Free Jazz and the “New Thing”: Aesthetics, Identity, and Texture, 1960–1966 KWAMI COLEMAN I n the issue of Down Beat published on January 13, 1966, Harvey Pekar, a cartoonist and occasional writer for jazz magazines, authored an essay titled “The Critical Cult of Personality, Or Stop That War—Them Cats Are Killing Themselves!”1 In it, Pekar decries the magazine’s partisanship, which substitutes for serious critical engagement. This, he notes, has been a long-standing problem in the profession; critics of different stylistic “schools” have fought each other since the 1930s, with one generation fiercely defending its aesthetic preferences by denouncing the next generation’s encroaching new fad. Baseless proselytization by critics eager to be on the cutting edge and display their “knowledge of hip slang,” he continues, has also always been true in jazz criticism, wherein critics abandon objective distance for a kind of “sycophantic” “hero worship.” For Pekar, criticism should generally be focused on an artist’s genius—their harmonic genius, specifically—and Gratitude to the many eyes and minds that have helped shape this article through its several iterations. Thank you especially to Denardo Coleman, Archie Shepp, the late Olly Wilson, Michael E. Veal, Benjamin Bierman, Brigid Cohen, Benjamin Piekut, Brandi Thompson Summers, Elaine Kelly, and the anonymous readers of this journal. And a special thanks to the late Ornette Coleman, to whom I am not related, for his boundless creative vision and resplendent musical work. 1 Harvey Pekar, “The Critical Cult of Personality, Or Stop That War—Them Cats Are Killing Themselves!,” Down Beat 33, no. 2 (January 13, 1966): 18–19, 39. The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 38, Issue 3, pp. 261–295, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347.  2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ JM.2021.38.3.261 261 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 262 the merit of their work: a deeper kind of analysis that avoids the “simplistic,” superficial assessments that seem all too common in the latest writing on mainstream modern jazz.2 But Pekar’s goal goes beyond a general call for higher professional standards and a reconciliatory consensus among peers. He takes aim specifically at the “most violent controversy currently raging in jazz”: the controversy surrounding the “new thing,” which was the prevailing epithet in mid-1960s criticism for modern jazz’s avantgarde. Self-appointed spokesmen for the avant-garde, Pekar bemoans, are engaged in a “cult of personality business” in which “less-gifted men” collect accolades from critics who “wax enthusiastic over [their] vague metaphysical statements . . . [and] write about political and social problems.”3 This, he says, is a poor substitute for enlightened commentary, and it misleads and alienates listeners by exacerbating the irrationality in much of the new music itself. Identity politics, Pekar implies, contaminates rational discussions of music, and this lack of objectivity thwarts any possibility for the music to be universally understood.4 Pekar’s article was the culmination of a rancorous debate surrounding experimental improvised music in the music press of the 1960s, a debate stoked by the putative meaning behind, and ultimately the merit of, jazz’s “new thing.” In this article I make a case for how, in the early 1960s, the experiments by improvising musicians working in the jazz industry in and outside of New York City came to be seen as a provocation, one that ran afoul of modernist leanings of the jazz tradition— an ideological construct founded on the ideals of universalism and cultural progress.5 I do this by focusing on a recording that would serve as the namesake for an entire experimental practice: Ornette Coleman’s double quartet album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, recorded in New York City for Atlantic Records on December 21, 1960.6 2 Pekar, “The Critical Cult of Personality,” 19. Pekar, “The Critical Cult of Personality,” 19. 4 See Mary Bernstein, “Identity Politics,” Annual Review of Sociology 31 (2005): 47–74, for an exploration of the contours of various iterations and responses to social movements construed as forwarding a unique set of “cultural politics.” Arguments that posit identity politics as negative and essentialist, particularly toward a dominant social group and more universalist visions of society, are outlined on 49–52 and 63. Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., explores how race-neutrality and “objectivity” in musicology are a kind of white “identity politics” that perpetuates the exclusion of black scholars—and thus critiques of European ethnocentrism—in the discipline. See Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., “Who Hears Here? Black Music, Critical Bias, and the Musicological Skin Trade,” Musical Quarterly 85 (2001): 1–52. 5 Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 525–60. 6 Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, Atlantic SD 1364, 1960. 3 c ol e m a n In the first section of this article, I parse and contextualize album reviews, editorials, and letters to the editor published in Down Beat magazine after Coleman’s recording was released. This narrow focus is to isolate the increased topical presence of the “new thing” in a publication that was, by then, the English-language authority on jazz in the United States.7 Press coverage of the “new thing” materialized during a uniquely dynamic period in American cultural history, a time in which jazz criticism, as John Gennari writes, “finally emerged in full throat,” expanding its influence, its professional viability, and its prestige.8 In the 1950s Down Beat pioneered jazz’s “new criticism,” which privileged empiricism as the means to assess the music’s aesthetic value and merits.9 This new epistemological paradigm established an evolutionary narrative of jazz’s historical development—a teleological model of stylistic progress that, by 1960, culminated in a modern, cosmopolitan music stemming from authentic black vernacular roots. This narrative was meant to extend beyond assessments of artists and their work; jazz in the 1960s was emblematic of American cultural preeminence—a hip commodity in the country’s burgeoning consumer culture and a diplomatic tool aimed at exporting the country’s democratic ideals abroad during the Cold War.10 My truncated summary of Down Beat’s 1960s archives on the jazz avant-garde offers an entry into exploring an important structural element utilized by musicians who were categorized by writers as avantgarde; I outline the terms by which this experimental music was misrepresented (and misunderstood) as being incoherent and motivated by divisive racial identity politics. Moving beyond Down Beat, in the second part of the article I propose heterophony—a musical texture that has been insufficiently defined and understood because of its convoluted lexical genealogy—as the key to “making sense” of Free Jazz. Heterophony’s fractious, dense, and opaque sonic mass describes best the relationship among instrumental voices in the structured improvised music that is Coleman’s Free Jazz. The third section presents an event map of the lengthy 1960 performance that is split between the two sides of the original LP of Free Jazz; its form is corroborated by the shelved 7 Other prominent jazz magazines, like Metronome (founded in the 1880s) and the short-lived The Jazz Review (founded by former Down Beat editor Nat Hentoff and contributor Martin Williams in 1958), would both be defunct by 1961. Published biweekly and headquartered in Chicago, Down Beat had global coverage but centered on the United States. 8 John Gennari, “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” Black American Literature Forum 25 (1991): 449–523, at 472. 9 John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 174. 10 Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 6–9. 263 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 264 “First Take,” the practice run of Free Jazz on Twins, a compilation of Coleman’s unreleased tracks recorded between 1959 and 1961 and released in 1971 also on Atlantic Records.11 And in the final section, I consider the joint aesthetic and political resonances of heterophonic textures in musicians’ sonic abstractions, and advance Martiniquais poet and writer Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity as a worthwhile conceptual tool through which a listener can approach Free Jazz’s heterophonic texture. According to Glissant, the “opaque [subject] is not the obscure” but simply the irreducible, and Western notions of universality stifle an embrace of the diverse and dynamic multiplicity inherent to human life (represented by racial/ethnic identity and cultural difference) by imposing objective, hegemonic standards.12 The debate over the “new thing” generated questions of aesthetic legitimacy: of the new music, its meaning, and its relationship to the jazz tradition; of musicians and more conceptual approaches to improvisation; and of jazz’s future direction. Most importantly, the “new thing” provoked a renewed and heated conversation about the relationship between “pure” music aesthetics and the relevance of earthly social politics to music creation and culture. Insight into the presumed identity politics of the “new thing” and questionable artistic merits can be drawn from the reaction to essays authored by poet, playwright, and essayist LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, and tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, whose provocative writings in Down Beat were taken, perhaps unfairly, as a manifesto for the new music.13 I try in this article to reframe Shepp’s and Baraka’s commentaries from a perspective on music experimentalism that takes seriously the political realities and subject positions of Black American avant-gardists in the 1960s. It is here where the notion of opacity, as an effect and affect, has both creative and political significance: heterophony invites an unconventional and invested way of listening if the many simultaneous musical voices—the multiple subjectivities—in the texture are to be heard. Heterophony, I argue, is the dense and opaque sound of decentralized simultaneity. “ Chords and Discords” : Down Beat circa 1962–1966 There was no consensus on the “new thing” in the jazz criticism of the early 1960s; coverage vacillated between cautious advocacy and condemnation. 11 Ornette Coleman, Twins, Atlantic 1588, 1971. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 191–92. 13 Jones changed his name to Imamu (Amear) Amiri Baraka in 1968 to signify his embrace of a new religious and political identity. 