Black Midi & Nubya Garcia record John Coltrane’s civil rights anthem, ‘Alabama’ whilst telling this story…

Free jazz

Hardbop jazz still ruled the clubs in the late ’50s, exemplified by well-established stars like Max Roach, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. As exciting and skilled as their work may have been, their approach had now become so familiar that it spurred some other jazz artists to seek something new.

Ornette Colman is credited with creating free jazz, by playing exactly what he felt and what he wanted to say, rather than playing to any formula.

“Free jazz didn’t adhere to any of the rules of what was considered music at the time,” said Tom Surgal, filmmaker, “There wasn’t a single musical tenet this music did not defy.”

The freshness of such musical interpretations mirrored parallel movements in the worlds of art and literature. Its accent on improvisation and internalization echoed both the beat authors’ love of spontaneous writing and the attitudes and techniques of the abstract artists of the era. The cover of Colman’s Free Jazz album featured a reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s painting The White Light.

Free jazz is also the genre of jazz that music fans have often complained that they find unlistenable, even from the very first gigs in the 1960s but that is often because no one has fully explained what it is, what it truly represents...

Black American life in the 1960s

Free jazz - the soundtrack to the civil rights movement 1963-

Free jazz’s anger, edge and freedom also reflected the politics of the day. This new music was coming out alongside the civil rights movement which metamorphosed into the Black militant movement. It also reflected the anti-war movement. The cry of wailing saxophones and the beating of drums was the perfect complement to the radicalism in the air at the time.

Free jazz became the musical reaction to the oppression of black people. Free jazz became the soundtrack to the civil rights movement - the soundtrack to black power.

The Importance of jazz by Martin Luther King

In 1964, a year after his ‘I have a dream speech’ and while the Beatles were conquering America, Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, played an essential role in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine as “Man of the Year.”

He also penned this essay concerning the significance of jazz for the 1964 Berlin Jazz Festival. It remains one of the most profound essays about jazz in modern times.

“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create, and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.

Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.

This is triumphant music.

Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.

It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.

Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.

And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.

In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”

Martin Luther King, Barrack Obama, John Coltrane…

While not an outspoken activist, John Coltrane was a deeply spiritual man who believed his music was a vehicle for the message of a higher power. Coltrane was drawn to the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech It was also the year that white Ku Klux Klan racists placed a bomb in a Birmingham, Alabama church, and killed four young black girls during a Sunday service.

The following year, Coltrane played eight benefit concerts in support of Dr. King and wrote a number of songs dedicated to the cause, but it his song “Alabama,” which was especially gripping, both musically and politically. The notes and phrasing of Coltrane’s lines are based on the words Martin Luther King spoke at the memorial service for the girls who died in the Birmingham bombing. Just as King’s speech escalates in intensity as he shifts his focus from the killing to the broader civil rights movement, Coltrane's “Alabama” sheds its plaintive and subdued mood for a crackling surge of energy, reflecting the strengthened determination for justice.

WATCH: Martin Luther-King’s original eulogy at the funeral of the four young girls in a news report about President Obama repeating the eulogy, when he spoke at the funeral of the pastor and eight of his congregation, murdered by a white supremacist in South Carolina, over forty years later, in 2015.

WATCH: John Coltrane’s musical response, ‘Alabama’, recorded just four days before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The following year Coltrane went on to record one of the foremost free jazz albums, ‘Asscension’. He’d gone on to become a jazz superstar but died a few years later at the age of only 40. Some of his sidemen continued in 1968 to establish themselves as leaders in their own light, including his widow, Alice Coltrane, who made a free jazz album with two of her late husband's sidemen.

Max Roach

An innovator of bebop drumming, Max Roach was also an outspoken activist. In the 1960s, he recorded the free jazz classic, ‘We Insist! Freedom Now Suite’, featuring his wife at the time, and fellow activist Abbey Lincoln.

Roach recorded two other albums drawing focus to civil rights: Speak Brother Speak, and Lift Every Voice and Sing. Roach also devoted his time to lecturing on social justice.

WATCH: Max Roach and wife, Abbey Lincoln performing the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival to celebrate Black history, culture, music, and fashion. As featured in the documentary movie ‘Summer of Soul’.

Free jazz - the soundtrack to the black power movement. 1967-

Within the year of 1967-68 Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and John F Kennedy had been shot dead and John Coltrane had died.

The Black Power movement was caming to the fore, representing a demand for more immediate violent action to counter American white supremacy. The 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, coupled with the urban riots of 1964 and 1965, ignited the movement. The Vietnam War also continued to take a deadly toll on civilians and soldiers, and its growing unpopularity in America spurred President Lyndon B. Johnson to forego running for re-election.

1968 has come to occupy a landmark in history, a year widely seen as a cultural flashpoint in which youth protest movements surged around the globe.

