The Freedom Principle

I used to think I was a free jazz drummer, now I just want to play tight arrangements.
– Todd Bishop

The book The Freedom Principle, published in 1984, by John Litweiler, was my my listening guide as I was getting into free jazz, and for a time shaped a lot of my ideas about playing. This was around 1988-90, when I was at USC— I renewed it from the library there multiple times that year. It’s a good overview of that music, especially the phase from about 1958-1970, and the subsequent activities of players from that phase. There are chapters on Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, modal jazz, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, more. It’s colorful and easy to read, with a good discography.

And it flogs a funny kind of dogma, about the arc of history leading to one particular way of playing— free jazz. We get a distinct message that deviations from that are indications of stifling conservatism, commercialism, chickenshittedness, and a lack of imagination in general. An unslakable thirst for money, probably. It was a pleasing dogma for this young (i.e. dumb) man to believe in, for a little while.

That view of historical inevitability is laid out in the first chapter, entitled “Steps in a search for Freedom”, summarizing the history of jazz as being about increasing freedom from musical constraints— conflating that with the concurrent movement for political freedom and equality for Black Americans. A false premise, but it seems like a natural thing, if you don’t think too hard about it. It’s never fully spelled out, because it meanders into a historical outline of jazz following bebop— cool, Third Stream, hard bop— setting the stage for the ”only” player who “sensed the need for freedom”, who even “felt the urge” for it.

…and that’s a little strange, that so many musicians would be so enslaved, with not even an urge to live as free individuals. Either that or freedom doesn’t mean what you think it does.

It’s not clear what he thinks musicians were trying to be free from. He suggests: “traditional fetters of harmonic and rhythmic patterns” in favor of “genuine freedom of expression for [one’s] own music.” Early jazz musicians “asserted their independence of melody, structure, rhythm, and expression from the musics that surrounded them”, subsequent artists, he says, liberated the soloist, rhythm, and acheived unspecified other freedoms. He never identifies the actual forces that were subjugating musicians in these ways.

The real lives of musicians as anything other than instruments of the author’s historical narrative aren’t considered. Like, for actual musicians free or freedom have different meanings altogether:

• A way of playing a piece of music, with very little or nothing preplanned.
• Being allowed by a bandleader to play a job the way they see fit.
• Being economically free to do the kind of music they want— in the player’s personal finances, and/or in the funding of the project itself.
• Being a skilled enough musician to have a lot of choices in how to play a piece or situation.

The author is really only talking about the first thing, and about being “free” from ordinary ways of organizing a piece of music, which he considers to be “fetters” and not tools, creative materials, the playing environment.

The quest for freedom… appears at the very beginning of jazz and reappears at every growing point in the music’s history. The earliest jazz musicians asserted their independence of melody, structure, rhythm, and expression from the turn-of-the-century musics that surrounded them; Louis Armstrong symbolized the liberation of the late twenties jazz soloist; the Count Basic band offered liberation of jazz rhythm; and Parker and Gillespie offered yet more new freedoms to jazz.

Talking about Elvin Jones here:

The only advance possible after Jones would be for the drummer to abandon timekeeping altogether— as Sunny Murray would indeed do in the next two years.

Later on he says about Murray, and Elvin:

How does this completely liberated drummer [Murray] play? He interacts with soloists on the complex levels of Elvin Jones, without Jones’s distracted timekeeping.

Now, referring to Elvin Jones’s playing as distracted in any sense is the most fucked up musical observation I’ve ever seen. Let’s be clear. And the idea of “advancing” by abandoning an element of music is also highly strange. We could call it an advance that that Murray’s way of playing would be allowed, and creatively available— for everything presented as music to be given an impartial hearing is a kind of freedom— but to insist on the abandonment of sectors of musical expression as a distraction is weird. It’s a defect of thought that was persistent throughout the 20th century. We saw it in painting and in classical music as well.