12 c ol e m a n Following the commercial release of Free Jazz in 1961, writers for the jazz press struggled to convey how this more abstract improvised music should be appreciated.14 By 1966 the fractious divide in opinion in Down Beat was mirrored in other music publications, reflecting a much broader sentiment that the “new thing” was a departure from modern jazz.15 Down Beat’s special double-author review of Free Jazz, published in 1962, illustrates how polarized these opinions were.16 The editors explained that assigning two separate reviewers to assess the recording was a decision made in response to readers’ calls for betterrounded reviews, but it was likely also in response to the controversy surrounding Coleman and his music. After his 1959 East Coast premiere at the Five Spot Café in New York’s East Village, Coleman personified the outer limits of jazz’s avant-garde, and likely also the “bohemian” countercultural scene of downtown Manhattan. The two reviewers, assistant editor (and record producer) Pete Welding and associate editor John A. Tynan, took divergent views on Coleman’s record. Welding rated Free Jazz a full five-stars, celebrating the “iconoclast alto saxist” for carrying to their logical (though some listeners will dispute this term) conclusion the esthetic principles present to a lesser degree—quantitatively, at least—in his previous recordings. . . . It does not break with jazz tradition; rather, it restores to currency an element that has been absent in most jazz since the onset of the swing orchestra—spontaneous group improvisation.17 In sharp contrast, Tynan rated the album no stars, citing specifically the recording’s lack of tonal and structural coherence. Tynan, who dismissed 14 Martin Williams, one of Coleman’s early champions and the writer of Free Jazz’s liner notes, offered insight into Coleman’s musical process in the December 1961 issue of Metronome magazine. In his article, one of the first feature-length treatments on the saxophonist that attempts to describe the music objectively (and thus provide Coleman with positive coverage), Williams describes a lively rehearsal session in which Coleman’s quartet played with an intuitive kind of freedom—barely talking about the music in detail with the ensemble musicians—and an attention to expressing “emotion.” See Martin Williams, “Rehearsing with Ornette,” Metronome, December 1961, 19, 39–40. 15 A particularly vivid example of contempt toward the “new thing” outside of Down Beat is in the second 1966 issue of the modern jazz–oriented magazine Sound & Fury in an editorial titled “New Music—News or Noise?” Although the editors gesture toward impartiality in their prefatory notes, a much more negative view of the new music follows. Ire is directed especially at those who defend the “new thing” by critiquing intolerance in the “jazz establishment”; see publisher Taylor Castell’s open letter, “Some Thoughts on Publishing, or . . . Yes, LeRoi, There Is a White Power Structure,” Sound & Fury 2, no. 2 (April 1966): 1. 16 Pete Welding and John A. Tynan, “Record Reviews—Double View of a Double Quartet,” Down Beat 29, no. 2 (January 18, 1962): 28. 17 Welding and Tynan, “Double View of a Double Quartet.” 265 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy’s “anti-jazz trend” after hearing them at Hollywood’s Renaissance Club in 1961, concluded his short commentary by observing: If nothing else, this witch’s brew is the logical end product of a bankrupt philosophy of ultraindividualism in music. “Collective improvisation?” Nonsense. The only semblance of collectivity lies in the fact that these eight nihilists were collected together in one studio at one time and with one common cause: to destroy the music that gave them birth.18 266 The chasm between these two perspectives typified the critical debate about the “new thing,” in which critics, magazine readers, and musicians opined on the music’s value and the aptitude and intent of the musicians themselves. The editors of Down Beat, all white men, sought to better explain the “new thing” to their readership and turned to Baraka, one of their very few black writers, to do so. In 1963 Down Beat published two lengthy pieces by Baraka on the avant-garde: “Loft Jazz: New York City’s Lofts and Coffeehouses Have Become Havens for the New Thing,” on the downtown scene; and “Don Cherry: Making It the Hard Way,” a feature on Coleman’s pocket trumpet player and close collaborator.19 In the former, Baraka draws a clear distinction between clubs in New York that book headline acts—the kinds that appealed most to columnists and “mainstream” jazz audiences—and venues in lower Manhattan that regularly featured the new music. He chastises club owners, describing them as “entrepreneur[s] that [know] nothing of the object [they’re] peddling,” and condemns their ambivalence toward younger experimental artists. The bulk of his piece, however, is devoted to describing the special traits of the downtown scene. Baraka notes that the coffeehouses and theaters downtown that featured this new music are vibrant and exciting spaces patronized by enthusiastic and open-minded audiences, and he shouts out the young musicians making an impact by name, mentioning Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, and Bill Dixon among others. In the Cherry feature published six months later, Baraka praises the trumpeter’s “musical intelligence” and perseverance; that he remains an “original” in an unjust industry is why Cherry cannot find regular work, despite touring with star tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins in 1962. 18 Welding and Tynan, “Double View of a Double Quartet.” LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “Loft Jazz: New York City’s Lofts and Coffeehouses Have Become Havens for the New Thing,” Down Beat 13, no. 10 (May 9, 1963): 13, 42; and Jones [Amiri Baraka], “Don Cherry: Making It the Hard Way,” Down Beat 30, no. 30 (November 21, 1963): 16–17, 39. 19 c ol e m a n “Cherry is an autonomous stylist,” Baraka proclaims, “but being so singular a stylist—that is, a musician who depends almost completely on his own secret ear to decide whether a solo is ‘right’ or not—is the thing that has helped estrange Cherry from clubowners and hippies alike,” adding that such a “singular performer can only baffle the listener who demands, even unconsciously, that every ‘new’ musician sound like somebody he’s already heard and digested.”20 In Baraka’s portrait of Cherry, the reader is to understand him as a unique, creative spirit—a serious, intelligent, and independent artist committed to knowledge acquisition and a mastery of the craft. He further validates Cherry by drawing a parallel between his work with Coleman and Miles Davis’s own career beginnings with the immortal Charlie Parker, thus situating Cherry clearly within the tradition as a jazz modernist. That Baraka saved his harshest words for the jazz “establishment”— the institutions ignoring these young experimentalists—aroused anger from other staff writers at Down Beat and from readers unimpressed by the new music. “LeRoi Jones’s article on Don Cherry raises a serious question on the validity of some jazz journalism and reporting,” writes Jeffrey Barr in a letter to the editor; “readers . . . should get the best possible record criticism, the best reporting on jazz and musicians, and the most objective editorializing. . . . Let’s not have articles about guys like Cherry who can’t play, by any standards of any kind of music.”21 Trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon, who Baraka included in his list of avant-gardists, also wrote in about his displeasure of the Cherry article because it smacked of “a kind of turgid self-conscious ‘in-group’ superiority generally and rightly associated with pseudo-intellectuals. . . . His constant pitting of the sociological with the musical . . . besides being a crashing bore, also makes me wonder if Baraka writes on jazz because he loves the music and wants to help it and its practitioners . . . or if he feels that by stirring up ‘controversies’ his name will become synonymous with those he constantly champions, thereby creating a niche in the world of jazz for himself.”22 Demands for objectivity only increased, and the magazine’s staff acquiesced in earnest. The July 2, 1964 issue includes a piece by alto saxophonist and critic Don Heckman titled “Ornette and the Sixties,” the first of several attempts by Heckman to explain the logic of Coleman’s music and that of the “new thing” in general. In it, he draws ties between the music by Black Americans and their difficult social and 20 Jones, “Don Cherry,” 16. Jeffrey Barr, “Chords and Discords—A Question of Validity,” Down Beat 31, no. 1 (January 2, 1964): 9. 22 Bill Dixon, “Chords and Discords—Dixon Digs at Jones,” Down Beat 31, no. 1 (January 2, 1964): 8. 21 267 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 268 political circumstances but denounces the burgeoning racial chauvinism that posits black musicians’ genius as the product of racial superiority.23 This critique seems directed at Baraka’s conviction—as set out in his book Blues People published the previous year—that jazz and other vernacular black music draws from the same cultural source, a common “essence” that Baraka construed as a birthright and inimitable by white musicians. The ostensible wedge between writings on the avant-garde that focused on the music’s design and writings that addressed its social politics only deepened in 1965. In the January 14 issue, Down Beat published Baraka’s most controversial piece to date: “Voice from the Avant Garde: Archie Shepp,” a profile of the young tenor saxophonist that characterizes him, like Cherry, as an uncompromising original well beyond the tastes of the average jazz listener and conservative mainstream venues.24 Within a rather detailed biographical overview, Baraka traces Shepp’s web of influences, ranging from Lee Morgan’s spirited bop playing to the abstract new sounds of Taylor and Coltrane (Shepp, Taylor, and Coltrane would all perform at the Down Beat Jazz Festival with their groups in August that year). Baraka highlights Shepp’s interest in Taylor, with whom he recorded in 1960. Taylor’s move away from tonal harmony was revelatory for Shepp; in approaching the piano more like a percussion instrument capable of tone clusters—and not limited only to the tempered scale—Taylor, Shepp says to Baraka, was reclaiming the African elements of jazz because tonal harmony is rooted in Western European music history. Such a reclamation of jazz’s primordial roots is, Shepp articulates, a “rebellion against the ultrasophistication of jazz” and a reorientation toward pure tone color and rhythm.25 Baraka’s write-up concludes with Shepp’s trenchant critique of contemporary American politics, in which he posits black music as a reflection of the lived reality in the United States of black life, which is under constant threat by white racist violence.26 23 “A discussion of the connection between society and art always includes the implicit danger of mistaking simultaneous events for those that are interrelated. Yet it would be hard to avoid the fact that, at a period when an unusual number of jazzmen were concerned with blues, Gospel music, and ‘freedom,’ the social fabric of US society was undergoing a drastic change. And it probably is significant also that the increased militancy of the civilrights movement was reflected by a growing aggressiveness in the music of many of the younger Negro jazz players. The regrettable, but probably unavoidable, consequence of this has been an occasional racial chauvinism that, in its worse form, reinforces the ideas of the white segregationists. This is especially unfortunate when one considers that the evolution of jazz is one of the great testaments to the artistic genius present in the Negro community in the United States.” Don Heckman, “Ornette and the Sixties,” Down Beat 31, no. 20 (July 2, 1964): 59. 24 LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “Voice from the Avant Garde: Archie Shepp,” Down Beat 32, no. 1 (January 14, 1965): 18–20, 36. 25 Jones, “Voice from the Avant Garde,” 20. 