In the summer of 1960, jazz composer and alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Charlie Haden, and drummer Ed Blackwell recorded This Is Our Music for Atlantic records. The album captured an original musical vision that had polarized performers, critics, and fans since the quartet’s New York City debut the previous year. Coleman reordered structural principles to afford the members of his group maximum melodic and rhythmic freedom. By allowing each musician to play inside or outside conventional chord, bar, pitch, and tempo guidelines, he pursued an expressive and collective approach to improvisation. On the session’s one standard...

“Jazz Makes It Up the River,” declared a New York Times Magazine headline of August 24, 1958. “The long voyage from New Orleans barrel-house to public respectability ends in a triumph.” Gilbert Millstein, author of the accompanying article, was not alone in recognizing a dramatic improvement in the music’s fortunes during the middle and late 1950s. “Jazz Achieves Social Prestige,” marveled Leonard Feather in a Down Beat article of 1955. The same year, Life magazine’s photo-spread acknowledged a “New Life for U.S. Jazz,” and a few years later Esquire celebrated “The Golden Age of Jazz” with a twenty-page feature and...

The idea that new venues could help elevate both jazz music’s status and its profitability suffered a setback at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival. Forcibly barred from the packed concert site at Freebody Park, thousands of drunken youths rioted in downtown Newport on Saturday night, launching beer cans, stones, and bottles at police, overturning cars, and smashing windows. Only the arrival of Marines, National Guardsmen, state troopers, and copious amounts of tear gas enabled authorities to disperse the troublemakers, arresting over 200 revelers for disorderly conduct in the process. Reacting angrily to the city’s subsequent cancellation of the remaining program,...

Amiri Baraka heard the news at the Eighth Street Bookstore in New York City during a book launch party. An increasingly acclaimed and notorious writer, Baraka—known then as LeRoi Jones—had made his name as a poet and playwright in the interracial Greenwich Village bohemian scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1965 his close acquaintances had narrowed somewhat to the more radical black men formerly associated with the literary groups Umbra and the Revolutionary Action Movement, the second wave of free improvisers, and the new African American painters. Although he had lately developed a reputation in...

The Cellar Café, a basement coffee house with a capacity of about 90 on New York’s West 91st Street, seems an unlikely venue for a jazz festival. Yet for four days beginning on the afternoon of October 1, 1964, it hosted more than twenty groups and soloists playing varieties of free improvisation to overflow crowds. Many listeners stayed around for late night panel discussions on the state of the industry featuring experimental musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, and Steve Lacy. Billing the event as “The October Revolution in Jazz,” producer Bill Dixon set out to demonstrate that “the...

On January 18, 1969, Howard Klein, Assistant Director of Arts Programs at the Rockefeller Foundation, arrived in the small college town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, for a jazz ensemble performance. He must have wondered how an unorthodox bandleader who barely made a living in New York City, America’s cultural capital, would be received in the heartland. He had met pianist Cecil Taylor at the Foundation’s New York offices a few months earlier and had come away from their meeting convinced that the commercial nightclub environment irreparably harmed jazz music’s artistic integrity. For some time the Rockefeller Arts Program had sought...

A cursory examination of reader letters published in Down Beat during the mid-1960s reveals the disruption and division caused by free improvisation among fans, musicians, businessmen, educators, and critics. While one writer praised the “originality and creativity” of John Coltrane’s “abstract” style, another described a recent “outside” performance as “a great mass of cold, crude sounds lacking in every aspect of harmonic and rhythmic unity.”¹ By experimenting with the boundaries of orthodox chords, bars, pitches, and tempos, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, and their followers displaced aesthetic and ideological reference points. Their collective and expressive approach to the production...