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Dubbed a 'fusion pioneer', Asha Puthli straddled multiple cultural mediums and created an alternative niche for herself as a global performer. By charting her trajectory as a musician, the genres that influenced her, the rise and proliferation of her music in relation to the cultural landscape of India during that period, this paper, which is structured around an interview with her, tries to understand what made her different from her contemporaries. How did her Indian roots supplement her in navigating the global music arena? Did she, as a female performer singing Western music challenge entrenched notions of femininity in India? By situating her as a performer who blurred boundaries and opened avenues of alternative resistance to set cultural patrimonies, her global presence and its impact on the Indian music scene are discussed, contextualising her work in the cultural ecosystem of India as it embraced modernity, inscribing Puthli as a hidden pop icon of the 70s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ways of recreating musical sonority in the text are studied within the theory of literary intermediality. The subject of research is the structural performability of text which helps to stage the performance of musical pieces within it. Specifi c textual strategies are discussed, which promote the perception of music in a literary text through the features of a sounding but not musical text, i.e. semantization of a musical piece. In this connection, the notion of performative writing is outlined, which can represent its mediality by showing what it talks about and, by doing so, its going beyond propositional senses. The study relies on the ideas of German mediality expert Sybille Krämer and literary mediality theorist Uwe Wirth. A short story by contemporary German writer Friedrich Christian Delius “The Future of Beauty” (2018) is analyzed. The ways in which the writer creates a free jazz concert with optimal musical sonority are studied. The famous 1966 concert of jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler is presented as an immediate musical event, with the actualization of sensory perception and interpretation of the sounding in a social and historical context. The performative dimension of the text, which highlights musical sonority, is achieved on the border of sound realization through the use of musical instruments, bodiliness of musicians, gestures, development of musical theme and assigning meaning to specifi c sound images, metaphorization of the sound, and creating images in one’s perception. The writer works within the modes of intertextuality and intermediality. He singles out solos, emphasizes the importance of communication between musical instruments and perceives the dynamics of a concert as a single event. Musical sounding is determined by the social and historical time; it is designed for an emotionally active and thoughtful recipient; its echo is vibrant for a long time and causes understanding of some regularities of human development. The study of musical sonority in literary texts highlights the process of sense creation and points to the productivity of borderline creative phenomena that a text-concert undoubtedly belongs to.

To keep up with the contemporary avant-garde and experimental movements, we take a look at Downtown New York's avant-garde music scene and trace the iconic, highly prolific and provocative activity of composer, performer, publisher John Zorn. Ever since the 60s, jazz-fusion musicians have experimented with the explosive mixture of musical styles and have detonated musical themes, proportions and harmony in music, in order to release instead improvisation, unpredictability, discontinuity, a-tonality, etc., to confront us with what escapes us and surprises us in music. In this context, we focus on the artist John Zorn, given that he challenged all musical conventions and showed us that all boundaries are permeable, dissolvable and can merge. We trace in various positions, comments, interviews, the arguments of musicologists like Marcel Cobussen, journalists like Hank Shteamer, or of musicians collaborating with John Zorn, in order to understand how this avant-garde community coalesced around him, what the remarkable initiatives are that propelled John Zorn onto the artistic scene and what the impact of his complex activity is, the creation of new practices and new musical universes, absolutely surprising.

