About halfway through The Free Musics, free-improv saxophonist Jack Wright’s philosophico-history of free improvisation, encapsulates the goal of jazz as attempting to establish “a psyche adequate to modernity.” That startling formulation is emblematic of Wright’s synthetic approach to the subject at hand; what threatens to be a disinterested taxonomy of the various strands of improvised music is instead a freewheeling hybrid of aesthetics, history, and cultural theory. Written from the perspective of an unyielding free improviser—a resolute outsider certain of his beliefs—The Free Musics takes a refreshingly strident approach to the subject.
In the first part, Wright-as-historiographer draws a sharp distinction between what he terms Free Jazz and free jazz. The former, in his estimation, consists of the music of the 1960s innovators—Ornette, Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and all the rest. The latter consists of revivalists operating from the 1980s onwards; here, probably because he likens them to Wynton Marsalis and situates them in terms of neoliberal ideology, Wright does not name names. The thrust of the argument is straightforward: initial-capitals Free Jazz was a great spontaneous artistic flowering that took place when and where it did because of a unique confluence of social and musical factors—post-WWII affluence; Civil Rights; frustration with jazz’s strictures; etc.—and this is reflected in the great stylistic and emotional range of that music. All-lowercase free jazz emerged in a period of advanced commodification, a situation where recording and touring opportunities for performers working within the recognized conventions of the idiom were relatively plentiful. To Wright, this makes all-lowercase free jazz, at best, a pleasant enough stylized rehash of the original gesture but, by definition, basically irrelevant artistically.
The second part veers between Wright-as-memoirist-and-historian and Wright-as-philosopher. Reminiscences about the ebbs and flows of local scenes around North America and Europe—venues, players, listservs, magazines—give way to philosophical digressions on free improvisation’s impetuses—variously: the transcendence of idiomatic or personal cliché; the disruption of the composer–performer hierarchy; the return to a pre-capitalist mode of musical production; “freedom from” strictures and “freedom for” something new—none of which Wright unambiguously endorses. Wright introduces “free playing,” as distinct from initial-capitals or all-lowercase free jazz and free improvisation, delving into the anxieties, challenges, excitement, and even boredom that his type of music presents both to players and audiences.
The short third part brings the story up to the present with the various new schools of young improvisers in the early 2000s, particularly the Morton Feldman-influenced reductionist school, and more ebbs and flows in the New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore free-improv communities.
Wright admits in his conclusion that the book itself amounts to a sort of improvisation, wilfully incomplete, a set of riffs on a subject. That noted, the writing is largely lucid and logical. On the level of the sentence, The Free Musics isn’t a dense book, exactly—but it is allusive and digressive to the point that, the above notwithstanding, proper summary becomes impossible. I would venture to say that most major musicians, art movements, and Western philosophers are at least touched upon to illuminate one insight or another. That being the nature of the thing, The Free Musics raises more questions than it answers—which seems fitting.
Daniel Glassman writes about film and music. He lives in London, U.K.