Time, or groove, to be clear, is high art. Doing it is high art, there is nothing beyond it that is more art. You can’t be “Elvin Jones, but better” by dispensing with groove. You don’t look at Michelangelo’s David and say “I’m going to do him one better by not doing sculpture.”

That impartial concept of freedom above is really not what this cat believes in. He makes a point of distinguishing between “capital F freedom”— meaning Free Jazz as a genre or style— vs. “small f freedom”, meaning real musical freedom, but then will insist on a style of presentation very much in agreement with a genre concept of music. For example he objects strenuously when Miles Davis exercises his small-f freedom to make musical choices that he disagrees with, on the album Nefertiti:

Clearly Miles Davis doesn’t choose to pursue the freedom he glimpsed in the Plugged Nickel reocordings. But since he cannot relive his earlier styles either, his late sixties music exists in an ongoing state of uncertainty. His solos become fragmented, or he plays exhausted memories (hear “Masqualero” after Sketches of Spain); he chooses repetitious material that avoids emotional commitment (“Nefertiti”, with no improvisation)…

Absorbing that for a moment— Tony Williams, of course, certainly does improvise all over the tune Nefertiti. Very hard to miss that. And there are of course plenty of recordings in the history of jazz where a tune has only one soloist.

And even if Tony didn’t solo… so what? It’s one tune on one record. Is there room to do that in music, ever, without it being interpreted as a coded denunciation of improvisation? Every piece of music is not a manifesto on how music must be made.

He says of Miles’s album In A Silent Way:

[…]adding guitarists to the band helps diminish what remains of emotion. In “Circle in the Round”, the guitar drone and the up and down Davis phrases are lulling; the next logical step is silent, the silence of sleep.

…which the writer feels would not be an acceptable musical statement. The Freedom principle does not, apparently, include the freedom to make the kind of records Miles made— including that famously unexpressive instrument, the guitar— instead of the kind of records the writer wanted him to make. Paraphrasing the author making the opposite point later in the book: Horrors! Miles Davis is not obeying the Freedom Principle!

We get the same attitude when he talks about the Willem Breuker Kollektief. After years of making some of the most challenging avant-garde music imaginable, Breuker decides to release one normal record, which triggers this reponse:

Will Breuker relent, soften his wit and anger, like so many other satirists, and join the culture of fraud and illusion that he so ruthlessly has criticized?

So much for freedom. On that record, incidentally, is a “perfectly straightforward” (it is not) performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, and another piece the writer says “might have come from the soundtrack of a spaghetti western film” (not really), both of which, if true, would unacceptably bad things— false manifestos.

Throughout the book there’s a funny kind of attributing musicians’ motives to historical factors— bebop appeared when “the previous era was exhausted”, emerging from “the national despair of World War II”, that it was a generational “statement of faith— a generation’s faith that its lyric creation redeemed its personal tragedies.”

I mean… no. These were players. Bebop came out of a rather small community of musicians working big band gigs, who had some ideas to work out after hours, about what they wanted to play. They weren’t acting as tools of history.

Usually the history of music and art is recorded as the development of high craft— improvements in training and sophistication, growth of creative ambitions, with a focus on the times and places in which those things happened. In the 20th century that took a funny turn as history also became, seemingly, about the dissolution of high craft— about the progressive dismantling of the thing they spent the last few hundred years forming. That’s the conservative perspective, and an easy narrative, seemingly followed by some artists themselves, racing to the end of history. Which I think they hit with John Cage’s 4’33”, and Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings (he was actually premature with that, in art there was still a good 20 years of dismantling to be done before the narrative fell completely apart). The end result for us today is that we have incredible latitude for what is allowable to be presented as art, with no stupid theory of history demanding we do a certain thing.

What is missed with this historical conception is that a lot of it is simply changes in fashion— the French public’s thirst for paintings of mythological scenes, then of super priviliged elites throwing parties, then of the glory of the revolution, then of Napoleon, and so on. There’s no historical narrative of ascension to higher states of expression there, they’re just changes in subject matter and style of rendering.

