Why You Should Love Free Jazz
It is often written that jazz is a genre that won’t come to you; you’ll need to go to it. And that’s never more true than for free jazz.
Free jazz was born of the artistic frustration of being boxed-in and constrained in performance by audiences, publishers and promoters alike to the musical styles that had become so popular in the late 1950s and early 1960s — hard bop, bebop, and modal jazz in particular, as well as the styles of the past. Musicians wanted creative freedom to make music on their terms.
Musical creative freedom, or rather freedom of expression in general, is enshrined in international human rights law as a fundamental human right. But those fundamental rights are not respected, or even conferred, everywhere; and recognition of these human rights and freedoms, even if only in less than one third of the world, is only a very recent achievement. Certainly in the late ’50s and early ’60s, repression, apartheid and different forms of discrimination and inequality were the norm throughout most of the world, and both the cultural and the legal basis of freedom to make whatever off-the-wall music you please was only just beginning to emerge.
Actually, freedom in its truest sense is something rare for we humans. Slavery, conscription, corvée labour, penal colonies, death camps, indentured servitude, work debt obligations and fiat currency debts are both our longstanding heritage, and for many of us, our contemporary world experience.
Slavery is loosely defined as being the property of another, and being compelled to say, think, act or live in ways that are in servitude of others and not of your volition. Freedoms are those things that you can control for yourself. With the advent of the Age of Enlightenment, slavery in its truest sense has been universally outlawed. But these days, it still persists. In the sewing shops of the fashion industry, in the slaughter houses, beauty salons, construction sites and brothels, modern slaves are hidden in plain sight.
Our modern world of civilisation is founded on slavery: the ancient Egyptians, Han, Greeks, Romans, Aztecs — were first and foremost slave societies operating on the principle of surplus: large static, irrigated valley farmland estates could produce vast surpluses — and consequently unbounded wealth for the kings — in a way that more ecologically balanced highland farming techniques could not. But this large-scale form of farming was resource intensive; and it required significant captive, forced labour in order to maintain, defend and expand the operation. In the 1st century AD for example, when Rome was at its peak, 30–40% of the population of Italy were private property. Densely packed populations of crops, farm animals and people were always at risk of plague, crop failure and starvation, war, or civilizational collapse.
But over time, more and more of the world population has been captured, traded, and integrated into ever bigger slave civilisations; and these slave civilisations have gradually become well camouflaged, to the point that we no longer recognise them for what they are. In the last 70 years, as technology has made it possible to reach the remotest parts of our world quickly and efficiently, almost no free humans remain. Even in the most inaccessible parts of upland Asia, the residents have a state issued identity, and are subjects of the laws of the civilisation to which they now belong. Today, only a handful of people worldwide remain “uncontacted”. Wild, unclaimed freedom is now an extraordinarily rare thing.
But as men, for the atteyning of peace, and conservation of themselves thereby, have made an Artificiall Man, which we call a Common-wealth; so also have they made Artificiall Chains, called Civill Lawes, which they themselves, by mutuall covenants, have fastned at one end, to the lips of that Man, or Assembly, to whom they have given the Soveraigne Power; and at the other end to their own Ears. These Bonds in their own nature but weak, may neverthelesse be made to hold, by the danger, though not by the difficulty of breaking them.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Our bondage is well hidden from us, but it is not gone. Some of us may no longer be the property of a king or a queen (although personally I’m a subject of both), but don’t be fooled — if your government decides, for example, that you must be exterminated because you have the wrong religion or ethnicity, then you must either run for the hills, or exterminated you will be, as the property of the state. If your government decides that you must go to a war zone to fight as a soldier, then go you must. Thomas Hobbes eulogises in his book Leviathan that sacrificing individual freedom in this way offers better overall collective comfort and security than we might otherwise hope for. Whilst for many of us this is cosmetically true — we have a washing machine, electric light and Netflix; crises like COVID-19, the collapse of society in Syria, the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda, and the Global Warming phenomena, have to call his claim into question.
You are not really free.
But actually, there are always ways to be free. Our minds can run free in the most extravagant day dreams. We can always choose what we find pretty. And many of us are free to make music how we want. That is where free jazz comes in. Free jazz is literally that: jazz without rules and obedience — wild, crazy and anarchic musical odysseys, like Pharoah Sanders' blazing version of The Creator Has A Master Plan — offer us a glimpse of happiness and carefree freedom that none of us will ever really experience in full.
Urban or rural, your life as the subject of some nation state or other means that you will never be truly as wild as the mountains and as free as the wind. There is no other option, even if you were hard enough to take the ultra rough lifestyle that it would entail. There’s no red pill.
But if you want a taste of freedom, then I urge you to learn to savour the bittersweet cacophony of Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Yusef Lateef, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders and Alice Coltrane. I promise you, once you get a taste for it, you’ll want more. To get you started, I made a playlist on Spotify that you’re free to enjoy while you reflect upon what it really is to be a citizen of our world.
Realising one’s own situation can in itself be liberating. As an emperor once wrote; what has been is already gone, what will be doesn’t exist, and the only thing that we ever stand to lose is the passing moment. And once you process the futility of asking, demanding, or expecting our world leaders to instigate any real and significant positive change, you may find that a burden lifts from your soul. When you understand that injustice is the bedrock of our civilisation, you will understand that the only one person who can instigate the change that you want, is you.
Go peacefully, and tread lightly, as they say.
