j/k haha
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Yeah claaa is right about Herbie. None of the stuff he did was ever really free jazz (although his Mwandishi-era albums between his Blue Note stuff and "Headhunters" (including the awesome track from "Sextant" that he posted) is about as close as he got. The track you posted is really structured and not really free in any way. I'm not familiar with Morphine, but that track isn't free jazz either. That song you posted has some rough sounds, but that alone doesn't make something free jazz.Originally Posted by WooHa
Ha, I've got "Sextant", "Crossings", and "Mwandishi", but I haven't listened to them in far too long, and I'm always down for being reminded of good stuff I haven't listened to in a while. In fact, I'm gonna throw on "Crossings" right now.
Oh and more new stuff is coming. I just finished my semester and I've been going through a ton of new (for me) stuff from the late 60s and 70s, and a bunch of stuff that came out of St. Louis' Black Artists' Group, so I'll be posting some of that stuff soon.
Actually, I'm bored right now, so I'll post some stuff now. Grachan Moncur III, who is an incredible trombonist, released an album on BYG/Actuel (a label that consistently released great free jazz albums) in 1969 called "New Africa". I've been listening to it at least once a day for the past few weeks. Here's the whole album, in order. I highly recommend that all of you check it out (especially you claaa, I think there's a lot on here you'd dig). Not all of this album is free, ("When" being a good example), but it's amazing nonetheless.
Sorry, i thought that the thread was generally about jazz , not about a piece of that music genre
How could someone, not that familiar with the genre, tell the difference between the different sub-genres?
For telling the difference between free jazz and more straight-ahead jazz, you can listen for things like collective improvisation, absence of melody, the rhythm section (bass and drums) not playing a set rhythm, blurring of the line between soloist and accompanist (multiple people "soloing" at once rather than one guy soloing while the others play the melody),rejection of typical chorus-solo-chorus song structure, and abstract sounds, all of which are often found in free jazz music. For instance, if you take John Coltrane, who moved from a 50s style hard bop sound to a free jazz sound, you can see the difference. I'll use some of his well-known stuff as examples.
^This song, the title track from his 1960 album "Giant Steps", showcases his hard bop sound that he and Miles Davis were among the frontrunners of (hard bop was probably the most commonly played style of the second half of the 50s and through the 60s).
^This is the first of four parts of Trane's 1965 album "A Love Supreme" (the best jazz album ever, in my opinion, and all four parts are on Youtube, so all of you who haven't heard it should check it out). This album served as a kind of transition from his older style to the freer sounds he would fully embrace on his album "Ascension" which came out a year later. You can see on this album a looser style of composition, with multiple people soloing at once, and an extended bass solo, which isn't terribly common on more straight-ahead jazz records.
^This track is from "Interstellar Space", the last studio album Trane recorded before he died. While most non-big band non-free jazz records feature ensembles with a bassist, drummer, a pianist, and a horn or three (or vibraphone sometimes), a lot of free jazz records feature more unorthodox ensembles, with multiple drummers or bassists, or no bassist, drummer, or only one or two musicians. This album is in the latter category, with only Trane playing saxophone and bells, and Rashied Ali on drums. This album is completely improvised, with every song starting with Trane ringing the bells to signal to Rashied that he should start playing, and then they both improvise. Neither musicians plays much of a consistent rhythm or melody for the listener to latch onto, so one has to focus on sonic textures rather than a more typical song structure.
I'm not a musician, so I'm not up on too many of the technical music terms to describe the different jazz styles, but you reach a point where you can just listen and tell what kind of style is being played. I hope this description helps though.
Last edited by Taskmaster2112; 05-14-2011 at 07:41 PM.
ikke: it's like with any genre of music, you won't be able to just instantly hear the differences. i couldn't for my life know the difference between e.g. trash metal, death metal and black metal because i don't listen to it but if i would i would eventually hear the differences. if you listen enough to jazz and read about it you will be able to hear the differences - i remember listening to "Kind Of Blue" for the first time and i couldn't for sure hear who was Miles, Coltrane or Cannonball but now i could pick out Coltrane on a track with three tenor saxophonists.
Taskmaster: do you post over @ AllAboutJazz forum anything?
daily updates: news, articles, reviews, the best compilations on the net. that true skool street hop!
r.i.p. Johan D, Kaddu, Ricke a.k.a. "Slick Rick" and the rest of the fallen soldiers - you'll never be forgotten!
