That Jazz - Monkey Max Music and File Download

In This Chapter
Chapter 8
A Radical Departure:
The 1960s and 1970s
� Experimenting with the avant garde
� Feeling liberated with free jazz
� Recognizing how jazz reflected the sixties
� Focusing on electric fusions
When the black-and-white ’50s faded into the Technicolor ’60s, jazz
exploded in radical directions that indicated the social and political
changes ahead. But the past wasn’t entirely abandoned. As new music developed,
older forms of jazz came along. Giants from jazz’s Golden Age of the
’30s still made vital music (see Chapter 6 for details on this era), and hard
bop players from the ’50s played bluesy, hard-driving jazz for three more
decades (Chapter 7 has the scoop on bebop). But as in earlier eras, a new
generation once again arrived to lead jazz in new directions. Those paths
ranged from free improvisation to mergers of jazz with classical and world
music and the adoption of electric instruments and synthesizers.
The Future Is Now: Avant Garde Jazz
Avant garde jazz is experimental and often includes significant improvisation,
but it also usually has structure. It may sometimes sound chaotic, but it’s
often elaborately composed in advance.
In the following sections, I discuss two avant garde movements — the Lydian
Concept and Third Stream — that originated in the ’40s and ’50s and how
they continued to influence jazz musicians through the ’60s and ’70s.