26 Jones, “Voice from the Avant Garde,” 36. c ol e m a n Baraka’s article provoked swift and scathing responses from Down Beat’s readership. Reader Jerry Guild, in a letter published in the “Chords and Discords” column a month later, refers to Baraka’s article as a “venom-filled thrust from his dagger of hate. It has become apparent that the small success that Jones received for his plays makes him feel that in whatever field he treads, he must hate the white man.”27 Shepp’s directness in connecting artistic work to a musician’s social reality, jazz as a black cultural artifact, and racism as an inescapable factor in the lives of black musicians cast him, for readers like Guild, as a racial separatist intent on flouting the tradition and misdirecting jazz’s expressive potential from a universal beauty and communicability toward race grievances and identity politics. Efforts were made to defend the aesthetic integrity of the “new thing” in the following months. Heckman’s two-part series “Inside Ornette Coleman” addresses the distinction between improvisation in deterministic form and more “aleatoric” spontaneity in jazz practice, with each constituting their own separate epistemological stream—the former an established pretext in Western musical composition (“rational principles of artistic form”) and the latter a newer development with parallels in other “spontaneous” musical avant-gardes (e.g., John Cage and Morton Feldman), experimental theater, and “nonobjective” painting.28 He credits Coleman with being an innovator within the “spontaneous” stream, who, more than any of his peers, provides “starting points and artistic premises that change and redirect the flow of the jazz mainstream”; listeners expecting “a complicated harmonic improvisation,” Heckman warns, “will be mightily disappointed.”29 A musician himself, Heckman’s praise for Coleman is focused on “recurring elements that are especially significant to the emotional and structural content of his music,” and although Coleman’s stylistic innovations (which Heckman specifies as “metrically-regular [improvised] phrases” in a “free-rhythm stream” and melodies based on “fluid pitch relationships”) exist outside of “the traditional Western artistic criteria—form, logic, structure, etc.,” Heckman tries to guide the reader toward a more impartial assessment of Coleman’s music.30 By assessing Coleman’s unique improvisatory style objectively, in isolation from that of his ensemble members, Heckman seems intent upon convincing listeners that Coleman is an intelligent 27 Jerry Guild, “Shepp, Jones, and White America,” Down Beat 32, no. 5 (February 25, 1965): 10. 28 Don Heckman, “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 1,” Down Beat 32, no. 19 (September 9, 1965): 13–15; and Heckman, “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 2: Sounds and Silences,” Down Beat 32, no. 26 (December 16, 1965): 20–21. The discussion of determined form and spontaneity can be found in “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 1,” 14. 29 Heckman, “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 2,” 20–21. 30 Heckman, “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 2,” 20. 269 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y musician and that his music is actually coherent: “What I am suggesting is that fundamental artistic goals do exist for the jazz improviser and composer, that there are always standards—no matter how unusual—beyond an artist’s immediate personal objectives and against which he can measure himself and can, in turn, be measured. Probably the most frequent criticism leveled against jazz in the ’60s has been that it respects no such standards.”31 In contrast to Heckman’s objectivism, Nat Hentoff was unabashed about the connection between the new music and social politics. His “Second Chorus: Learning to Listen to Avant-Garde—A Basic Problem,” published in December 2, 1965, addresses the deluge of letters received by the editors that express an “angry puzzlement” over the new music. He recounts his own initial resistance to bebop —the music of Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—more than a decade ago, and argues that first impressions can be incomplete and misleading. He urges readers to push past “doctrinal” ways of listening and to receive the work of “current explorers” as that of individuals with a seriousness of purpose. Most controversially, he warns readers that, whether they like it or not, 270 many of the new players are committed to music not only as a way of expression but also as one of the ways in which to change the world. Or more basically, to change their listeners. Not to convert them to particular kinds of politics, but to stimulate them to an awareness of how hard it is to retain individuality, let alone integrity, in an increasingly organized society in which fewer . . . people have a part in the key decisions that affect their lives.32 This indirect admonishment, it seems, was Hentoff’s answer to the topic of racism in jazz discourse. Despite these efforts, characterizations of the “new thing” remained mostly negative. In the issue published on September 23, Leonard Feather, long the most prominent critical voice in jazz, decries the “painful self-consciousness in jazz.”33 Gone, in his view, are the days of natural expression and universalism, as well as the expectation that an average listener might derive pleasure from this new music, since universality appears incompatible with the times. For Feather, the “cosa nova” (his thinly veiled suggestion of a “new thing” mafia) is neither “box-office gold” nor “poison,” but exists in a vexed and alienated space. Here, Feather advances the trope that the new music is hostile and 31 Heckman, “Inside Ornette Coleman, Part 1,” 14. Nat Hentoff, “Second Chorus: Learning to Listen to Avant Garde—A Basic Problem,” Down Beat 32, no. 25 (December 2, 1965): 13. 33 Leonard Feather, “Feather’s Nest,” Down Beat 32, no. 20 (September 23, 1965): 44. 32 c ol e m a n incoherent; its chaos could only be a protest against both the jazz tradition and white people at large. Such a critique by a prominent, trusted voice could only further validate listeners’ negative opinions on the “new thing” despite Feather’s later entreaties for objectivity and for his colleagues to stop fighting among themselves.34 Shepp added more fuel to the fire in the December 16 issue, in which he addresses the “bigots” and “those ‘in’ white hipsters who think niggers never had it so good (Crow Jim).”35 They only seek to retain their privilege, Shepp argues, along with the “sensitive chauvinists—the greater part of the white intelligentsia—and the insensitive [chauvinists],” and he calls out Feather, George Russell, and other critical voices by name. He defends his commitment to “Art”—one he says he shares with men of other ethnicities—but denounces the injustice and anti-black violence rampant in the United States, adding that he and other black men simply wish to regain their dignity and ability to pursue their dreams freely. In the meantime, he portends, whites should not be surprised by the unleashing of blacks’ “collective rage.” In response, reader Ed Mulford, in a letter published a month later, relays his fears for jazz’s future, because Shepp’s essay contains some of the most vicious, revengeful garbage I have ever read. The words that people like Shepp and LeRoi Jones are putting into print are pure animal, and they can only harm the music we love. The hatred they spread cannot possibly help their race in any way. Unless this insanity is brought to a halt now, we will all suffer, as will the music. We must learn to respect and love all men. What the “haters” and “new thingers” do not seem to realize is that two wrongs do not make a right. Unless they learn it, we can forget jazz and maybe even civilization.36 Abstraction and Multiplicity These disputes illustrate the conceptual void between pure aesthetics— what Pierre Bourdieu calls the “pure gaze” of informed and elitist consumption—and the social politics of artistic creation.37 The aesthetic appreciation (which is to say, consumption) of music in a manner that 34 Leonard Feather, “Feather’s Nest: A Plea for Less Critical Infighting, More Attention to the Music Itself,” Down Beat 32, no. 26 (December 16, 1965): 13. 35 Archie Shepp, “An Artist Speaks Bluntly,” Down Beat 32, no. 26 (December 16, 1965): 11. 36 Ed Mulford, “Chords and Discords: That Shepp Article,” Down Beat 33, no. 1 (January 13, 1966): 8. 37 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 4. 271 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 272 ignores its social context has been challenged in the decades since the critical debates on the “new thing” in the 1960s.38 While true that political identity or convictions rarely account for the sum of an artist’s creative decisions, neither Baraka nor Shepp seemed to insist that social politics should substitute for informed style or technical analyses. Rather, their provocations targeted the absence of these considerations. Nor was it the case that all of Down Beat’s writers dismissed the “new thing” as a corrosive expression of identity politics, with Heckman’s appeals to objectivity and Hentoff’s support of black avant-gardists’ calls for social justice being notable examples of support. That said, the critical discourse on the “new thing” in the 1960s treated “the music itself ” and the social reality of black musicians as two separate concerns. Baraka and Shepp, in their own respective ways, critiqued the willful blindness of liberal white male writers and listeners toward the full and grisly reality of racial violence in the United States. Baraka’s insistence that art aesthetics are fundamentally connected to political reality extended beyond his championing of the jazz avantgarde;39 in Blues People, he argued that black vernacular expression springs forth from a primordial “essence” particular to the black race, which in turn produces a unique cultural logic replete with its own criteria for validating and appreciating art. He expanded this theory in “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music)” published in 1966, specifying that even the most experimental work by black members of the “so-called avant-garde” contains “the blues impulse,” which has remained central to black cultural experience throughout history.40 Baraka’s overtures to race essentialism (whereby cultural production is effectively biologically determined)—which he uses to make a claim of African Americans’ ownership of their music in the face of the 38 So inveighs Richard Taruskin: “To put it in utopian terms, in the name of autonomy and authenticity classical music has indeed become, to a degree once literally unthinkable, the music of noplace, composed for nobody and performed for nobody. . . . The idea of esthetic autonomy—initially a reaction to the nineteenth-century social emancipation (or, perhaps more accurately, the social abandonment) of the artist—has metamorphosed over the course of two centuries from a lifesaving into life-threatening measure. That metamorphosis, entailing social divorce and moral irresponsibility, is the implicit subject matter of this book.” Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music: And Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), xv–xvi. 39 Amiri Baraka was probably the first writer to identify a jazz avant garde, which he defined as “a burgeoning group of young men who are beginning to utilize not only the most important ideas in ‘formal’ contemporary music, but more important, young musicians who have started to utilize the most important ideas in that startling music called BeBop.” See Jones, “The Jazz Avant Garde,” Metronome, September 1961, 9–12, 39, at 9. The genesis of his “changing same” argument—in which he proposes a continuity of “essence” from turn-of-the-century blues to experimentalism in the 1960s—can be found in this essay. 