Right, and Jackie's quite clear you should chew it, not eschew it...:bounce::bounce:
It depends what you consider "free jazz"? I can listen to some of Ornette Coleman's stuff but not Archie Shepp. For me, music has to have some kind of melody or it just becomes an irritating noise. It's just personal taste really. But I do agree with Jackie, you should be allowed to graze or stay in the same pasture ...
Quite, Jackie and Ornette had the flow, a stream.
They may well be. By 1975 there had been quite a few innovations, so by then I would have thought freedom could mean the freedom to not be restricted to the harmonic and rhythmic conventions of bebop and earlier. So I imagine while it can mean totally free, it could also mean free-er, or freeform with some structural elements, or modal, or fusion. I would take it to mean just going beyond the mainstream.
Well, we will have to agree to disagree then. I still listen to the music I listened to as a kid, as well as music from that time that I didn't know about then. Other than jazz I don't listen to any of today's contemporary music.
In other words, Bitches Brew.
Bitches Brew was shifting towards rock. It was certainly freeform but hanging onto the current dynamism that was happening on the rock world. I think that the idea of building in space to play free has been incorporated into modern jazz playing even though much writing has become over intellectualised, complex for the sake of it. It isn't Free Jazz but I think finds a way that allows free expression without losing structure.
There were those aspects that appealed to Miles, of course. James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi Hendrix, etc. It was about energy, and visceral excitement and most importantly to him, sound and new ways to find rhythms and freedom from what he pioneered and perfected as a purely acoustic player. Hendrix's studio craft in particular was what he hoped to achieve in his new experimentation of electric manipulation of sound. It turned out well enough in spite of all the new pitfalls and his return to drug abuse.
I always thought that eating metaphors were interesting, much in the way that this one is, too. Clearly he's referring to human nature and the freedom of choice and reflecting that back at society in earnest honesty and critical commentary. Jackie was equally at home at expressing his thoughts in words obviously and somewhere a while back I remember reading a very caustic observation of his about the development of the atomic bomb and how it related to mainstream American attitudes of that era. Post WWII jazz has reflected the creative genius of its creators and practitioners against the tumultuous nature of modern progress and al its pitfalls, and paradoxes. Strictly on musical terms, post Mingus specifically as far as McLean is concerned, his championing of Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy is well known and a reflection of who he was as well. I never read this set of liner notes but I hope that this was covered in them as well.
It's not about a melody; it's about melodic intonation and the structures it contains. The theory of intonation (have you heard of it?) states about subconscious intonation resonance in listeners who have some kind of preparatory experience. Such a resonance generates solidarity. However, such solidarity can also arise on the basis of theoretical knowledge, acquaintance with the history of the development of musical aesthetics. Who said that jazz, especially free jazz, is music for passive easy listening? It requires the active participation of a listener who has the necessary skills for this. It is not by chance that free jazz attracts artists of the visual arts first of all - what did they manage to hear in this music that others did not hear?
