WorksheetsBlack Music Matters 15: Free Jazz
Total questions: 10
Worksheet time: 11mins
What do we mean by "free jazz"?
no need to buy tickets, concerts are free to the public
musicians are free to play whatever occurs to them in the moment, irregardless of what anyone else might be playing
musicians are free to play whatever occurs to them in the moment, but what they play is still based on what is happening in the overall group improvisation
the music is free of harmful chemicals
some jazz musicians most associated with free jazz are:
Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey
Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald
Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry and Cecil Taylor
Muddy Waters, Skip James and Robert Johnson
the musician playing the solo on this track is
John Coltrane
Don Cherry
Eric Dolphy
Freddie Hubbard
The name of this tune is
Lonely Woman
Out to Lunch
Odwalla
Ascension
The following are true facts about Ornette Coleman:
he played on a plastic alto sax
he was one of only two jazz musicians to be awarded a pulitzer prize during their lifetime (not posthumously)
he was thrown out of his high school band for improvising during a march
he was a controversial figure in jazz who was both loved and hated
he was never given a recording contract because his music was so unpopular
Free Jazz started in the early 1960s and picked up steam later in that decade and going into the 1970s and beyond. How does its development mirror cultural trends in the US?
The Art Ensemble of Chicago were known for...
elaborate costumes and face paint
everyone played percussion and the bandstand sometimes had up to 500 different instruments
their beautiful, haunting, "inside" theme song, "Odwalla"
not limiting the instruments they played to just western instruments, but including instruments from different world cultures
Drummer Milford Graves he rejected metronomic (perfectly steady and equal) time because the human heartbeat is not exactly steady and equal -- he believed that time needs to respond to what happens in the moment
true
false
Free Jazz musicians really put themselves out there, and risked being unpopular as they searched for new ways to express themselves through music. What, if any, ways have you risked being unpopular in order to be more true to yourself?
One of the earliest, famous jazz musicians to try out playing "free" (and whose experiments in this style made others think "hey maybe this is OK and I can try it too...) was
Clifford Brown
Bud Powell
Dizzy Gillespie
John Coltrane
