THE CREATIVE LISTENER

Avant-garde jazz has been surrounded by controversy the last eight years or so, most of it ridiculous. The central question tossing back and forth on this sea of controversy (what?) is usually “Is it music?” Very basic. Predictably one side says yes and the other side says no. (One longs for someone to reflect the ambiguity of the times by taking a firm stand with a resounding “maybe!”). The yes-people I’m not concerned with — they’re generally cool. The idea here is to develop another argument against the no-people. Actually, I don’t give a large s for the validity of aesthetic theories applied to living music and have not intention of developing one. Just a few casual observations and a conclusion I haven’t heard anyone say yet.

The no-people are usually distressed over the lack of form in avant-garde jazz (referred to from now on, for brevity’s sake, as new jazz). It seems that they believe that making an intelligent original within self-imposed forms is what constitutes art. Without the form or structure, the ensuing freedom is artless since it is the manmade form that makes it art and not the chaos contained within. They assume that artistic value is derived only after the solo is held against the structure within which it is created. Thus someone like Albert Ayler, whose solos are not stated within any perceivable structure, is not making music. It is noise, meaningless They argue that since he has “freed” himself from conventional structures and has placed himself in a position where he could play “anything” within a single solo, is in the same position as a ten-year-old kid who picks up a horn and simply blows what he wishes, having no knowledge of melody, horizontal and vertical | improvizations, etc. And, of course, they conclude, this ten-year-old kid. is not producing art. Or music. This is all hypothetical nonsense — I cannot think of a single new jazz ; artist that doesn’t have a strength Jand perseverance that would be lacking in a ten-year-old kid.