Analyses of Cecil Taylor's music are understandably scarce. Very few of his scores exist, and transcriptions are even harder to come by. The music itself is often blindingly fast, unremittingly dissonant, and rhythmically elusive, further discouraging attempts at comprehension. This article aims to fill this analytical void, demonstrating that Taylor's music is not nearly as intimidating as it at first would seem. Using my own transcriptions of Taylor's music as a guide, I argue that Taylor's music is best understood not as abstract relationships between pitches ("sound structures"), but rather as the formal organization of physical movements ("naked fire gestures"). Such a hypothesis comports with Taylor's own explanation of his music--"I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes"--and thus demands that questions of physiology and physicality be considered under the umbrella of music theory. Furthermore, this movement-first analytical approach complicates traditional understandings of the autonomous musical "work": while Taylor's music could be understood as distinct, individual performances, it is also worthwhile to consider his overarching musical practice as an analytical object in and of itself. Finally, I trace the sounds and gestures of Taylor's music back to their roots in blues and jazz, reinforcing Taylor's own understanding of his music as a continuation of Black music traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This concept poem ekphrastically manifests Ornette Coleman's landmark album Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. Separated into two columns, the piece features the work of two quartets of poets, reflecting Coleman's own separation of his double quartet ensemble into left and right recording channels. The poets Bob Kaufman, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are the quartet in the left column; Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, M. NourbeSe Philip and Boris Vian are the quartet in the right. The work of these poets has been scrambled and interwoven in the first and third-fromlast stanzas, mimicking the two polymelodic interludes found in Coleman's album. The remaining stanzas either combine lines from a quartet of poets or are entirely from the work of a single poet, who 'solos' against the quartet in the adjacent column (again, mimicking the general structure of Coleman's album). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz was at the center of controversy in early 1960s music journalism. Released in 1961, the album contains a single thirty-seven-minute performance that is abstract and opaque. Its presumed cacophony and lack of order made Free Jazz emblematic of the "new thing," the moniker journalists used to describe jazz's emergent avant-garde, and links were drawn between the album's sound and the supposed anti-traditionalism and radical (racial) politics of its artists and their supporters. This article does three things. It examines prominent reportage surrounding the album and the "new thing," outlining the analytical shortfalls that helped to promulgate common misunderstandings about the music. It presents a new analytical framework for understanding Free Jazz, and it explains how the performance was organized and executed by exploring the textural provenance of its abstraction: heterophony. Heterophony, a term commonly used in ethnomusicology but with various shades of meaning, is theorized here as an opaque, decentralized musical texture. It opens up new epistemological terrain in the context of experimental improvised music by affording multiple simultaneous subjectivities (i.e., different sonified identities), interpolating the listener into a dynamic and constantly shifting sonic mesh. The experiment that was Free Jazz, I argue, is one of collective musical agency, in which the opacity of that sonic mesh--woven by the musicians in coordinated action--subverts traditional expectations of clarity, cohesion, and order, beckoning the listener to hear more openly, or more "freely." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Andrzej Trzaskowski (1933-1998) was an outstanding pianist and composer, one of the most important figures of the first post-war generation of Polish jazz artists. He was a member of the cult band Melomani, led by a saxophonist Jerzy “Duduś” Matuszkiewicz. In 1958 he joined the group Jazz Believers, and a year later he founded the famous The Wreckers, with which he successfully performed at the 1960 Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw. In 1962, at the invitation of the US State Department, the group went to the USA, where it performed, among others, at the festivals in Newport and Washington. The second half of the 1960s marked the period of Trzaskowski’s cooperation with the Norddeutscher Rundfunk radio and television station in Hamburg. In the 1970s, the musician created and led the Orchestra of Polish Radio and Television Studio S-1. He was a composer of 50 instrumental and orchestral pieces. He wrote music for 70 films, recorded 30 albums, and as a music critic he collaborated with the monthly magazine “Ruch Muzyczny” and the “Jazz Forum” magazine. He was an artist of great knowledge, intelligence and courage. Consistently faithful to his own concept of free jazz, he was a firm supporter of progress in art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the article is to reveal the specifics of the formation of free jazz, emphasizing its essential features and outlining the ways of interaction with other areas of musical art, which are manifestations of freedom of the direction. The scientific methodology involves the use of a comparative method to illuminate the features of the appearance of free jazz stylistics in the works of various musicians. The use of analytical and systematic approaches is appropriate for the selection of the essential features of the direction and their generalization. Scientific novelty. The features of free jazz as a direction corresponding to the aesthetics of postmodernism are revealed. His ability to interact with academic and ethnic music is underlined. From these areas, free-jazz borrows nonconventional ways of sound production, techniques of the game, tools, and principles of composition arrangement. Conclusions. Free jazz is one of the promising trends in contemporary musical art. His essential features are the desire for freedom - in a modal, rhythmic, structural relation. An extremely large influence on the formation of free jazz improvisations was academic music. It is the interaction with the avant-garde musical culture that introduces jazz in the