So basically, free jazz doesn't have a set of rules that have to be followed.
@Claaa7 I can see where you're coming from but sometimes it can be very obvious, or maybe it has to be pointed out first.
No i don't post there or any jazz forums. The only place I post with any consistency is here and occasionally over on the Stones Throw message boards.
mega props for this thread
Free Jazz is something you either love or cant get into imo. to me its like a hip hop freestyle, you can go anywhere with it really
Coltrane was/is my favourite free jazz artist ever, especially when you look at some of his most prolific works, it all leans towards the more free jazz style music he made.
love this thread
ain't nothing change but the address...
Shit than I better get my ass in gear and start posting more stuff. Maybe tonight, but definitely tomorrow.
I mentioned the BYG/Actuel label in my post with the Grachan Moncur III album. This label existed for only a few years in France. The Pan-African Festival was held in France in 1969, and BYG flew a ton of American free jazz heavyweights including Sun Ra, Don Cherry (from Ornette Coleman's great quartet), Archie Shepp, Sunny Murray, Sonny Sharrock, and others for the festival. Around the time of the festival they recorded about 50 albums by these guys that flew out, some Americans that were already over there, most notably the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Anthony Braxton's group, some French free jazz musicians, and a few sub-par psychedelic rock groups. After recording these 50 albums in a summer, they released them between 1969 and 1971 before the label folded. While the 5 or 6 rock albums the label released are mostly not very good, almost all of the free jazz albums range from good to great. I already posted some tracks from the BYG/Actuel label in earlier posts (Dewey Redman, the Grachan Moncur album, etc.), but here's a few more. Most of the BYG/Actuel albums aren't on youtube so I'll be posting multiple things by some artists:
Jacques Coursil (his entire second album "Black Suite" is available on youtube, so I'm posting the whole thing here):
This is a track on Jacques Coursil's first album "Way Ahead":
Some absolutely insane stuff from Sonny Sharrock, one of the few great free jazz guitarists. This album, like a lot of his albums, prominently features his wife Linda on vocals:
Archie Shepp recorded 6 albums for BYG/Actuel, way more than anyone else. His best are his two "Live in Antibes" albums with the Full Moon Ensemble, but since that stuff isn't on youtube, here's a track from his "Blase" album:
Sun Ra released over 100 albums in his career, of which I've heard over half, and his two BYG/Actuel albums are oft-forgotten highlights:
Some Arthur Jones:
And some Arthur Jones with Claude Delcloo:
Burton Greene:
Like I said earlier, most of the BYG/Actuel stuff isn't on youtube, including a lot of the best albums on the label. Ones I haven't been able to find videos for that are among the finest the label put out include:
All 3 of Sunny Murray's albums on the label, especially "Hommage to Africa", which is, along with Grachan Moncur's "New Africa" and Dave Burrell's "Echo", one of the three best albums the label ever released.
Alan Silva's "Luna Surface" and "Alan Silva and the Celestial Communication Orchestra"
Both Anthony Braxton albums, especially " B-Xo/N-0-1-4-7a"
Andrew Cyrille's "What About" (one of the few great solo free drumming albums)
Dave Burrell's "Echo"
Musica Elettronica Viva's "The Sound Pool" (more ambient than free jazz, but still great)
Pierre Marietan & Terry Riley's "Germ-Keyboard Study"
Frank Wright's "One for John"
Both Joachim Kuhn albums
Archie Shepp's "Live at the Pan-African Festival"
All three Art Ensemble of Chicago albums
Plus the albums I mentioned above and Grachan Moncur's "New Africa" and Dewey Redman's "Tarik", which I already posted.
A full list of the label's output is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYG_Actuel Really all of the jazz albums are worth a listen, so if you search for one of the albums on discogs.com or something and it lists the genre as anything but Rock it's probably worth checking out.
A lot of the BYG/Actuel albums that aren't currently in print are available for free at the Nothing Is 2.0 blog. Here's the link to Dave Burrell's "Echo" album. The rest can be found by googling the artist, album name, and Nothing Is together.
http://ajbenjamin2beta.blogspot.com/...rell-echo.html
And here's a little more information about the label:
http://destination-out.com/?p=201
If you can't tell, this is maybe my favorite small label in jazz history (along with Strata-East, which I will do a similar entry for down the line).
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