Free Jazz and Atonality Explained

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This Jazz Piano Tutorial is about Free Jazz and Atonality.

Free Jazz, as the name implies, is all about freedom.

The goal of free jazz is to allow greater freedom of expression through completely free improvisation. Each artist, naturally, expresses him or herself differently, and this is precisely why Free Jazz is a notoriously difficult genre to define. It’s not about any one particular characteristic or technique. Instead you can only define free jazz in the negative: Free Jazz is the systematic rejection of musical norms and established rules in favour of personal expression.

The whole trend of modern jazz is towards greater freedom in improvisation. The way this was done was by reducing the importance of chords. This is because chords restrict your improvisation by forcing you to work within a given harmonic framework or chord progression. By reducing the importance of chords, you free up your ability to improvise.

Free Jazz songs often try capture an emotion (Expressionism) or a scene (Impressionism), which is generally stated in the title of the song – such as ‘Peace’ or ‘Lonely Woman’. And songs sound different depending on what mood or emotion or picture you’re trying to paint – Free Jazz improvisation over a song called ‘Sadness’ should sound different to Free Jazz improvisation over a song called ‘Energetic Puppies!’

The ultimate goal of free jazz is ‘freedom of expression through free improvisation’ – this was achieved by breaking musical ‘rules’. Interestingly, Free Jazz is not completely free – Free Jazz musicians still employed tonal centres, or thematic development in order to impose some structure onto their song and improvisation. So perhaps complete freedom is undesirable.

Free Jazz is not easy to listen to, and it’s not supposed to be. You have to know what to listen to. Free Jazz is like conceptual art – the idea behind it is just as important as the music itself. It’s not like a Mozart song, which innately sounds pleasant. You have to really understand what you’re listening to in order to appreciate it. And sometimes it’ll sound like a cat walking across a piano. But other times it will sound very powerful and emotive.

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