Archie Shepp

Archie Shepp was a renowned free jazz artist, In 1971 he wrote and released ‘Attica Blues’ his response to events at Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, which had amounted to one of the deadliest confrontations on American soil since the Civil War.

One morning, state troopers opened fire on the prison in a siege-like effort to end a four-day rebellion in protest of inhumane conditions - the protesting prisoners were mostly black and the assaulting troopers were mostly white. The savagery of the attack, 39 people, inmates, and hostages, were slain by police gunfire, with more than twice as many wounded, registered as an instant scandal and an unspeakable horror.

His album features a Beaver Harris poem; “I would rather be a plant than a man in this land,” recited by William Kunstler, a radical lawyer who’d been a witness to the doomed negotiations at Attica, and who would later defend several of its prisoners at trial.

“Some people think that they are in their rights. When on command they take a black man’s life.”

On “Ballad For a Child,” the bittersweet, Marvin Gaye-like reflection that follows Kunstler’s reading, gospel vocals can be heard to cry. “What the whole world really needs, is a baby’s smile.”

LISTEN: ‘Ballad for a child’ from Attica Blues by Archie Shepp.

The loft jazz scene

Artistically, Black Power demanded the embrace of blackness and black vernacular forms. The live, loft scene grew up from this black power movement, where blacks were starting their own shops, cafes, record shops and clubs to retain a fair portion of the profits for themselves.

By the end of the decade

The New York times finally started using the term black instead of negro and Arthur Ashe had won the US tennis open, becoming the first black player to do so, when he was still banned, because of his race, from most tennis clubs in the country.

Colin Kaepernick, Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka have all been lauded and vilified for their expression of activism within sports. But the first Black man to win Wimbledon, The US Open and the Australian Open, was a singularly-focused tennis player who refused to bow to pressure on what kind of black man he should be and transformed into a militant voice who to this day has an enduring legacy for his work within the Civil Rights Movement, against apartheid in South Africa and for AIDS activism.

The No.1 tennis court at the US open was named after Louis Armstrong until it was rebuilt and named after Arthur Ashe in 1997. It is the largest tennis stadium in the world.

WATCH: The trailer for Citizen Ashe, a new documentary movie.

The wider influence of free jazz

The exploratory quality of free jazz also reflected the musicians’ experimentation with their own psyches. A lot of the free jazz musicians, especially, the ones in New York, were experimenting with hallucinogens and that experience was informing the music. In many ways, this was undocumented psychedelia.

So it was no surprise that rock musicians of the day took note. The expansive and noisy solos of late 60s psychedelic rock used some of the principles of free jazz to blow out the bounds of the blues that first inspired them. The fractured guitars in songs like the Byrds’ Eight Miles High borrowed from the angularity and skittishness of free jazz. Leader Roger McGuinn often spoke of the cues he took from John Coltrane. Paul McCartney listened to the music of the free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler while writing songs for the Revolver album and various Beatles attended shows by the London-based free improv band AMM.

You can hear the clear influence of this music on British art-jazz bands like Soft Machine as well as on the avant-garde UK keyboardist Keith Tippett, who channeled the very soul of Cecil Taylor with his unhinged piano work in pieces like King Crimson’s 1970 single Cat Food.

Ornette Coleman’s frenetic style didn’t only influence the sounds of musicians but, in one prominent case, the movements. After a young Iggy Pop heard Coleman for the first time, he had a revelation: “I can do that,” he told a reporter, “with my body.”

WATCH: The Byrds ‘Eight miles high’.

Free Jazz today

Devotees of free jazz abound in the world of alt-rock, from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Nels Cline of Wilco, to members of Superchunk. Today, some young new rock groups, like Black Midi and Squid, have applied free jazz’s dissonance and mania to guitar-oriented sounds.

WATCH: John Hell by Black Midi in 2020.

WATCH: GSK By Squid, live in 2020.

Free jazz has also regained its importance in the era of Black Lives Matter. Music like 10 Freedom Summers by Wadada Leo Smith, “Rollcall for Those Absent” by Ambrose Akinmusire, Your Queen Is a Reptile by Sons of Kemet, and “Pig Feet” by Terrace Martin show that the roots of jazz can speak to our lives in this cultural moment.

Sons of Kemet

With their borders-down aesthetic, fierce social conscience and sax, tuba and two-drum-kit combo, the Kemet’s pack a punch. But with lyrics written and spoken by poet Joshua Idehen, sparked by Black Lives Matter protests, and with guests ranging from Angel Bat Dawid and Steve Williamson to grime MC D Double E, their album ‘Black to the Future’ has the tightly coiled righteous fury of opuses such as Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues and Max Roach’s Freedom Suite.

WATCH: Hustle by Sons of Kemet in 2021

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