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The Jazz Avant-Garde: Not as free as we would think By: Lee Barry 
The easy assumption about jazz is that it is free, or that it representsattempts at freedom, and makes it seem easy to evoke an spirit of an unboundedfreedom. In fact, the driving force behind jazz is in many cases the story of liberationfrom existing cultural and societal structures set in place by the largely white worldof central Europe. Jazz could be seen as an attempt to break barriers created bythree hundred years of white domination of music and the rigidity of the structure of tonal music, beginning with the development of equal temperament in the 17
th
Century. It is amusingly ironic, too, that the invention of equal temperament was anattempt to re-map the octave into 12 parts, thereby creating new boundaries withinwhich music is created. As a result, we continue to see and hear the world with earsthat have evolved from those boundaries.As we have learned from Marshall McLuhan, every new medium creates newtypes of messages that would not have existed before. In the case of equaltemperament, it created highly complicated systems of melody and harmony, andcreated theories such as the "circle of fifths" and "circle of fourths", the "enneagram"or "mandala" for this new approach to sound organization. Jazz, the progenitor of anew sound seemingly based on freedom, is however tightly bound to this system, asthe seeds of jazz were partly sown by the world of classical music, arising from theconventions set in the Baroque period (Bach, Vivaldi, Couperin), and later by theClassical period (Haydn, Beethoven). If you study the music in these two periods,you find a very codified music structure. In the Baroque period for example you finda very refined sense of rhythm, bound by rules, where only certain rhythmicconfigurations are allowed; and with regard to the Classical period, a refined sense of harmony, where for example you seldom hear a major 7
th
chord. It was not seen as
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an acceptable sound, and may have seemed almost dissonant, yet became a fixturein jazz. As we trace the evolution of music, we can see how rules and boundaries areset, and then broken.Jazz sounds like art, full of rebellion and infused with the notion of “f*** off—I’ll do what I want”, but in many ways jazz is more of a science than art, or perhapssits on the fence between the two. If you hung out any professional jazz musician inthe 50s and 60s you’d be talking about “tritone substitution”, “two-five-ones”, “flat-fives”, “lydian chromatic concept”, “pitch classes”, “chord scales”, and so on.The popular assumption is that jazz is free improvisation, sort of like finger-painting with sound, yet jazz was for many years built upon music theory developedin Classical music. The "free" sound of jazz is actually an illusion, as jazz is full of rules and boundaries, many of them adopted from the rules and boundariesestablished by the
figured bass
and
cadenza
in Baroque and Classical music. Figuredbass (the chord structure in a piece of music) eventually evolved into the "changes"in jazz, and the cadenza
 
evolved into the jazz "head" and then the solo.The term "free jazz" more accurately expresses the essence of jazz, and ismore intimately tied to abstract expression in the visual arts. It severs therelationship with western music in an abrupt and shocking way, and says "go f***yourself" to three hundred years of music development. In essence, it launched asurprise attack on the music world and changed it forever. But like all artmovements, it creates boundaries of genre, with the ultimate goal of creatingsomething virgin and untouched; yet eventually loses that virginity.
Freedom never truly free
Absolute freedom is an oxymoron. As you break boundaries to achievefreedom, you automatically create boundaries. They are a side effect of freedom.Very often freedom can only be obtained by construction of barriers, as they wall-off opposition, allowing the new freedom to exist unencumbered. This is not a bad thing,
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and is how we make genre; and without genre, everything would be homogenousand boring.The jazz avant-garde was partly an attempt to break free of the grid of tonalmusic, but at the same time created a grid of its own. As Charles Mingus once said, “You have to improvise from something—you can’t improvise from nothing….” Inevitably, you need some type of map eventually, as the mind is wont of them. Evenwhen structure is replaced with Dionysian abandon, we very often find ourselvesinside different boundaries based upon exclusion and avoidance of the status quo;and find ourselves again ensnared by rules, even when the whole point was to get ridof the rules.
To break a rule is to add interest
Humans sometimes have to pinch themselves to remember that they have anunbounded intellect, and challenging artistic entrenchment is the most effectivemeans of breaking boundaries. However, the down side of rule breaking is that it hasto be a continual process. A broken rule can quickly become a fixed rule, and againwe find ourselves within the boundaries of tradition. This is why we see cycles in art,which is the intentional replacement of convention when it becomes overdone anduninteresting. Ironically, this is often accomplished not by innovation, but byrecycling previous conventions--and just so happens to be a good exercise for theintellect as well.The essential element of any avant-garde philosophy is the spirit of experimentation and innovation. More of a science than an art, it engages theintellect to a greater degree than folk or pop music.Saxophonist Ornette Coleman and guitarist James Blood Ulmer devised a newmusical paradigm called
harmolodics
, a theory based on a steady beat but within
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