Impro
2002; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 112; Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/ctr.112.002
ISSN1920-941X
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoMy most intensive experience as a listener to jazz extends from 1959 – the year of release of groundbreaking albums that included Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, Charles Mingus’s Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come – to the period in my late teens and early twenties when Archie Shepp released Fire Music and Four for ’Trane, Albert Ayler released Bells and The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra appeared mysteriously in my collection (which also heavily featured albums by John Coltrane, especially the quartet with McCoy Tyner on piano, Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass). As I recall it, this was, among other things, a period in which improvisation was in different ways attempting to free itself from shaping structures such as chord changes, melodic lines, “modes” or even “notes” as such: as Albert Ayler famously remarked, “it’s not about notes any more, it’s about feelings.” In the wake of the civil rights and other liberatory social movements, as I remember it, jazz at this time was also, in some of its manifestations and particularly among black musicians, moving away from featured soloists toward increasing collaboration – or group improvisation, as on John Coltrane’s late albums, including the classic A Love Supreme, which consists of group improvisations around a basic four-note theme, extending over two sides of vinyl – one of the few non-classical “record” albums that actually benefited from the reformatting required by its re-release on CD.
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