40 LeRoy Jones [Amiri Baraka], “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music),” in Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 180–211, at 180. c ol e m a n exploitative practices of a largely white male–run industry—has since been contested for working against its purported goals. John Gennari describes Baraka’s position as one that inadvertently diminished black agency over cultural practices and production, since that ownership subsisted—even without remuneration—under the most exploitative capitalistic conditions.41 Some black musicians did not feel that Baraka’s views represented their music or political beliefs, viewing his advocacy as self-serving and in bad faith, as Bill Dixon’s 1964 letter shows.42 It is not clear in Baraka’s published work from this period, Blues People and “The Changing Same” especially, whether his race essentialism was a strategic gambit or an uncritical oversight; regardless, it was suggestive of race nationalism—a kind of “self-essentialization” that Paul Gilroy warns against43—in its defense of black creativity amidst the assimilationist expectations of American postwar liberalism and terroristic racist violence. And, most obviously, Black American culture is not a monolith; cultural practices are regionally specific and as much a people’s creative, circumstantially contingent response to their material world as they are artifacts of their shared experience and history.44 Both Baraka and Shepp, in their writings, offer damning assessments without outlining solutions forward, but their candor should be taken in context. They made important interventions on the universalist strivings of jazz criticism’s deference to objectivity, and on a depoliticized “colorblind” jazz tradition constructed primarily by white men.45 This tradition involved the canonization of artists whose merit was assessed on the basis of “the music alone,” and the standardization of “objective” practices that could be decoded by knowledgeable specialists. The expectation among white critics and fans that black musicians appeal to “universal” tastes and divest their work of racial politics blatantly ignored the lapses in citizenship and legal protections that Black Americans faced and that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965—both pieces of legislation passed in response to protest and political pressure—were nominally aimed at redressing. 41 Gennari, “Jazz Criticism,” 492. Gennari also mentions the Dixon letter and cites Cecil Taylor’s later dismissal of Baraka to Gerald Early: “Oh, he never knew what he was talking about when he discussed my music.” Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 281. 43 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 38. 44 That Baraka’s avant-gardists are all men presents a kind of black nationalism that, as Ashley Farmer makes clear, subordinates the creative work and activist labor of black women in an effort to exalt strong male leadership —a sexist oversight that undercuts true equality and liberation. See Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017). 45 DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition.” 42 273 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 274 With Western art (classical) music the reigning aesthetic episteme among the “cultured” and academically trained, the jazz criticism that Baraka and Shepp excoriated was impeded by the limits of conventional music knowledge; tonality, atonality, and discernible, notated form persisted as the standard criteria. How the “new thing” challenged critics in the 1960s to hear differently can teach music listeners and scholars today about the permanent links between aesthetics (the tools and approaches that one uses to think about art) and the social world (the lived experiences that inform how one makes and listens to music), and how these links inform the questions both asked and left unasked about music, as well as the things one hears, mishears, and refuses to hear. The dichotomization of race and the idea of a universal modern art is an important and complicated subtext in the debates about the “new thing.” To understand the impulse toward race-neutrality in jazz criticism—the desire for a universal and communicable kind of modern music—requires seeing musical modernity in this postwar moment as an assimilationist project beset by its own unique set of identity politics. Ingrid Monson discusses the idea that 1950s and 1960s jazz criticism, in Down Beat particularly, strove toward a politics of colorblindness, 46 a universalist ideal to which those for whom racial difference was inescapable had to acquiesce (gender difference barely registers in jazz’s critical discourse, and sexuality is virtually untouched).47 Implicit in this ideal was the presumption that certain objective qualities were intrinsic to serious, aesthetically modern music, that music’s formal design and tonal content—understood as stable, objective categories—should be intelligible to the “universal” and “informed” listener. The opacity of the “new thing” and its presumed hostility toward white people put it on a divergent path from what many understood to be modern jazz’s historical continuum.48 46 See Ingrid Monson, Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 70–89. John Gennari, in Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 137–42, also touches on the trope of colorblindness in 1950s jazz criticism as being important in its framing of jazz as a “universal” American music tradition. 47 A notable example of sexuality discourse comes from Jean French’s column “It’s Like This” in the short-lived magazine Sound & Fury, initially devoted to cutting-edge modern jazz, in which several musicians are asked the same question and their responses printed for comparison. In the magazine’s second issue French poses the question: “It Is Claimed That Homosexuality Is Almost Non-Existent among Jazz Musicians as Compared to Other Limbs in the Tree of Show Business —Your Opinion?” Jean French, “It’s Like This,” Sound & Fury 1, no. 2 (September–October 1965): 52–53. 48 Baraka presents a counterargument to this in his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and the New Black Music),” in which he explains that even if the “new thing” falls outside of what white people understand as jazz, its rootedness in black vernacular culture—epitomized by the blues—still places it within the Black American musical continuum. Baraka, “Changing Same.” c ol e m a n The pressure for marginalized identities to assimilate into hegemonic cultural expectations or a singular aesthetic doctrine can have deleterious effects on their lives and stifle a plurality of thought, thwarting the goal of an intersubjective (i.e., “diverse”) society. Contemporary social theorists have made important observations on universal humanism’s inherent exclusionism: marginalized subjects remain alienated because power hierarchies, based on race, class, and other facets of identity, undergird all social relations. Hearing Free Jazz as an experiment in textural multiplicity that reflected, symbolically, visions of the antiracist, diverse society promoted by artists and activists requires first recognizing the inability of political and aesthetic hegemonies to nurture more intersubjective (democratic) and cooperative modes of relation and creative expression. I turn first to Paul Gilroy’s critique of assimilation as an expectation embedded in modernity’s universalist ideal to explain how political and aesthetic goals can coexist and, in concluding, interpolate Glissant’s theory of opacity to describe the heterophonic texture and collective cooperation of Free Jazz. Race and assimilation are, for Gilroy, definitive elements of modernity because race theorizations of the eighteenth-century European (specifically German) academy granted full subjecthood exclusively to the educated white European male.49 Thus, the same episteme that justified subjugation and exploitation on the basis of race—which was determined by phenotype and presumed geographic origin—also forwarded a “democratic” notion of “universality” premised on the equality of subjects, even as European nation-states engaged in colonization and global imperialist conquest.50 Gilroy contends that the universal humanism of the post-Enlightenment European academy (the ideological birthplace of modern liberalism) inculcated a worldview in which the particularities of subjecthood, even of the marginalized, are beholden to transcendent values—founded upon Reason—at a time when full human subjecthood was the exclusive category of white European males. 49 Paul Gilroy, Against Race, 30–39, 62–76. Nell Irvin Painter traces the evolution of “white” as a racial designation, which despite its unique meanings in specific imperial campaigns, societies, or historical eras, always ultimately signifies the highest point in the social and cultural hierarchy. Its power comes from its exclusivity, and one’s ability to assimilate into whiteness—which, in the United States, was initially reserved for those of “pure” Anglo-Saxon Protestant ancestry—becomes tantamount to their assimilation into the social hegemon. See Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 59–90. 50 See Gilroy’s critique of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy of History, which focuses on Hegel’s dehumanizing exclusion of the Ashanti people, whom he considered “prehistoric and prepolitical” and lacking any “universal spiritual laws,” from modernity. Gilroy’s point is that educated Western Europe promoted a self-centered, exclusionary modernity. Gilroy, Against Race, 56. 275 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 276 This important distinction is germane to the racial subtexts that made debates about experimental improvised music in Down Beat’s reportage on the “new thing” in the early 1960s so fraught: although critics like Feather and Pekar seemed to suggest that Baraka and Shepp were playing identity politics, they overlooked how their own universalist ideals were ethnocentric and exclusionary. 