rejection of tonality as such that it can be replaced by polytonality, atonality, or even elements of serialism. An important feature of free jazz is the desire to reveal the freedom of the artist, which can be manifested in the total improvisation of works, borrowing elements of ethnic music, actionist, and performance. Often, free-jazz is perceived as a piece of protest music that is acutely social in nature and directed against the policies of individual leaders or parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When individuals coordinate their behaviour, they need to both anticipate actions and respond to each other in meaningful ways. Jazz musicians often encounter situations in jam sessions in which they interact with previously unknown musicians, allowing insights into spontaneous collaboration. The current study investigated call and response patterns in free jazz improvisations by analysing movement and musical characteristics of duos. Twelve jazz musicians were paired into six duos of an e-guitar and a saxophone. Balanced across duos, one musician was asked to play a series of improvisations expressing the emotions happy, sad or neutral. The second musician responded to each improvisation without knowing the emotional intention of the first musician. Call and response roles were then exchanged. While musicians improvised or listened to their duo partner, they were both recorded with an optical motion capture system. Results indicate correspondences between call and response musicians in movement variability and cumulative distance of head motion. There were marked differences between happy and sad emotional expressions both in movement parameters and musical features including mean intensity, mode, and, albeit to a lesser extent, tempo. Retrospective verbal decoding of the call musicians' emotional intentions was correct in 76.5% of all cases. Independently of explicit decoding success and even for the first encounters, musicians spontaneously tuned into each other's performances by means of their body movements and the musical characteristics of the improvisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The kind of collective improvisation attained by free jazz at the beginning of the sixties appears interesting from the perspective of contemporary debates on collective intentionality for several reasons. The most notable of these, is that it holds a mirror up to what analytical philosophers of action identify as "the complexly interwoven sets of collective intentions" that make a group more than the sum of its parts. But at the same time, free jazz poses a challenge to these philosophical theories of collective intentionality, because what happens is not planned in advance but arises from spontaneous interactions in the group. The second and no less decisive reason is that jazz musicians act together in a very distinctive way, which casts into clear relief the interplay between togetherness and agonism, individual freedom and group commitment, which is contained in every human interaction. In other words, in free jazz we find what Hannah Arendt calls the "paradoxical" or "twofold" character of "human plurality." Starting with the analysis of two paradigmatic case studies—Charles Mingus's Folk Forms No. 1 and Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation—my main concern in this paper is to provide a phenomenological account of the individual-yet-plural intentionality that emerges and runs through the improvisatory process in the free jazz case. After having made the negative point that this phenomenon represents a challenge to the analytical theories of collective intentionality, I shall argue that it can be accounted for from a phenomenological perspective. My basic thesis is that the overall cohesiveness of the improvisatory process must be regarded as a meaningful realization of an overall feeling, shared and shaped together by musicians over time—and not as the execution of an advanced plan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Este artículo trata de una investigación preliminar que propone un viaje por el racismo y el arte en el marco histórico del free jazz neoyorquino de los años setenta, cuyo análisis nos acercará al entendimiento de sus características definitorias y sus propósitos activistas, a través de las cubiertas de discos. Tras una breve introducción histórica, donde se trata el tema del racismo y la música jazz, la autora centra su objeto de estudio en una selección de cubiertas de discos y artistas plásticos, a través de los cuales comienza un análisis de la gráfica e iconografía que fue definiendo la industria musical del momento. Música y plástica como premisas para un acercamiento a la problemática racial que afectó a creativos cuya obra iría evolucionando en un marco sociocultural de segregación y manifestación por el cambio; experimentando y liberando sus procesos artísticos a favor del compromiso social.

The article deals with a movie project based on a Piglia’s original idea. He himself was participating in it, together with musicians, movie directors and friends, after his definitive comeback to Buenos Aires. The movie was finally uncompleted. Two topics characterize the project: Argentine jazz history of the sixties and the intersections between free-jazz, literature and improvisation. It was planned to recall memories of mythic Argentinian jazzmen and tango performers as well as the Buenos Aires musical memory of Piglia. The article comments the different work stages, includes fragments of the scenario and suggests the reader to hear some recordings of musical themes.

Somatic, musical and augural contexts of rhetoric Rhetoric is considering from the way of performance (gr. hipokrizis, lat. actio), called by the Cicero “the body language”. There will be a point of departure in all kinds of somatic obstacles that limit the orator, and also the voices of the background that make oration harder. Among the natural voices there is a specific case of animal sounds, in particular birds’ melodies which were intensively listened by ancient augurs and poets. There is also returning question of birds singing and human voice, especially in the age of ecology and the new media, and in context of cinema music and literature. From the perspective of the zoophilology a very special case is the voice of marsh warbler that can be associated with jazz improvisation and the sampling. In the conclusion author reveals the rhetoric community between different discourses that were inspired by the art of improvisation – the free jazz (Coleman), deconstruction (Derrida) and birds language (marsh warbler).

