Fire Music, new US documentary on the birth of Free Jazz....

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Debuting in New York tomorrow (if you're passing by). It looks good, Labour of love etc. Ornette, Cecil, Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons et al, archive footage. Article in the Guardian yesterday. Not sure about UK showings yet...

Here's the trailer...http://youtu.be/rlYJYeoScs4

[Serial_Apologist]

Debuting in New York tomorrow (if you're passing by). It looks good, Labour of love etc. Ornette, Cecil, Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons et al, archive footage. Article in the Guardian yesterday. Not sure about UK showings yet...

Here's the trailer...http://youtu.be/rlYJYeoScs4

Looks great - hopefully we'll get to see it over here, some day.

[Jazzrook]

Debuting in New York tomorrow (if you're passing by). It looks good, Labour of love etc. Ornette, Cecil, Prince Lasha, Sonny Simmons et al, archive footage. Article in the Guardian yesterday. Not sure about UK showings yet...

Here's the trailer...http://youtu.be/rlYJYeoScs4

Many thanks, BN.
Here's the Guardian article:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/sep/07/fire-music-history-free-jazz-documentary

Hopefully this documentary will be available on DVD soon.

JR

[Jazzrook]

Fascinating review & comments on 'Fire Music' here:

https://artsfuse.org/235064/film-review-fire-music-a-history-of-the-free-jazz-revolution-informative-but-incomplete/

JR

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

Fascinating review & comments on 'Fire Music' here:

https://artsfuse.org/235064/film-review-fire-music-a-history-of-the-free-jazz-revolution-informative-but-incomplete/

JR

Yep, very good. The one US review I've seen is far less complimentary & sympathetic, saying the editing is amateurish, the questions to "veterans" sometimes lacking point and the archive clips mostly already on YouTube. I'd still like to see it thorough.

*No-one mentions Val Wilmer's book, which to me still stands up, although she said she'd revise sections now, particularly about the role & the (male musicians?) treatment of women.

[Serial_Apologist]

Fascinating review & comments on 'Fire Music' here:

https://artsfuse.org/235064/film-review-fire-music-a-history-of-the-free-jazz-revolution-informative-but-incomplete/

JR

Not of course having seen the doc, I dare say I tend to go along with that review. Not sure he's right in inferring free jazz players couldn't play on chord changes, but that might be his take on others': I'm not seeking to start something here! There's certainly a point about free jazz being better received and respected on this side of the Pond, but that had always been the case for jazz, I think. I feel a discussion about the different underpinnings of racism here and in the States, so I'll shut up!

[Ian Thumwood]

I found the article Jazzrook posted a link to really interesting and the comments that have been made below are also quite salutary. I have not seen the film but the article certainly raised some issues that I felt should be raised when this thread first appeared. The whole 1960's "Free jazz" thing that effectively stretched in to the early 1970s is a bit of a mixed bag. The usual suspects are rightly praised but there is a wealth of other material by other artists that has never seen the light of day and is perhaps reflective of the times. There is a lot of material which has been romanticised or players like Guiseppe Logan eulogised where credit is not really due. For me, I think that there has been a tendency to romanticise a lot of this material where , in fact, so much of the freer material that was produce in the mid 1970s onwards has been far superior than a lot of what came before. I think that there were plenty of charlatans around in that period but also players like Shepp and Sanders who are often lauded are a little bit over-rated. I cetainly do not think that they necessarily represent the best of a music which now has it's own tradition stretcching back over 50 years I think that when you take the politics out of the equation, the music does not always stand up. Those musicians working in an "outside" context in the 1960s who were right on the money tended to be classically schooled whether it be Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Horace Tapscott, Roscoe Mitchell, Paul Bley, Muhal Richard Abrams, etc, etc.

What I think is more interesting are those musicians such as Muhal Richard Abrams ( his record with the UMO jazz orchestra has been on my CD player almot continually of late) , Julius Hemphill, Arthur Blythe, Henry Threadgill etc who cemented reputations in the 1970s and strike me as being far for interesting than the likes of Sanders and Shepp. It is interesting to see the names mooted as being part of this incendiary music in this film who I would say are much more part of a lineage which stretches back in to jazz history whilst being informed by 20th century formal composition. Abrams and Hill spring to mind - neither of whom seem anything more than a continuation of the brilliance of jazz that probably started with Don Redman but you might also want to add Dolphy, Rivers, McLean, Hutcherson, etc in to the list. They just took a tradition and had the musical knowledge to run with some amazing ideas. I don't see their music as being radically "alternative" to much of the then jazz mainstream and perhaps it has become part of the fabric of the tradition itself. It is just great jazz that has perhpas tken the audience a while to make sense of.

