Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. Avant-jazz often sounds very similar to free jazz, but differs in that, despite its distinct departure from traditional harmony, it has a predetermined structure over which improvisation may take place. This structure may be composed note for note in advance, partially or even completely. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
1950s
The origins of avant-garde jazz are in the innovations of the immediate stylistic successors of Charlie Parker. Based in New York City, musicians such as Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane introduced modal improvisation and experimented with atonality and dissonance. Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman became controversial jazz innovators, outside the range of what many fans considered listenable. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
1960s
John Coltrane's increasingly experimental work, and the Impulse!
label became the flagbearers of the avant-garde jazz scene. Musicians
associated with this high-volume variety of avant-garde jazz (sometimes
referred to as "fire music") included Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, McCoy Tyner, Don Cherry, Pharaoh Sanders, and Alice Coltrane.
Some of these musicians also began to take on an oppositional
relationship to the mainstream music industry, preferring to release
records themselves through independent labels such as ESP-Disk. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
The 1970s saw the development of jazz fusion. It is questionable whether this can be considered a form of avant-garde jazz, though Miles Davis's recordings of this period, in particular, appear quite innovative and take inspiration from serialism and aleatoric music, just as the AACM did. In any case, hardcore jazz fans
tended to regard early jazz fusion as a commercial sell-out move.
However, by the early-to-mid-1970s, many free jazz icons, such as Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and Ornette Coleman were experimenting with rock and funk. Coleman would eventually develop the free funk style, which would be further explored by the M-Base musicians in the 1980s. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
Jazz also became considerably more international in the 1970s, as saxophonists Gato Barbieri (Argentine), Kaoru Abe (Japanese), Peter Brötzmann (German), and pianists Sergey Kuryokhin (Russian), Egberto Gismonti and Hermeto Pascoal (Brazil) attest. European free jazz, in particular, began to develop. Evan Parker and Derek Bailey were pioneers of the new non-idiomatic style. Some veteran avant-garde jazz musicians (Charlie Haden), and much of the new blood, including a number who had played with Miles Davis in the 1970s (Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea) and several Europeans (Jan Garbarek, among them), began to record for the ECM label. The ECM sound, invariably recorded by Manfred Eicher, tended towards an elegant, refined, polished style that owed a great deal to the history of classical music. ECM also released recordings of minimalist and medieval music, and work by the Art Ensemble of Chicago
(who were considerably messier than the ECM stereotype would indicate).
A number of the AACM and ECM musicians would collaborate with one
another, for example in the group Circle. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
John Zorn, in particular, became an iconic figure in the "downtown" music scene, performing in free jazz, free improvisation, and a variety of rock and extreme music styles. Many of these musicians actually resided in Brooklyn; Tim Berne is a prominent representative. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
Likewise, there was an increase in vitality in the remnants of the loft jazz scene in New York, centered around David S. Ware. Matthew Shipp, Susie Ibarra, and William Parker
practiced a more traditional variety of avant-garde jazz than the punk
jazz-inflected downtown musicians, though some collaboration did occur
between the two camps. Matthew Shipp eventually collaborated with illbient and alternative hip hop musicians (DJ Spooky, Anti-Pop Consortium, El-P), and moved towards a distinctive brand of nu jazz comparable to that of Craig Taborn. - Text from: Wikipedia-Avante-Garde Jazz
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