When musicians improvise freely together—not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or “referent”—to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other's work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen's kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers' thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.

Jeanette Leech is a writer, researcher, DJ and music historian who contributes regularly to magazines including fRoots and Shindig!. She also writes extensively in the health and social care fields. Her first book about music, Seasons they Change (2010), a history of acid folk, was widely praised as 'an engaging celebration of music from the fringes'. Her new book, Fearless (2017), is subtitled 'the making of post-rock'. She lives in Canterbury, England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to shed light on the cultural context of the contemporary practices in music production. The essay focuses on the use of the archival recordings (both: African-American free jazz heritage, and Polish Radio Experimental Studio tapes) in the process of the reinterpretation of basic cultural categories: „identity" (to rebuild „African-American identity" - Présence Americaine) and „modernity" (to reclaim „Polish modernity"). The field of my research are „Polish Radio Experimental Studio" albums produced by Polish label Bôłt Records, and series of free jazz albums produced by labels such as ESP-Disk, Nessa, NoBusiness Records and Transparency. The question is: are these practices a part of the interpretive research and/or a critical theory of the contemporary culture? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the career of Gato Barbieri, a jazz saxophonist from Argentina who relocated to the United States in the 1960s. In this new setting, audiences and critics saw Barbieri as “Latin,” an ethnic category and a musical descriptor that meant nothing to him before he left home. By negotiating the distance between his own sense of self and the perceptions of North American jazz musicians and critics, Barbieri developed a distinctive musical persona. Engaging with the highly politicized free jazz movement and with novel forms of protest jazz, Barbieri articulated Latin-ness as an irreducible difference and an implicit critique of white, North American power and privilege. Since he had no interest or expertise in Latin American music until after he left Argentina, it makes little sense to see him as the bearer of a Latin musical tradition. On the contrary, his musical innovations were the result of the agency he was able to exercise within global structures in which Latin America was associated with exotic, earthy rhythms and with values such as passion and sensuality. At the same time, these associations also limited the ideological challenge posed by his music: Barbieri eventually embraced conventional musical signifiers and thereby reinforced North American stereotypes about Latin identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FOUNDED IN 1967, FREE JAZZ stands in the cultural landscape of Quebec by its quest for a revolutionary praxis which aims to promote cultural democracy among workers. During its eight years of existence, this group of improvisers weaves significant links with the Montreal Council of the Confederation of National Trade Unions, the Quebec Liberation Front and the Women's Liberation Front. Members of this group appropriated Free Jazz - a music attached to black nationalism - in order to insert their project of a socialist and independent Quebec in a historical process marked by decolonization. This appropriation expressed a desire to achieve a rapprochement between the colonized individual Quebecker - Pierre Vallières, whom one calls "white negro in America" - and his African-American counterpart. It was based on the belief that musical improvisation is a vehicle for communication, organization and participation. This study questions the political and cultural discourse on which the "music-action" of Free Jazz was based. It offers a broader analysis of the place of Free jazz in resistance movements while highlighting the cultural aspect of political activism in Quebec during the 1960s and 1070s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on an experimental study that brought two free jazz instigators, the drummer Todd Capp and multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, to musically meet Mikey Holmes, a young noise artist in New York in May 2014. Throughout an analysis of the improvisation process of these three musicians, our study addresses both the social and artistic continuity between different improvisation genres and generations. The two improvisation meetings have been filmed and recorded to allow musicians’ self-evaluation. We include two videos in the article to share the musical result of these meetings with the readers. We use musicians’ quotes to shed light on issues ranging from performance and recording time, the use of contextual sounds, transmusicality, free improvisation and the links between music and politics in New York between the late fifties’ jazz giants and today’s improvised music. Thanks to the issues tackled, we show how the subversiveness of a particular music and its resistance to time are related, and we suggest there is a link between the sustainability of musical recordings and their conditions of studio production. Our interdisciplinary approach allows us to confront the art of sampling with improvised performance and to question the social and political aspects included in an improvisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]