Here is the way music develops: times change, commercial needs change, new musicians try to distinguish themselves from the past, education and technical skills get better, and are expressed in the music. New generations of players are raised in a different environment, and hear different stuff. Maybe players get more ambitious about certain aspects of their music. We have periods when artists are better (or worse) funded than in the past, which may allow more freedom, or less, either way. And as the public becomes more sophisticated, and is exposed to more varied and adventurous music, more things become accepted.

Throughout this book there’s also a funny insistence on inferring a literary/historical message or motivation, and ascribing it to the artist, and not the writer’s conceit:

“In place of bop’s escape, [Thelonious Monk] offered heightened reality, a reality that sounds surreal or abstract while it devastates the guides by which others order their musics and lives.”

“[Herbie Nichols’s] art of portraiture is full of fantasy, which is not the refuge for him that is was for his bop peers.”

“As the faint, lingering shadow of chorus structures disappears [in Ornette Coleman’s music], classic narrative form (Lester Young’s ‘solo should tell a story’) becomes irrelevant. That’s because music with a beginning, middle, and end imposes the structure of fiction on the passage of life, says Coleman implicitly.”

“By turns [Coleman] fears or embraces […] ambiguity; but he constantly faces it, and by his example, he condemns those who seek resolution or finality as timid.”

Monk offered, refuge for Nichols, says Coleman implicitly, Coleman condemns. They didn’t say that, man, you said it. Nobody is giving secret orders with their playing.

He gives a lot of colorful descriptions of the alleged emotional content of musicians’ playing— for example, Charlie Parker’s:

[H]is rhythmic tumult is the tumult of complex, fleeting emotions. The brokenness of his phrasing, the swiftness of his passing emotions, from cruelty to tenderness, suggest a consciousness that was itself disrupted by the panic of alternating drug ingestion and withdrawal… his desperation was shared by much of his generation.

It sounds like we’re really getting into the deep meaning of his playing there, but… no. This kind of writing is a distraction. The sound— that stuff going into your ears— is the meaning, and the entire meaning. As soon as you decide you need to put words to it for it to be real, your ears shut down a little bit.

I think William Burroughs said the theory of the avante-garde is that artists know something that everyone will soon know— that the radical will become normal. The goal is for the music to be heard as what it is, not to be heard as something weird or offensive. Jackson Pollock was a very radical artist, but he believed his work should be judged the same way as any other painter before him.

But in the avant garde music scene I have noticed a sort of attitude of permanent revolution, where creating difficulty for the listener seems to be the point. The musician’s job is to test people’s ears and tolerance, to always be offensive, and that is the path forward. Maybe that’s just an Oregon thing. I think it’s more likely to be an attitude of enthusiast audiences, and not of the musicians.

We have some very serious caveats here, but The Freedom Principle is still a worthwhile book, as a listening guide, and overview of a period of music. I’m finally adding it to my actual library now. I think people should bring with them some real hostility to anyone trying to do their listening, and judging, for them, and some skepticism of this type of language interpretation of music.

My opening egomaniacal self-quote isn’t entirely true. I felt that way when I first figured out that arranging was a real art form, and not just there as an impediment to creativity. It gives you some things you can’t get any other way. The point is, you can’t get too attached to these dogmas— or ideas in general— or to your self image as a player.

I think the beginning of my maturity about on this topic was when Ron Graff, my painting professor at the University of Oregon, in my year end review, told me about an abstract expressionist painter who moved into metal point drawing as her primary medium— going from an extremely loose medium to an extremely exacting, fastidious one. Photorealist painter Audrey Flack followed the same trajectory. You follow your instincts and inclinations, you don’t follow somebody’s good sounding story about what history requires you to do.

There is an enjoyable essay from jazzshelf.org (the writer is anonymous) on this book, with many of the same criticisms I had, and the writer sounds even more appalled.

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