[Column] Avant-Garde Jazz—a movement that dismantled structure and redefined music
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Prologue: The moment when jazz stepped into the “unknown”
Text: mmr｜Theme: On the essence of Avant-Garde Jazz, which is often distanced from the mainstream as a music of solution.
In the mid-20th century, jazz seemed like a mature music. There were distinct styles: swing, bebop, and hard bop, and a shared language of chord progressions, time signatures, and solo structures. However, in the late 1950s, a movement began to doubt this very premise, quietly but surely. Does music really need to follow harmony and form? How free can improvisation be? The movement that would later be called ““Avant-Garde Jazz’’ was born from these questions.
Although this music is often talked about as eccentric or difficult to understand, it is actually strongly connected to the history of jazz, and deeply connected to society and ideology. Avant-garde jazz was not about destruction but redefinition, and it was a movement that exposed the potential contained within the music of jazz.
Prehistory: Tensions and limits after Bebop
Bebop, which was established in the 1940s, greatly increased the freedom of improvisation, but also created highly sophisticated norms. Complex chord progressions, fast tempos, and shared diction were both exciting and new constraints for experienced performers. In the 1950s, hard bop and modal jazz were born, and attempts were made to partially free music from chords and tonality.
In particular, mode jazz is an important preliminary stage. The method of improvising for long periods on a limited scale gave performers an idea that was not tied to harmonic progression. The efforts of Miles Davis and John Coltrane served as a bridge to avant-garde jazz. However, the framework of meter, theme, and order of solos was maintained.
Avant-garde jazz began by questioning this ““frame that still remains’’ itself.
Ornette Coleman: The revolution called harmolodics
Ornette Coleman is the most emblematic of the starting point of avant-garde jazz. His appearance did not simply present a new style, but questioned the very structure upon which jazz was based. We remove frameworks such as tonality, chord progression, and division of roles, and rebuild the relationships between performers. His ideas had a deep influence on later avant-garde improvisational music as a whole.
Innovation of the early quartet
Coleman’s quartet, formed in the late 1950s, is characterized by its lack of a piano. This choice was made to weaken the harmonic dominance and allow each player to make melodic decisions directly. The composition of trumpet, alto saxophone, bass, and drums created a place where everyone could simultaneously become the subject of improvisation.
Representative recording analysis: The Shape of Jazz to Come (1959)
In this work, the boundaries between theme and improvisation are extremely blurred. The opening melody is clearly presented, but immediately after that each player develops an independent melodic line. What is important is that despite the absence of chord progressions, the performance as a whole maintains a sense of unity.
Coleman”s alto saxophone makes frequent use of pitch jumps that cross keys, and phrases expand and contract like songs. The bass doesn”t stick to walking, but incorporates melodic movement, and the drums function more as a reaction device than a time signature. Here, the very concept of a rhythm section is being redefined.
Practice of harmolodics
In harmolodics, each player has the same melodic rights. There is no need for someone to be the accompaniment; music becomes a place where multiple melodies intersect. This idea erased the boundaries between composition and improvisation, turning performance itself into an act of structure generation.
Coleman’s achievement is to show that freedom is not anarchy but a redesign of relationships.
Cecil Taylor: Constructive improvisation that turns the piano into a percussion instrument
Cecil Taylor embodies the ultimate in construction in avant-garde jazz. Although his performances are often described as an outpouring of emotion, they are actually highly organized temporal art. Although it is improvised, its greatest feature is that it has the density and order of a building.
Redefining piano playing techniques
Taylor’s playing style treats the keyboard not as a series of melodies, but as a mass of sound. High-speed clusters using both hands and complex polyrhythms transformed the piano from a melodic instrument to a percussion instrument.
Representative recording analysis: Unit Structures (1966)
This work is one of the recordings that most clearly records Taylor’s thoughts. As the title suggests, music has a structure in which multiple units are repeatedly combined and decomposed. Each instrument plays freely, but the direction of energy is shared.
Improvisation is not linear but stacked vertically. Short motifs are repeated, increasing in density and covering the entire piece. The drums do not keep a beat, but form a complex rhythmic layer in response to the movement of the piano.
Fusion of improvisation and composition
For Taylor, improvisation was the act of instantly executing a compositional thought. The logic of development is more important than a predetermined theme, and the music self-organizes in time.
He showed through thorough practice that improvised music can be both intelligent and structured.
Sun Ra: Fusion of cosmic thought and music
Sun Ra is a person who liberated avant-garde jazz from the framework of music and expanded it into the realm of thought and mythology. His activities were a comprehensive expression that integrated music production, philosophical discourse, and visual production.
A community called Arkestra
The Sun Ra Arkestra did not have a fixed composition, and the number of members and the composition of instruments changed depending on the period. This fluidity is directly connected to his musical philosophy, which centers on collective improvisation. Individual performances are free, but the overall performance maintains a sense of ritual unity.
Representative recording analysis: The Magic City (1966)
In this recording, tonality and meter have little meaning. Fragmented phrases, noise-like sounds, and sudden group performances appear alternately. What is important is that the music does not progress linearly.
The repeated short motifs change the listener’s sense of time and lead the music into a cyclical experience. Improvisation functions as a collective ritual rather than a display of individual skill.
Cosmic thought and musical structure
For Sun Ra, music was a device to transcend the real world. The concept of space was both a metaphor and a framework of thought to distance itself from the existing social order.
His music showed that avant-garde jazz could be realized as a spiritual and ideological expression.
Intersection with the European avant-garde
Avant-garde jazz is not just an American phenomenon. Since the 1960s, a unique improvisational music culture has developed in Europe. Here, the influence of contemporary music, noise, and improvisational theater is more apparent than the American blues style.
The characteristics of European improvisation are its handling of tone and space. Periods of silence, minute noises, and the persistence of single notes are important elements, and the swing feel characteristic of jazz is often intentionally eliminated. This can be said to be the result of pushing the ideals of avant-garde jazz in a different direction.
This trend shows that avant-garde jazz is not a specific style, but a way of thinking.
Social background: 1960s era
The development of avant-garde jazz is inseparable from the social conditions of the 1960s. The civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the questioning of existing authority had a strong influence on the consciousness of musicians. This rejection of form and norms was as much a political gesture as it was a musical choice.
Many avant-garde jazz performers distance themselves from commercialism and establish independent labels or cooperatives. This was a practice to protect the freedom of performance, and an action to question the very nature of music.
Avant-garde jazz is also a movement that reflects social changes through sound.
Visualization of structure: Diagram of improvisational relationships in avant-garde jazz
This cycle shows the basic mechanism of improvisation in avant-garde jazz. There is no fixed structure; music is generated as a chain of interactions.
Chronology: Main trends of Avant-Garde Jazz
This chronology shows that avant-garde jazz was a movement that developed intensively over a short period of time.
Subsequent influences: Expansion of improvised music
Avant-garde jazz had a major influence on later free improvisation, noise, and experimental music. Even in the fields of rock and electronic music, the idea of liberation from form has been inherited.
What is particularly important is that he positions improvisation as an expression that is not bound by a specific usage. This has implications that transcend musical genres.
Avant-garde jazz is an idea that continues to be updated even today.
Final chapter: The legacy of avant-garde jazz
Avant-Garde Jazz is often dismissed as difficult music. However, its essence was an attempt to liberate music from fixed forms and reconsider it as a momentary creation.
Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and others have shown that freedom is not born from disorder but from deep mutual understanding and concentration. Avant-garde jazz was a movement that visualized the fundamental improvisational nature of jazz in its purest form.
