The History of Jazz

by Ted Gioia

It is impossible to comprehend the free jazz movement of these same years without understanding how it fed upon this powerful cultural shift in American society. Its practitioners advocated much more than freedom from harmonic structures or compositional forms—although that too was an essential part of their vision of jazz. Many of them saw their music as inherently political. They believed that they could, indeed must, choose between participating in the existing structures—in society, in the entertainment industry, in the jazz world—or rebelling against them. The aesthetic could no longer be isolated from these cultural currents. In the overheated Marxist rhetoric that increasingly found its way into mainstream political debate during those days, even a “pure” art such as music was ultimately part of a superstructure of social institutions and events that was delineated and determined by economic realities and, ultimately, class values. “Pure” music? One was advised that such abstractions were, at best, an idle delusion, at worst a conscious deception.