51 In turn, the “identity politics” employed by Shepp and Baraka in their provocative rhetoric were complicated and unique to each. Shepp’s call for social and political change deferred to the very same post-Enlightenment ideals of universal brotherhood that jazz modernism presumably advanced, but his critique—directed at the incomplete universalism extolled in the United States, which excluded Black Americans—provoked Down Beat’s white readership to view him as an angry black separatist. Baraka’s melding of aesthetics and the inherent politics of blackness, which, in his capacity as a poet and playwright, could be understood as being in the service of consciousness-raising, relied on its own kind of essentialism.52 Detractors of the “new thing” insisted that Coleman’s music—and that of other experimentalists like him—simply did not make sense; it was neither formally coherent nor pleasurable to listen to, and the “noise” that avant-gardists appeared intent on passing off as modern jazz could only be explained in the racialized terms of black grievances, not universal values. That, and Baraka’s and Shepp’s insistence that the “new thing”—and jazz in general—could not be extricated from social reality, generated a critical discourse that, between Welding and Tynan’s 1962 double review and Pekar’s 1966 article, devolved into a defense of objectivity against the scourge of identity politics. Hanging above this discourse is a hegemonic model of formal coherence and “orderly” improvisation that helped define jazz modernism and ultimately limited meaningful engagement with the heterogeneous expanse of the experimental practices of black improvisers in this period, especially any suspected of being politically motivated. But what if that “noise” and “disorder” instead reflected a heterogenous sound ideal—one with great currency already in Black American musical practices—in which multiple sonified identities (unique musical/instrumental voices) are 51 The fact that many writers in postwar English-language jazz journalism were Jewish—in a postwar society in which the racial identity of Jewish peoples was shifting—is an important detail in the history of jazz criticism. The extent to which Jewish immigrants and their children could claim or assimilate into whiteness varied, but “white” in this article should be understood as a phenotypical and cultural marker applied generally to those of European descent. For more on Jewish people and whiteness in the United States, see Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 52 Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cool, 264–83. c ol e m a n arranged without the expectation that they fully blend or assimilate into each other?53 Texture, as a central aspect of musical design, offers a way to reframe the “new thing” in terms not of negation (i.e., anti-harmony, anti-jazz) but of multiplicity. The key to understanding texture as a structuring element in Free Jazz is to hear the ensemble’s sound as a matrix of instrumental voices corresponding to each other in a dynamic way without centralized structuring elements such as key or meter; sound creation is fluid and interactive, and the relationship between soloist and accompanist is less bifurcated than in the era’s modern jazz practice. Instrumental sound in Free Jazz is heterogeneous, and “harmony” is expressed abstractly as simultaneity. The distinction between heterophony and polyphony in Western musical thought is convoluted and worth clarifying. Polyphony, a pillar of Enlightenment Europe’s music thinking and design, carried at every point in its lexical genealogy a directive to collapse and assimilate textural difference to ensure an orderly and cohesive (“organic”) design.54 Such an assimilation was accomplished by establishing a textural hierarchy—a focal point—under which contrasting separate voices could be integrated; the ideals of consonance and clarity in contrapuntal and tonal matrices are consecrated by rules that confer preeminence to a principal textural voice or tonal center. 55 Heterophony, in its 53 The late composer Olly Wilson theorized the “heterogeneous sound ideal” as being a fundamental conceptual approach that valued timbral and textural diversity in Afrodiasporic music traditions in the United States and beyond. See Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright and Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (Warren, MI: Harmonie Park Press, 1992), 327–38. 54 Polyphony (“polyphonia”) as a texture of “equally important” parts appears by name in the theoretical and pedagogical tracts of Enlightenment-era Europe, but it has, since its incipient usage in the mid-fourteenth century, also alluded to a broader aesthetic ideal of coherent design and unification. Up to the eighteenth century, “polyphony” meant counterpoint specifically, and thus the latter is best understood as a technique used to achieve the former in effect. For a more detailed explanation, see Klaus-Jürgen Sachs and Carl Dahlhaus, “Counterpoint—§12,” Grove Music Online, 2001, accessed February 25, 2021, http://www. oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo9781561592630-e-0000006690. On the on the early (and rare) use of “polyphonia,” see Lexicon musicum Latinum medii aevi (https://www.woerterbuchnetz.de/LmL), s.v. “polyphonia.” 55 In Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er, MS 10162-6, dated to the midfourteenth century, polyphonia is used in reference to mensurated sections of liturgical music that are meant to contrast with—and ultimately return to—dyaphonia: organum of two simultaneous “unified” voices. This is an early source of the trope of (textural) unification, via assimilations of difference (counterpoint) and resolutions of dissonance (diatonicism), that, I argue, remained a subtext in understandings of polyphony up to the present. For this reference and a brief comprehensive genealogy of “polyphony,” see Wolf Frobenius et al., “Polyphony,” Grove Music Online, 2001, accessed February 24, 2021, https:// www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-0000042927. 277 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 278 conventional (ethno)musicological meaning, denotes the simultaneous sounding of a singular melody in one voice or instrument and its variation in another. The lexical root of heterophony is ancient and vague, but in post-Enlightenment Germanic musicology it is conceived in contrast to tonal polyphony—the apex of Western musical thinking and design—as a primitive and intuited (i.e., illogical) multivoice texture.56 The implicit racial chauvinism in this definition is clear in “Über Heterophonie,” a 1908 article by Austrian musicologist Guido Adler who uses the term to describe the multivoice, improvised, and imitative music of Europe’s uneducated folk, and that of African, Asian, and Indigenous American people, and construes heterophony as an “unenlightened,” primitive kind of polyphony.57 The ethnocentric distinction between polyphony and heterophony—and its lingering subtext of racialized intelligence—has led, a century after Adler, to its exclusive and insufficient application to non-European improvisatory multivoice music.58 Contemporary music creators, however, have appropriated the term to mean something different: a decentralized multivoice texture without a principal melody, in which multiple unique voices are sounding simultaneously—what composer Kui Dong calls “differences within oneness.”59 The ontological insufficiency of heterophony as an “imperfect” kind of polyphony betrays the Eurocentrism of twentieth56 The term heterophony (first attested in Laws VII 812d) is attributed to Plato by ethnomusicologist Peter Cooke, who states that Plato used it “when discussing the unsuitability of music for lyre and voice in musical education,” thus leaving the meaning open to a range of significations, “from reference to minute discrepancies in singing or playing in unison or octaves . . . to the most complex of contrapuntal writing.” Specifically, Cooke maintains that Plato’s reference to this obscure texture presents one of three possibilities: (1) a secondary melody (carried by the lyre) played in contrast to a main (vocal) melody; (2) the lyre’s “harmonization” of the vocal melody; or (3) the lyre’s simultaneous, “deliberate” variation of the vocal melody. He settles on the last, and this meaning remains the musicological standard, supported by more recent historical sources like Pierre Boulez’s Penser la musique aujourd’hui (1963), in which heterophony is “the superimposition upon a primary structure of a modified aspect of the same structure.” See Frobenius et al., “Polyphony—§5.” The cited quotation appears in Pierre Boulez, Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Éditions Gonthier, 1963), 135–36. 57 Guido Adler, “Über Heterophonie,” Jahrbuch der Musikbibliothek Peters 15 (1909): 17–27. 58 See John Napier, “A ‘Failed’ Unison or Conscious Differentiation: The Notion of ‘Heterophony’ in North Indian Vocal Performance,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 37 (2006): 85–108. 59 Composer Kui Dong, in a roundtable discussion with Christian Wolff, Larry Polansky, Christian Asplund, and Michael Hicks, uses “heterophony” in reference to a singing group of elderly women in rural China who began in unison before adding melodic variance improvisationally. Polansky follows by invoking the “cacophony” of an orthodox Jewish service in Brooklyn, which he describes as “everybody going through the liturgy in their own time, in their own corner, in their own key.” Christian Wolff et al., “Improvisation, Heterophony, Politics, Composition,” Perspectives of New Music 45 (2007): 133–49, at 143–44. c ol e m a n century musicology,60 and a reframing more aligned with Dong’s “differences in oneness”—one that broadens the conceptual possibilities of heterophony to multiple autonomous improvising musical voices, each occupying the role of soloist and accompanist simultaneously— turns away from heterophony’s troubling racist genealogy and decenters polyphony’s hegemonic Eurocentric hold on musical “order.” Here, I believe, is the fundamental challenge that these experimental improvising musicians in the 1960s ambitiously sought to explore: how can two or more independent and contrasting melodies be made “harmonious” outside of tonality? The solution is to expand the meaning of “harmony” to encompass a concerted, coordinated heterogeneous sound that we might otherwise call heterophony. I advocate for a more literal definition of heterophony, one that draws directly from the term’s etymology—from the Greek heteros (“different”) and phōnē (“sound” or “voice”)—to mean a decentralized multipart texture. Improvisational heterophony is a dynamic mesh of sound that affords both performers and listeners multiple focal points because each musician—each musical voice—creates their own stream of sound with a shared goal of synergetic cohesion. The resulting texture of this amoebic, multivoice sound mass is implicitly nonhierarchical and driven by co-creative simultaneity. The abstract kind of “harmony” that this texture produces accounts for the undulating and opaque sonic density of Free Jazz. Parsing the dense heterophony of Coleman’s Free Jazz requires an understanding that its texture cannot be reduced to a single, preeminent voice, even in the “solo” sections, since multiple instrumental voices are improvising with, after, against, and in between each other. As such, a listener engaging with the recording must be willing to expand their field of attention to absorb the dense and protean sonic complex. By actively readjusting to various points of interest, the heterophony of Free Jazz invites the listener to “perform”—to act—alongside the musicians through active listening; the overall absence of either a central pulse (tactus) or the conventional soloist-accompanist relationship shatters the expectation that form or texture will help streamline one’s concentration during the listening experience, or otherwise disclose a conventional route toward analysis. I argue that through heterophony Coleman’s Free Jazz (as observed in Welding’s review) restored one of the canonical jazz tradition’s most 60 “The evolution from the imperfect to the perfected, from the inept to the successful, is gradually taking place, and this development is not always guaranteed in ‘natural’ music practice and should be separated from that which follows rules. As in the monophonic folk music of exotic and Occidental people, stunted and unwieldly [über-wuchernde] forms remain under the threshold of actual Artforms, so too should this be the case in polyphony.” Adler, “Über Heterophonie,” 23. 