I agree with SA about Free Jazz being taken up with more enthusaism with European audiences and I think that the Stanko track on JRR on Sunday really helped underscrore that notion. Of course, European improvisors have then taken these ideas on and taken them outside of the realms of jazz. Where I would be very critical is to consider this as being only relevant to the 1960s and all the attendent politics that went with that scene. Such a view really underplays just how significant this music has been and ignores the fact that there is now swathe of recordings where the music is more adventurous, interesting and better played than some of the stuff produced in the 1960s. This is not to discount the importance of musicians such as Ornette, Cecil Taylor, etc but to recognise the fact there has been a wealth of music in this idiom that has been performed since the heyday of the 1960s. You just have to look at the back catelogue of labels like Black Saint. The nonsense idea that these musicians may have lacked technique is swept away by so much of the avant garde jazz which continued through the 1980s and is still being perfomed today at venues like Vision Fest. As I have said before, the most interrsting jazz being perfomed these days is either centred around the avant garde (in it's various guises) or in the quality of composition which has grown exponentially over the last 40 years.

It is quite intriguing to see the names trotted out and to pick out some unlikely names like Prince Lasha. What is curious about this thread is that the bands being banded about by those contributing are generally musicians from the 1960s whereas if you were 100% serious about this music, would you not be lauding musicians like William Parker who have produced a body of work over the last thirty years which is as good if not superior to what is being celebrated within the film. The film seems a bit of a nostalgia trip to be honest and is a culpable in it's way of having as narrow a focus as the Ken Burns series of 20 years ago.

[Serial_Apologist]

The only place I really disagree, Ian, is with your idea of taking the politics out of the music. For sure, there are figures who prefigure proliferation of the kind which took place in the 1960s and 70s, and that prefiguring was an early manifestation of creative limitations inscribed within the chords-based compositional frameworks previously seen as the sole endowment of legitimacy to how an improviser went about conceptualising an instant relationship within it. And the relationship, in turn, between instantaneity and co-determination of outcome had always been questioning of culturally received notions of trusting in the wellsprings of creativity unmediated either by religious mystification or the conformist demands of a music consciously shaped by the music business (including broadcasters) as consumer fodder. The crucial binding factor in the 1960s becomes the possibilities of new forms of musical and other expression and transmission that were latent in jazz practice as consisting in the transcendence of its own boundaries and those circumscribed by marketisation and its underpinning political status quo - twin factors it would be mistaken to think of as being separable.

To offer examples where arts have prefigured social and political change, or the promise thereof, one can cite many lived examples: the explosion of avant-garde thinking in the arts and what would become thought of as alternative lifestylism fifty years down the line, that took place before, during, and after the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the defeat of that revolutionary spirit with the rise of Stalinism in the early 1930s, following years of failed pragmatic ground-holding - the lessons of which have not really been talked through enough, but that's another matter - that led to the re-introduction of outworn practices designed to re-instate traditional values and 19th century nationalist aesthetics, in what ironically became known as Social Realism. Similarly a process of cultural and stylistic interweaving that had informed fringe developments in jazz and improvised music more generally in the 1970s and early 1980s, warts and all, and incidentally at a time when mainstream broadcasting organs such as the BBC were more accented towards that part of the Reithian equation that benefitted an informed knowledgeable public than today, was cut short with the coming of Thatcher and market liberalisation. For that to happen the forces of progressive change had to be defeated and thereafter remain sidelined. While welcoming the initiative of the likes of Wynton Marsalis and Gary Crosby in re-instating principles of jazz as part of a broader emancipatory initiative it is no accident that the terms through which these principles would be progressed would be deeply retrospective. Jazz had to be re-born respectable in image, style and presentation. Politics was and remains deeply implicated in all of this: one has to take sides if one is to side with free jazz today, and see free jazz as one among many options rather than central to the music's ethos and a context vastly different from in its heydays.

[BLUESNIK'S REVOX]

From the Organissimo site in the US today (Clifford Thornton)...
"Fire Music is quite good but it is short at 88 minutes in length. There is a lot to cram into that space, as you might imagine. The film basically stops in the early 1970s -- there's a little bit on the Europeans, but it's quite superficial. I know Tom knows that music so it was certainly a time constraint issue.... " There's more in the review but that's the basic (post) Ornette/Trane setup.