Free jazz never truly free
Absolute freedom is an oxymoron. As you break boundaries to achieve freedom, you automatically create boundaries. They are a side effect of freedom. Very often freedom can only be obtained by construction of barriers, as they wall-off opposition, allowing the new freedom to exist unencumbered. This is not a bad thing, and is how we make genre; and without genre, everything would be homogeneous and boring.
The jazz avant-garde was partly an attempt to break free of the grid of tonal music, but at the same time created a grid of its own. As Charles Mingus once said, “You have to improvise from something—you can’t improvise from nothing….” Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them. Even when structure is replaced with Dionysian abandon, we very often find ourselves inside different boundaries based upon exclusion and avoidance of the status quo; and find ourselves again ensnared by rules, even when the whole point was to get rid of the rules.
The jazz avant-garde was partly an attempt to break free of the grid of tonal music, but at the same time created a grid of its own. As Charles Mingus once said, “You have to improvise from something—you can’t improvise from nothing….” Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them. Even when structure is replaced with Dionysian abandon, we very often find ourselves inside different boundaries based upon exclusion and avoidance of the status quo; and find ourselves again ensnared by rules, even when the whole point was to get rid of the rules.