279 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y primordial elements: “spontaneous group improvisation.”61 Although it is unlikely that Welding had the term heterophony in mind when writing his review, the opaque mesh of sound characteristic of this texture is precisely what he heard throughout Free Jazz in lieu of more familiar musical parameters, like a singular meter or key. Free Jazz 280 Free Jazz is an ambitious musical work and an example of Coleman’s daring conceptualism, but it was precisely that unconventional thinking, and the dissenting politics that some suspected were underwriting the “new thing,” that jazz writers and listeners took to be a provocation. Heard by critics like Tynan as noise yet presented by its defenders as modern jazz’s new aesthetic frontier, the “new thing,” and Free Jazz especially, most upset those who held tonal harmony as the bedrock of musical order. In the aesthetic worldview of the college-educated white male writers who made up jazz’s critical field, modern jazz’s aesthetic sophistication rivaled that of classical music, and its connection to black vernacular culture made it authentically American. In this way, for its critical gatekeepers, modern jazz represented the ideal integration of European and African musical elements—Western tonal logic and African rhythmic intuition—and white and black people. That Coleman’s music was cacophonous, that it seemed to lack tonal or formal order, led to doubts on the part of critics and fellow musicians about his musical abilities and sanity.62 And by 1965 the emphasis of the “new thing” on “noise” was taken as reflecting the growing social disharmony of the era, as evident in protests, race violence, and war, leading critics to mourn the end of universality in the arts.63 But “noise” can also disclose new 61 Welding and Tynan, “Double View of a Double Quartet.” Miles Davis’s criticism of Coleman in his autobiography is well known. See Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 250–51. In a 1961 article by Hentoff for Esquire magazine, however, Davis’s makes two divergent comments on Coleman’s music, positive (“I like Ornette . . . because he doesn’t play clichés,” 82) and negative (“Just listen to what he writes and how he plays. If you’re talking psychologically the man is all screwed up inside,” 87), which suggests a conflicted or ambivalent opinion on Coleman’s music the year Free Jazz was released. See Nat Hentoff, “Ornette Coleman: Biggest Noise in Jazz,” Esquire, March 1961, 82–87. 63 Commenting on the “new thing” in a critics’ roundtable discussion for Down Beat, photographer Don Schlitten remarked: “Art is a means of communication. But it doesn’t try to communicate anguish, horror, hate, and war; it tries to communicate beauty. If you want to look at pictures of war, look at Life magazine. But in art we’re trying to create out of the havoc of living and of the world something beautiful, something that’s outstanding.” Dan Morgenstern et al., “The Jazz Avant Garde: Pro & Con,” Down Beat Music ’65: 10th Yearbook (1965), 87–95, at 95. 62 c ol e m a n aesthetic sensibilities and methods of organization,64 and Coleman’s Free Jazz is a historical example of how a heterophonic form can be structured. If improvised heterophony is a dynamic and interactive weave of independent strands of sound—a moving sonic tapestry—then the colors of those unique strands span the audible frequency spectrum, thus representing a shift in the standard unit of measurement for musical content beyond tone exclusively (the twelve chromatic tones of equal temperament) and toward a vast spectrum of frequencies. Free Jazz, Martin Williams wrote in the album’s liner notes, is not a theme-and-variations piece in the usual sense. . . . I don’t suppose any jazz performance ever took bigger chances. Not only is the improvisation almost total, it is frequently collective, involving all eight men inventing at once. And there were no preconceptions as to themes, chord patterns or chorus lengths. The guide for each soloist was a brief ensemble part which introduces him and which gave him an area of musical pitch. Otherwise he had only feelings and imagination—his own and those of his accompanists—to guide him.65 The lengthy thirty-seven-minute double-quartet performance and the shorter almost seventeen-minute “First Take” share a clear structure: section A, in which precomposed motives (labeled “a” and “b” in table 1 and fig. 1) are played in sync by the eight musicians, alternates with section B, which comprises rotating solos; one musician takes the lead in these, but the B section always features collective improvisation by other, and sometimes all, musicians. This polyvalent, heterophonic texture accounts for why some critics of the 1960s heard the “new thing” as atonal (although “polytonal” is maybe more to the point): any tonal center is fleeting because melodic invention is both self-directed and crafted in response to other musicians. The performance’s heterophonic sections amount to an experiment in large-scale cooperative improvisation that dissolved the distinction between soloists and accompanists and broadened the definition of “harmony.” Free Jazz, Williams declares in the liner notes, achieved a truly liberated collective improvisation, and this unprecedented feat is something that the listener should approach with an open mind.66 64 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 3–9. 65 Martin Williams, liner notes, Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, Atlantic SD 1364, 1960. 66 Williams, liner notes, Free Jazz: “Jazzmen have tried spontaneous group improvising without preconception before, of course—and almost invariably fallen into playing the blues within an acceptable key. It is surely a most telling tribute to the importance of this music that all of these young men, of different experience in jazz, were able to contribute spontaneously and sustain a performance like this one.” 281 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y Williams voiced his convictions about the importance of Free Jazz more strongly a decade later when, in the liner notes to “First Take” on Twins, he described the original recording as “one of the most important, provocative, and highly influential jazz recordings of the past fifteen years.”67 Here, Williams refers to the ensemble’s heterophonic improvisation as “atmospherically atonal counterpoint,” an almost metaphorical way of capturing how the texture, which had been dismissed as cacophonic or anarchic (with “anarchy” here denoting chaos rather than a nonhierarchical system), is one in which musical voices are tethered together in a decentralized way.68 But rather than define the texture for what it is lacking—tonality—this recorded performance is better understood through the framework of abundance, of tones and subjectivities. Table 1 is a transcription of both Free Jazz and “First Take”; no known score exists, but the table illustrates the negotiation between predetermined parameters, improvisation within the context of these parameters, and chance elements in the musicians’ spontaneous, real-time interactions and exchanges with one another that characterize the performance.69 In this table the different textures that constitute the A 282 67 Martin Williams, liner notes, Ornette Coleman, Twins, Atlantic 1588, 1971. Whether music or sound-based creative practice can be anarchic—that is, decentralized—is a fascinating conceptual terrain, even if the word’s connotation tends toward the negative. In colloquial US English today, “anarchy” means a breakdown in social cohesion, usually spearheaded by bad actors flouting the rule of law and intent on stoking a chaotic, disorderly environment characterized by the rejection of the state’s authority, violent confrontations with the police, and the looting or destruction of private property. Though a more fitting word for this destructive scenario is nihilism, the roots of anarchy’s association with chaos are in the Enlightenment political theory of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all of whom upheld reason (and society based on rational laws and customs, i.e., a “social contract”) as the quality that separates humankind from animal kind and nature, which are inherently wild and irrational. By contrast, political theory that posits anarchism as a more cooperative (possibly even utopic) system of social organization that functions by way of consensus—where subjects are autonomous and volunteer to work together toward a common good and collective goals—arose in the work of early nineteenth-century French philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who influenced Mikhail Bakunin and Karl Marx. See Andrew Fiala, “Anarchism,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2018 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2018/entries/anarchism. Current scholarship on collectivist music creation includes Paul Steinbeck, Message to Our Folks: The Art Ensemble of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Benjamin Piekut, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); and Lesley A. Tilley, Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 69 Gunther Schuller remarked that Coleman would often eschew notated or dictated parameters in performance and would invite the other musicians to do the same. See the preface to A Collection of the Compositions of Ornette Coleman, ed. and transcribed by Gunther Schuller (New York: MJQ Music, 1961), 2–4. Martin Williams noted in 1961 that one of Coleman’s new pieces was “written out on a slip of manuscript paper” but observes that he plays or sings the musicians’ parts, or dictates instructions, rather than have them read a score. See Martin Williams, “Rehearsing with Ornette,” Metronome, December 1961, 19. 68 c ol e m a n sections are denoted as heterophonic (A1), homophonic (A2), and monophonic (A3) in both performances. Monophony here is a single pre-composed melody carried by the horns in unison and approximated or “gestured” toward by the rhythm section (bass and drums).70 The sequence of rotating solos (B)—which vacillates between a reduced texture (B1) and the full ensemble’s collective improvisation (B2)—and the stereo channels in which they are mixed are identical in the two recordings: Eric Dolphy on bass clarinet (right channel [RC]), Ornette Coleman on alto saxophone (left channel [LC]), Freddie Hubbard on trumpet (RC), Don Cherry on cornet (LC), Charlie Haden (RC) and Scott LaFaro (LC) on bass, and Ed Blackwell (RC) and Billy Higgins (LC) on drums. Each solo, as Williams wrote, is “introduced” by ensemble (A) material, and the performance begins and ends with a short tutti heterophonic episode (A 1 ); there is a closing motive, or coda, which concludes with long held notes. A3 and A2 are ensemble “unisons”— a term Coleman appropriates in an idiosyncratic way to mean both a single line played in unison (monophony) and an improvised melody that mirrors the shape and rhythm of that single line (homophony), respectively.71 The unison melody labeled A3 has two short phrases (“a” and “b”), as indicated in example 1. As table 1 shows, the fixed structure of the performance features coordinated, predetermined material (A1, A2, and A3) that alternates with improvisational episodes (B), in which one musician is foregrounded while others drop out, thereby thinning the texture (B1), and then gradually rejoin the soloist (B2). A metered pulse is maintained by bassist Haden (panned to the right) and drummer Higgins (panned to the left), but they are not always in sync with each other. As the rotating solos culminate, the texture’s density dissipates such that the final four solos (B) are by each of the two bassists (with the drummers) and then, finally, the two drummers alone. A final coordinated “unison” figure (A1!A2) closes the performance. In Free Jazz dialogic improvisation happens heterophonically. Even when a wind instrument is featured as a soloist there is always one bassist (LaFaro, left channel) and drummer (Blackwell, right channel) improvising simultaneously; additionally, the remaining horns eventually intervene by playing background riff patterns, engaging in an exchange with, or obstinately playing alongside, the featured horn soloist. In the heterophony of the alternating solo sections, “coherence” is a dynamic 70 Monophony in Free Jazz is when the musicians play the same motive or melody with the same pitches; homophony is when they play the same motive (rhythm) in sync, but at different pitches. 