There is a version of jazz that exists primarily as a museum exhibit — the repertoire maintained, the standards observed, the solos measured against the recordings they derive from. It is skillful, sometimes beautiful, and almost entirely backwards-facing. It produces musicians who can play anything Parker played, at tempo, in any key, and who have nothing particular to say.
Then there is what is happening in a handful of clubs and lofts and DIY spaces in Chicago, London, Tokyo, and Lagos, where a generation of players seems to have collectively decided that the tradition is more useful as a toolkit than as a canon.
What the new music sounds like
The shorthand — “avant-garde,” “free jazz,” “contemporary improvisation” — does not quite cover it, because the music being made is not against anything. It absorbs electronics, hip-hop rhythmic structures, West African polyrhythm, and European art music without treating any of them as primary. The harmonic language ranges from blues-derived to microtonal to atonal within a single set.
What holds it together is not a style but an attitude toward improvisation: the belief that the best music happens in the moment of its making, that composition is a constraint to be negotiated rather than a blueprint to be executed, and that the audience’s discomfort is a sign of engagement rather than failure.
Why it matters
Jazz has always renewed itself by absorbing what surrounded it. The music that became bebop was, to its first audiences, unlistenable — too fast, too chromatic, too indifferent to entertainment. The music that became free jazz was, to bebop’s champions, a repudiation of everything that had made the music great.
The players who made both of those turns were not trying to destroy jazz. They were trying to find out what it could do that it had not done yet. The current generation appears to be doing the same thing, with a wider range of materials and, perhaps, a clearer understanding of what the tradition actually requires of them — which is not preservation, but use.
