Albert Ayler - Ghosts

FREE JAZZ

'For me free isn't a style. It is an individual possibility.'
Ornette Coleman got to the root of the matter: the term 'free jazz' can only be meaningfully understood as a collective term for different forms of musical expression. That the freedom which this musical terminology encompasses did not however impede the development of personal styles or even of more general principles of style, is in retrospect more clearly recognisable. If free jazz is seen as a fundamental break with jazz tradition, then that has to do with more general principles, principles which surfaced simultaneously in many jazz musicians during the first half of the 'sixties, regardless of their stylistic differences: improvisation based on chord progress, the breaking away from traditional thematic and formal frames of reference and the rejection of the continuous fundamental rhythm.