71 Coleman’s idiosyncratic meaning of the term appears in the preface of Schuller, Collection of the Compositions of Ornette Coleman. 283 284 T AB L E 1 . Outline of Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation and “First Take”1 Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, Atlantic SD 1364, 1960 0:00–0:21   1 [A ] opening ensemble heterophonic “unison” (tutti), with circle of fourths outlined by Charlie Haden (Right Channel [RC]) [A2] homophonic “unison” above drum activity 0:22–5:10 1  [B ] Eric Dolphy’s (RC) solo  [B2] heterophonic riffs by horns at 0:39; occasional interjections until full ensemble is present at 1:54; episodes of riffs interspersed until end of solo  pulse maintained by Haden (RC) with another separate pulse implied by Ed Blackwell (Left Channel [LC]); same configuration for each subsequent horn soloist  Scott LaFaro (LC) and Blackwell (RC) improvise freely 5:11–5:39  2 [A ] homophonic “unison” in horns; rhythm section approximates, especially Haden (RC) 5:40–9:42      1 9:43–10:05 2 [B ] Freddie Hubbard’s  [A ] homophonic (RC) solo “unison” Hubbard occasionally  [A3 aþb] monophonic aligns with Haden’s “unison” melody in the (RC) pulse horns with (a) and (b) 2 phrases; bassists and [B ] collective drummers approximate heterophonic riffs at melody or play 6:30 independently Hubbard’s solo continues without riffs at 7:06 collective riffs resumes at 7:38 10:06–19:34     1 [B ] Ornette Coleman’s (LC) solo strong pulse in Haden’s bassline, which Coleman and Billy Higgins follow [B2] “shout chorus” riffs played by other wind instruments throughout Coleman’s solo LaFaro (LC) switches from pizzicato to arco at 14:06; back at pizz. by 16:23 “First Take,” Twins, Atlantic 1588, 1971 0:00–0:20   [A1] [A2] 0:21–2:28  [B1] Dolphy’s (RC) solo  [B2] collective heterophonic riffs behind Dolphy begin almost immediately  pulse is initially dispersed but Haden (RC) and Higgins (LC) eventually settle into their own  LaFaro (LC) and Blackwell (RC) improvise freely 2:29–2:54   [A2!A1] episode ends with held note “unison” 2:55–4:48    [B1] Hubbard’s (RC) solo [B2] collective heterophonic riffs at 3:28 ensemble heterophony overtakes Hubbard’s solo 4:49–5:10  [A2]  [A3 aþb] 5:11–8:26    [B1] Coleman’s (LC) solo [B2] riffs at 6:13 Remaining horns sustain long notes behind Coleman at 8:14 Free Jazz, cont. 19:35–19:45  3 aþb 19:46–25:20 25:21–25:25 1 ] [A  [B ] Don Cherry’s (LC) solo  monophonic  [B2] collective riffs at 20:36; Dolphy and then Hubbard “unison” returns, (RC) have moments of carried by horns exchange with Cherry while the drummers and bassists  Coleman (LC), Dolphy, and continue Hubbard (RC) resume improvising exchange behind Cherry at 24:04; Coleman and Dolphy rise above the texture with their dialog at 24:44 3 b 25:26–29:50 [A ] latter half of monophonic “unison” (the bluesy “b” phrase)        1 [B ] Haden (RC) begins  his solo with an ostinato motif LaFaro (LC) walks a bass line Drums play lightly in support Haden (RC) begins tremolo at 27:33 both bassists play with tremolo by 28:00 the pulse, marked lightly by drums, dissolves bassists exchange motif in harmonics starting at 28:51 29:51–29:59 30:00–33:46 2 [A ] loud “unison” note  [B1] LaFaro (LC) solos marks transition  Haden (RC) accompanies LaFaro with previous between soloists harmonics motif and then a pedal/double-stop figure which, by 30:34, transforms into a guitarlike dialog between bassists  LaFaro resumes his more independent solo at 31:57 while Haden walks “First Take,” cont. 8:27–8:36  3 aþb [A ] 8:37–10:03 1  [B ] Cherry’s (LC) solo  [B2] collective riffs at 9:06 10:04–10:08  3 b [A ] 10:09–11:44    1 [B ] Haden (RC) begins  his solo with a tremolo motif LaFaro (LC) enters shortly thereafter; walks at 10:37 Higgins (LC) plays shimmery ride cymbal and “drops bombs” on kick drum; Blackwell (RC) interjects occasionally on snare drum and toms 11:45–11:50 2 11:51–12:58 1 [A ] loud “unison” note  [B ] LaFaro (LC) solos, transition starting with tremolo motif  dialogic exchange emerges between the two bassists; drummers play supportively throughout 285 286 TABLE 1. (continued) Free Jazz, cont. 33:47–33:59  [A1 ! A2] frenetic heterophonic episode concludes with a homophonic “unison” 34:00–35:17  [B1] Blackwell (RC) begins solo on toms with a marchlike figure  Higgins (LC) implies a pulse on bell of cymbal 35:18–35:25  35:26–36:32 [A2] loud “unison”  note marks transition between soloists [B1] Higgins (LC) solos on cymbals, gradually incorporating more drums, while Blackwell (RC) maintains swung pulse, engaging in dialog with Higgins on snare and kick drum 36:33–37:03   [A1] heterophonic passage much like the opening [A2] closing homophonic “unison” “First Take,” cont. 12:59–13:09  [A1 ! A2] 1 13:10–15:02  [B1] Blackwell (RC) freely improvises on toms  Higgins (LC) plays supportively, in dialogue with Blackwell 15:03–15:11  [A2] loud “unison”  note marks transition between soloists 15:12–16:27 [B1] Higgins (LC) solos while Blackwell (RC) maintains a pulse 16:27–16:55  [A1 ! A2] closing “unison” note Timestamps in this table correspond to the streaming version of the album Free Jazz found on Apple Music and Spotify. c ol e m a n example 1. [A 3 ] “Unison” horn figure preceding and following Ornette Coleman’s solo, at approx. 9:48 and 19:27. negotiated by musicians improvising in simultaneity, and the pulsekeeping bassist (Haden) and drummer (Higgins) serve less as metric references for the other musicians than as registers of ensemble momentum. As Eric Charry discusses, Coleman’s remarks about unplanned freedom articulated in the liner notes to his albums Change of the Century (1959) and This Is Our Music (1960), in which he claims that the ensemble’s group improvisations are totally unplanned and “free,” are unintentionally misleading, and have caused writers like composer Gunther Schuller, one of Coleman’s early supporters, and subsequent jazz scholars to misunderstand fundamentally how his music is organized.72 Useful for clarifying what “freedom” means for Coleman is the distinction between what Charry calls an “aesthetic of musical freedom” or spirit of freedom, which invites musicians to co-create spontaneously beyond convention, and the structuring parameters used to organize this free playing: the “form” of the performance.73 Demonstrations of coherence in music reflect an ideal that, as Charry argues, is ultimately a subjective, unempirical conclusion aimed at validating the music within a given paradigm.74 As I argued earlier, this kind of validation depends wholly 72 Eric Charry, “Freedom and Form in Ornette Coleman’s Early Atlantic Recordings,” Annual Review of Jazz Studies 97 (1998): 261–94. See also Gunther Schuller, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation,” Jazz Review 1, no. 1 (November 1958): 6–9, 21. Schuller’s article, which argues for Rollins’s smart soloing on “Blue 7,” is seen by jazz scholars as the first in-depth (positivist) analysis of improvisational logic vis-à-vis musical form. See Benjamin Givan, “Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins: Stylistic Context, Intentionality, and Jazz Analysis,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67 (2014): 167–237. 73 Charry locates the “aesthetic of musical freedom” achieved by Coleman’s ensemble in the areas of timbre, intonation, melodic construction, an adherence or divergence from tonality, a steady pulse or free meter, and, lastly, the design of the composition with regard to a departure from the conventional 12- and 32-bar forms of the blues and popular song, respectively. Charry, “Freedom and Form,” 262. 74 Charry, “Freedom and Form,” 265. 287 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 288 on the authority of the analyst and the epistemological context in which they understand and assess the music. Put another way, a listener armed with only hegemonic models of music logic and formalized music thinking (gathered through education and acculturation) understands “harmony” as a very narrow category determined by tonality and, possibly, systematized atonality. That narrow episteme makes hearing a more fluid and decentralized matrix of improvised sound as anything other than cacophony very difficult. Hearing the heterophony of Free Jazz, by contrast, is to acknowledge a textural braid of many unique and independent strands of sound in motion. Charry’s argument that Coleman expanded upon the prevailing concept of musical form is confirmed by the analysis of Free Jazz presented here. The protracted and revolving binary form of the two recorded performances, in which the coordinated, predetermined material of the A sections alternates with the improvised heterophony of the B sections, is hidden because the standard parameters of musical organization—key and meter—do not function in expected ways. These parameters are not absent but are, instead, fluid, and that creates an opaque mass of sound driven by ensemble momentum. Rather than “assimilate” into one meter, key, or harmonic progression, the musicians on Free Jazz explore unity in plurality and “harmony” by cooperative simultaneity. Williams does his best in the liner notes for Free Jazz to explain the performance to the listener, and his commentary can be appreciated as an earnest attempt to defend the integrity of Coleman’s music from his detractors, especially in his use of “polyphony” to describe the texture. It begins, according to him, “with brief polyphonic playing by the horns— a kind of pitch and emotional ‘tune-up’ for the piece, in effect,” but the passage in question has two parts, a short episode of heterophony and a contrasting homophonic passage, in which the horns choose a pitch and move in rhythmic lockstep with each other, with bassist LaFaro and the drummers improvising more freely (see ex. 2). Dolphy is the first to solo, and Coleman’s comment to Williams upon hearing the playback (quoted in the liner notes) was that Dolphy played “as if he was playing all the instruments behind him.” Coleman also praised the musicians’ willingness to play freely, citing in Blackwell’s playing “emotion . . . [that] liberates the rhythms and meters.” Remarking on the ensemble’s collective improvisation during his own solo, Coleman told Williams: “You can hear the others continue to build together so beautifully that the freedom even becomes impersonal.”75 75 Williams, liner notes, Free Jazz. c ol e m a n example 2. Approximating transcription of the opening passage in Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, “LC” and “RC” are Left Channel and Right Channel, respectively. 289 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y figure 1. Free Jazz album cover (left), which features a reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s painting White Light (1954), also reproduced in the album’s inner gatefold. 