Jazz improvisation is something to shout about

 

Over the May bank-holiday weekend, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival bends its boundaries a little, making space for a music that’s entering its fifth decade of sustainable cult status, despite minimal airplay, minimal subsidy and dismissal by mainstream critics. I’ve been pulled in to help promote three nights of so-called free improvisation, under the banner heading of Stewart Lee’s Freehouse, because I write about the music for this paper, and because it is imagined that a semi-known comedian like me might help to sell this supposedly problematic music to the people of Gloucestershire. The same weekend in London sees the 10th annual Freedom of the City event at the Conway Hall, a vast programme featuring some of the same performers, appearing at their own expense in a gesture of solidarity with the capital’s thriving free-improvisation scene. In short, there has never been a better time to explore non-idiomatic spontaneity. 

I began watching free improvisation when I arrived in London in the late 1980s. In those pre-Google days, I’d follow flyers to tiny clubs to see unknown musicians mentioned in interviews with experimentally inclined rock bands such as Sonic Youth or Spacemen 3, and be exposed to whole evenings of serious-looking folk, playing apparently incompatible instruments, with no obvious melody, or rhythm, or any discernible purpose. At first, I found it ludicrous. During a Morphogenesis show at the China Pig in 1993, attended by six people and a cat, a balloon that one of the performers was rubbing burst, but nobody minded, and I still went back. In 1997, I saw the guitarist Derek Bailey accidentally walk into a wall while playing, acknowledge the clang of his instrument, and then deliberately bash it into the wall again. I rea­lised there was a method at work, and how close the absurd was to the sublime. Then, after I moved to Hackney in the late 1990s, where rooms above pubs host a disproportionate amount of this music, I realised that I was going to see this sort of thing all the time, and finding in it a satisfaction few other sounds offered. Apparently, this stuff had a name, and a history. It was free improvisation. And it looked like I was a fan.  

But what is free improvisation? And why should you allow it to jeopardise your bank-holiday weekend? Various free improvisers kindly took time out from dismantling hollow musical gestures to explain. The saxophonist Tony Bevan offered a concise history: “European free improvisation came about in the late 1960s, partly as a not disrespectful reaction to the black American free jazz” (of Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman). For me, as an observer, there’s also the fact that free improvisation’s early instigators, the working-class jazz musicians Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley, for example, were restless autodidacts sick of the constraints of tea dances and session work. Wondering where to go next, and denied access to the temples of culture, they built a bricolage avant-garde music from the ground up in empty theatres and pub back rooms unvisited by the establishment. 

Yet despite its roots in jazz, and the music’s formal inclusion in this year’s Cheltenham Jazz Festival, can free improvisation even be called “jazz”? The drummer Steve Noble writes like he plays, with capital letters and exclamation marks: “I would call what I do FREE IMPROVISATION, but as I am not asked very often to name what I do, maybe I have not given this too much thought. I just PLAY, man!” American jazz’s experimental wing believe that a conservative pincer movement of the critic Stanley Crouch and the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis ensures the innovations of the free-jazz musicians, cutting loose from melody and rhythm under John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor, are viewed as dead ends, while a more palatable jazz heads for the conservatoire. So, what does “jazz” even mean now? With characteristic bluntness, the pianist Steve Beresford says it means a great many things, “most of them being unbearable. Because the qualities I love in, say, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman and Bill Evans are so often totally missing in so many jazz players, but those qualities are present in so many of the free improvisers I listen to and play with”.  

Beresford means there is a loss in mainstream jazz of the excitement that would have gripped audiences historically, when the music’s next moves were genuinely unknowable. And in an age when we expect and are given culture on demand, through a variety of media, watching a performance by free improvisers forces you to rea­lise that something is happening that will happen only once. Improvised music relieves me, at least, of the terrible duty of expectation. 

“That’s the essential thing about free improvisation,” agrees the saxophonist Evan Parker, who plays on Saturday in Cheltenham and on Sunday in London, both with the trumpeter Peter Evans. “Listening to a performance of something you already know, you are listening to it in real time, but you are also comparing it to the recording that you know. With free improvisation, you are forced to concentrate on the music in front of you.”  

Over and above the actual sounds and shapes of free improvisation lies another key attraction. This music will not betray you. One of the purposes of rock’n’roll, for adolescent boys and resolutely adolescent men, was that it offered something to believe in. But now Iggy Pop is in a car-insurance advert and the counterculture is corporate-sponsored. Free impro­visation, by its very nature, cannot be clipped, packaged and co-opted. Bevan concludes: “I don’t think free improvisation represents anything that’s unique in the history of humankind. There’s a moment in all kinds of music where it suddenly just, well, takes off, I suppose. Classical, punk, folk, jazz — it seems to be just something that happens when people play together. But the thing about free improvisation is, it puts people in a position where those moments can happen more often, and not because of any mysticism, but because the players have to play together, react and create a single body of music. And when it happens, as Derek Bailey would say, everyone in the room knows it.” 

“That said,” the saxophonist Alan Wilkinson confided, also quoting Bailey, “it all sounds like crap to most people on the street.” Bailey’s refreshingly unpretentious attitude to a supposedly pretentious art form is typical of the free improvisers, who avoid the self-mythology even the lowliest indie rocker is prone to. “It’s good to get a preview of these events in a mainstream paper,” says the saxophonist and composer John Butcher, “although a few years back, I recall an Evening Standard piece where, after a week of going to free-improvisation gigs, the guy said he could only conclude that everybody was required to use bows. Except for the string players, for whom it was forbidden.”