A Punter's Guide to Honk and Squeak Music (aka Free Jazz)

                                                                                

 By Don Curren 

A note on this entry: it began life as a casual offering to a cousin of mine, another music lover, who told he hadn't heard a lot of free jazz and was interested in hearing more.

I initially meant to write him a DM on Bluesky with a few suggestions for good starting points. But, as writing projects often do, it took on a life of its own and eventually became a fairly lengthy email.

I don't purport to be an expert on free jazz. 

I am obsessive about music and interested in almost all kinds. To characterize my breadth of taste I usually tell people I like all music except Abba and heavy metal. 

And I've always been curious about musical forms that buck convention such as free jazz.

So I've collected and listened to quite a bit of it over the years, and seen some of its greats in live performance.

I once travelled to Lewiston, New York, to see Cecil Taylor perform at Artpark there.

I saw Derek Bailey play his fractured, oblique, totally improvised style of guitar at the Music Gallery in Toronto.

I witnessed Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, Dewey Redman and Ed Blackwell perform as Old and New Dreams at a club in the same city.

And I saw the Alexander von Schlippenbach Trio play to a tiny audience (with at least one highly disgruntled member) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

I was also once known to haunt the used record shops of Medicine Hat, Alberta, looking for recordings by Anthony Braxton and other proponents of what the proprietor of one of them called "honk and squeak" music. That phrase, which I believe was intended as descriptive rather than pejorative, is where the title for this piece partly came from. 

But this is not intended to be a systematic, well-researched list. It's not even a comprehensive account of my own favourites in the genre.

It's really just a note tossed off from one music fan to another who expressed an interest in taking a "punt" on the genre, as the English might say. One tilted toward relatively accessible entry points for a genre of music that, for many, is deeply inaccessible.

So here, finally, it is:

Free jazz is a young man’s music - both for the listeners as well as the artists -  and I don’t listen to it nearly as much as I used to.

I don’t have the same ability to listen for extended periods of time to five or six musicians bashing away with maximal intensity and minimal structure as I did when I was 22 or thereabouts. I’ve grown to believe the most interesting music combines elements of structure as well as freedom.

On the other hand, a lot of it’s still worth listening to.

The great original text of the movement, Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman is still pretty listenable, with a regular beat and some great playing, although it does meander at times over its considerable (35 minutes or so) length.

The early Ornette Coleman quartet albums, made before that singular musical manifesto, are great listening.  More conventional tunes, but still very radical and creative - free jazz in embryo. My favourite is Change of the Century.

But probably my all-time favourite Ornette album is Science Fiction, from 1971 or so, which consists of shorter tracks, some of them with very punchy riffs bordering on rock and R and B. 

His later electric albums in the “harmolodic” style are somewhat hit and miss, but Virgin Beauty, which features Jerry Garcia on some tracks, is quite good.

Ornette’s trumpet player Don Cherry recorded a number of good albums, first in a style much like Ornette’s, but then branched out into being influenced by music from Indonesia, India, etc.

I love his 1969 album Eternal Rhythm, which has a lot of that influence. 

John Coltrane, of course, did some albums that were essentially free jazz. I used to listen to a couple of them, Meditations and Interstellar Space, in my twenties, but haven’t engaged with them seriously in years.

Ascension, another ambitious free jazz work by Coltrane, is a really challenging listen.

His sideman Pharaoh Sanders did some great albums in the Sixties and early Seventies that also engaged with African and Latin music and spiritual influences, Karma, Thembi, Tauhid and Black Unity being all quite enjoyable.

Continuing the sideman theme, the guitarist Sonny Sharrock, who played on some Sanders and Cherry albums, is probably the most important guitarist in the genre and probably the free jazz musician I listen to the most these days.

He died young, in his 50s, and didn’t record enough. His late album with Pharaoh Sanders, Ask the Ages, is superb, and his album Guitar is a very good listen. 

Sharrock can range from string-shredding sonic chaos to sublime melodicism. Sometimes in the same song. 

He also participated in the “supergroup” Last Exit, which is usually described as a cross between free jazz and metal, and is surprisingly enjoyable. 

It also included Peter Brotzman, a wild man sax player from Germany. (European and UK free jazz is generally even more extreme and difficult to listen to than the American version)

My favourite Last Exit album is probably Iron Path.

Hope this helps.

And Bon Voyage.