290 The personnel list in the LP’s inner gatefold lists the eight musicians and notes that the double quartet is split between the two stereo channels. While the latter is not exactly a special feature—stereophonic recording, then decades old, had become an industry standard by 1958—the two-channel mix permits a novel way of engaging with the unorthodox performance. The stereo Free Jazz LP allows the listener to glide across the stereo field by using the pan dial on their high-fidelity phonograph player or receiver, thereby redirecting their aural perspective. Here, technology provides the listener with an enhanced ability to train their aural gaze, and thus customize their experience, at any point in the recorded performance. In this way, the listener is given the agency to act—to improvise—by using a knob to control the blend of, and their relative position in, the sound mass. Coleman was not alone in his heterophonic explorations; Cecil Taylor’s “Air,” recorded in New York City on October 12, 1960, for the album The World of Cecil Taylor, also features simultaneous streams of improvised melody without a common meter or key. But the critical discourse around the “new thing,” beset by formal Western music thinking and a modern jazz with universal appeal, lacked the conceptual language to account for new kinds of harmony. Additionally, situated in a racially segregated society bolstered by institutionalized white c ol e m a n supremacy—a society embroiled in civil rights struggle—black musicians venturing outward into abstract conceptual realms likely provided credence to the suspicion that the “new thing” was a nihilistic turn away from the status quo. And after Baraka’s and Shepp’s commentaries on racial and economic injustice on the pages of Down Beat, some critics and listeners understood the “new thing” as a turn against white patronage itself. In this article I have tried to provide insight into Free Jazz that does not presume a lack of harmony or a rejection of tradition. These negative generalizations, applied to the idiosyncratic nature of creative experimentalism, stifle the possibility for aesthetic continuities embedded in new conceptual terrain. Rather than accept the legacy of Free Jazz—and the “new thing” as a whole—as a threat to commonplace musical sensibilities, contemporary listeners should understand that there is no universal standard for good or coherent music, and that listening and playing “free” from received knowledge can unlock plentiful and densely layered new sonic possibilities. Opaque Subjectivities Coleman’s comments on his sonic experiments adopted a utopian tone, and his egalitarian vision for human interaction is made explicit in the few remarks he made to the press in the early 1960s. He responds with considerable grace to the less-than-judicious reception of Free Jazz in Down Beat in a letter to the editor, published one year after the album was recorded, possibly in an effort to quell the charges against him of being an angry rebel and charlatan: I have read articles by the staff of Down Beat and some freelance writers about music. . . . This is very good for musicians and listeners. I do believe everyone shares in the nature of music whether we like it or not, player and nonplayer. The biggest problem about music is the material it is made out of, and this seems to be brought about by the social concept of classes rather than the music itself; I guess that is why jazz music has such a beautiful meaning: it is classless, just as the art of human living is a classless way of living that gives. Music has this quality. I wrote this letter because I believe in people and their relation to music.76 76 Ornette Coleman, “Chords & Discords: Lovely Words from Ornette,” Down Beat 29, no. 2 (January 18, 1962): 6. Understanding Coleman’s meaning of the word “class” as not solely restricted to wealth-based privilege but closer to the meaning of “caste” helps clarify his position. 291 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y 292 There are two disjunct understandings of universalism threaded through the pages of Down Beat in its early to mid-1960s coverage of the jazz avantgarde: one more utopian and the other hegemonic. Coleman’s letter above lends to Free Jazz an air of utopian egalitarianism; it is not difficult to imagine his vision for a musical collective in which creation was not the sole responsibility of a singular composer or a lead soloist supported by accompanists, but rather a shared enterprise that was multifaceted and modular. He later articulated elements of this vision with greater clarity in his theory of “harmolodics.”77 Yet the Free Jazz experiment was not exactly the egalitarian utopia that Coleman may have intended; the album and composition are credited to him alone (which, under United States copyright law, has a bearing on the distribution of royalties) and the liner notes also clearly credit him as the lead conceptualist, a role not fundamentally different from that of the composer-as-auteur. I argue that this experiment in heterophony is best understood not as achieving a utopian vision of artistic egalitarianism but as a strong step toward that vision. It was a spirited attempt at an alternative to the sonic assimilationism of polyphony and musical rationality represented by tonality—one in which improvisers could more freely create with each other, in real time. Abstraction served dual aesthetic and political goals for postwar black artists by resisting the assimilationist expectation that marginalized subjects be and make work intelligible—and thus exploitable— to people in power. A black writer’s commitment to opaque abstraction in prose writing, argues Phillip Brian Harper, upended any “promise of easy and transparent communication in light of which none of their cognitively disjunctive features can fail to make an impression, since these evidently violate that very promise.”78 Harper 77 Stephen Rush, whose thorough interview with Ornette Coleman composes the bulk of his book Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman, explains the theory thusly: “Harmolodics is about collective improvisation. It posits that equal consideration should be given to each player. . . . Harmolodics is also about breaking the stranglehold that harmony had on Jazz by the end of the 1950s. American song form and Bebop had confined Jazz to a ‘head—solos— head’ structure, or ‘composed melody—improvise over the changes—melody.’ Harmolodics uses that rubric also, as any of the transcriptions in this volume will show, but the ‘improvise over the changes’ aspect is replaced with ‘improvise over the ethos of the composition.’ . . . Harmolodics is an approach that attempts to value each element and each participant equally.” In the interview portion of the book, Coleman underscores the symbolic dimension of harmolodics, which Rush describes as “ultimately a metaphor for the spiritual communion of all humankind”: [Coleman speaking] “Mmmm-hmmm! Not hierarchy! When you look up you don’t see nothing but the sky. Nothing but the sky.” Stephen Rush, Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman (New York: Routledge, 2017), 8, 12, 38–49. 78 Philip Brian Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 12; and LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], “Cecil Taylor (The World of Cecil Taylor),” in Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967), 110–12. c ol e m a n finds a similar abstractionist practice in Cecil Taylor’s 1960 rendition of the Rogers and Hammerstein showtune “This Nearly Was Mine,” recorded on The World of Cecil Taylor ; drawing from Baraka’s 1962 review of the album in the avant-garde magazine Kulchur (reprinted in Black Music), Taylor’s abstraction of the tune’s melodic shape and regular meter obscures in a dramatic fashion the original’s design, a disruption that, for Harper, disorients the listener by disappointing their expectations, thus beckoning them to listen to Taylor’s rendition as though it was an unfamiliar tune.79 It is helpful to understand the “new thing” in this way: as frustrating a listener’s normalized expectations in order to incite a different kind of subjective experience, in which the uprooted vulnerability potentially caused by the swirling, undulating sonic mass in the widened stereophonic field allows for new ways of listening outside of rote hegemonic expectations or conditioning. A heterophonic aggregate, without a central or predominant tonal center or meter, is a dense, undulating mesh of sound that requires proactive listening. It is a texture of discrete strands and the sum of its parts. But to capture the totality of sound in one hearing is beside the point; it is humanly impossible to hear every voice in a clear and isolated way, even in stereo, since they overlap with and intrude upon one another. In heterophony, “hearing,” “understanding,” and “knowing” are exercises in approximation and repetition, leading the listener, in the words of Glissant, to “focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.”80 It is Glissant who, in Poetics of Relation, first forwarded “opacity” as a theoretical concept that promotes a human being’s right to difference in relation to other human beings. For Glissant, opacity is an embrace of the irreducible totality of human existence, a filter through which genuine human interaction and mutual understanding—“Relation”—occurs. Opacity is not the absence of clarity but the recognition of the many artificial limits that a privileging of objectivity imposes on attempts to understand humanity in its multitudes. “Agree not merely to the right to difference,” Glissant demands, “but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not an enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics.”81 With the “transparency” of objectivity, the messy, 79 80 81 Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics, 97–106. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 189–94. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. 293 t h e j ou r na l o f m u s i c o l o g y unpredictable, and irrational breadth of human experience is denatured, and the subject reduced into a known, sterile object.82 Getting comfortable with the lack of clarity that comes with embracing opaque multiplicity, according to Glissant, is a poetic alternative to the rigid Enlightenment model of universalist “totality” to which all human beings are expected—or forced—to acquiesce.83 And for people who have experienced the inhumanity of subjugation and marginalization, to be and create opaquely can unlock a new path toward a self-determined freedom. This kind of liberation might be what Archie Shepp meant when he addressed Down Beat’s readers in 1965: But I am more than the images you superimpose on me, the despair that you inflict. I am the persistent insistence of the human heart to be free. I wish to regain that cherished dignity that was always mine. My esthetic answer to your lies about me is a simple one: you can no longer defer my dream. I’m gonna sing it. Dance it. Scream it. And if need be, I’ll steal it from this very earth.84 294 ABSTRACT Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the “new thing,” the moniker journalists used to describe jazz’s emergent avantgarde, and links were drawn between the album’s sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the “new thing,” outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the 82 83 84 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 192. Shepp, “An Artist Speaks Bluntly,” 11. c ol e m a n context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh—woven by the musicians in coordinated action—subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more “freely.” Keywords: improvised music, experimentalism, heterophony, free jazz, criticism 295