Avant-Garde Jazz: A Guide to the History of Avant-Garde Jazz

Avant-garde jazz is a genre of music that pushes jazz beyond the traditional forms of swing, bebop, hard bop, and cool jazz. Avant-garde jazz musicians are known for embracing collective improvisation, radical harmonic concepts, and even atonality. Originating in the mid-1950s and continuing through the present day, the avant-garde jazz idiom remains a key component of the jazz scene at large.

Both traditional jazz and twentieth-century classical music have influenced avant-garde jazz music. Its purveyors have come from the highest ranks of jazz music, including bebop and hard bop legends like John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Eric Dolphy. Others were more experimental from the start, such as free jazz pioneers Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry. Thanks to these early pioneers and current avant-garde jazz stewards like Anthony Braxton and John Zorn, the movement has maintained a small but dedicated base of practitioners and patrons.

The avant-garde jazz scene took form in the late 1950s as musicians from the bebop and post-bop jazz scene began exploring and expanding the potential of a traditional jazz quartet or quintet.

• Early days: Some of the earliest signs of jazz's avant-garde angle appeared on pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1956 record Jazz Advance. The record hews to traditional song forms and chord changes, but Taylor's form of improvisation hints at the atonal and twelve-tone music that was emanating from classical music halls at the time.
• Emergence of free jazz: Saxophonist Ornette Coleman helped break open the door that Taylor had cracked. With 1958's Something Else!!!!, 1959's The Shape of Jazz to Come, 1960's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation, and 1960's Change of the Century, Coleman ushered in a genre that would be known as free jazz, an essential counterpart to avant-garde jazz. Coleman encouraged his bandmates—trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Billy Higgins—to improvise together with minimal regard for structure or standard chord changes.
• Growing popularity: Coleman's radical approach to jazz inspired a legion of free jazz and avant-garde records in the 1960s and 1970s. Notable records that helped define the movement include Spiritual Unity (1964) by the Albert Ayler Trio, Out To Lunch! (1964) by Eric Dolphy, Unit Structures (1966) by Cecil Taylor, The Magic of Ju-Ju (1967) by Archie Shepp, and Space is the Place (1972) by the Sun Ra Arkestra. During this time, avant-garde jazz also gained a crucial ally in saxophone legend John Coltrane, who increasingly pushed toward free and atonal music toward the end of his career. On records like Ascension (1966) and Interstellar Space (1967), Coltrane pushed past all boundaries of his bebop and hard bop origins and fully embraced the avant-garde.
• Rise of Chicago musicians: New York City was the world's jazz capital leading up to the avant-garde period, and it remained this way throughout. Yet Chicago also proved to be a key city for the movement, thanks to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), which came of age in the 1960s. AACM members like Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago embraced the avant-garde from a more formal perspective—showing as much influence from classical musicians like Pierre Boulez as they did from jazz greats like Charlie Parker. Poet Amiri Baraka also collaborated with the AACM, making the collective a more holistic consortium of Black art and artists.
• Present-day influence: In the present day, the avant-garde jazz scene continues to thrive in New York City thanks to artists like John Zorn, Henry Threadgill, and Anthony Braxton. Many international artists have also advanced the form including German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and Japanese pianist Yōsuke Yamashita.

A few stylistic characteristics help define avant-garde jazz music.

1. 1. Rejection of standard tonality: For most of jazz's early years, the genre was based around loose interpretations of tonal music, or music organized around a central note. Beginning in the 1950s and exploding in the 1960s, avant-garde jazz music rejected traditional tonal boundaries and pushed toward unconventional harmony and even atonality.
2. 2. Collective improvisation: In many avant-garde jazz ensembles, players improvise simultaneously rather than taking turns while other players comp, or support a solo.
3. 3. Inspiration from twentieth-century classical music: Modern avant-garde jazz composers like Anthony Braxton and Henry Threadgill do not merely draw inspiration from jazz titans like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. They’ve also followed channels pioneered by twentieth-century classical composers like Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, and Witold Lutoslawski—as well as the composers who influenced those classical artists, such as J.S. Bach.

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