In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more.
The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”
Moore became a longstanding booster of this music. Sonic Youth played live with fabled avant-garde jazz ensemble the New York Art Quartet, while Moore released free jazz albums on his own Ecstatic Peace! label. His latest project is the book Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80, co-written with Coley and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson.
An attempt to counter what he calls “dry and academic writing” on the subject – “enthusiasm is key, we didn’t want to couch it in too much of a smarty-pants vibe” – the book is intended to introduce the music to a broader audience. It is beautifully assembled, featuring some fabulously engaging two-fisted writing (“Many listeners deny it’s jazz of any kind,” offers the entry for a 1980 album by Borbetomagus, “but those bow-tie ass-wipes can take a flying fuck at the moon”) and it comes with a foreword by Neneh Cherry. She grew up with many of the albums mentioned in the book, thanks to her stepfather, Don Cherry, a trumpeter who worked with Ornette Coleman, the saxophonist who invented the term free jazz with the 1961 album of the same name. “I feel that I know free jazz as a spirit,” she writes. “I’ve thought about it as a commitment and a necessity, such as food.”
Nevertheless, it’s tempting to say that Moore and co have their work cut out for them. Free jazz, Moore says, “was critically derided”, often described as “noise, or nonsense”. Now Jazz Now recommends Free Fall, a 1963 album by Jimmy Giuffre, a celebrated west coast clarinettist and key figure in the development of “cool” jazz, but notes that its release was “a complete commercial failure … Giuffre took a 10-year hiatus from recording afterwards”. He also disbanded the trio who made it after a gig at which they made 35 cents each. Early on, major labels and august jazz institutions, including Impulse!, were willing to dabble, but very swiftly it became the province of tiny independents and musicians self-releasing their work.
Decades later, it still seems to carry a uniquely forbidding aura to the average listener, as Joakim Haugland – who runs the Oslo-based label Smalltown Supersound – attests. A Sonic Youth fan, he discovered free jazz via an album Moore released – Arthur Doyle’s Alabama Feeling – and was instantly smitten, recognising the same unpredictablility he’d found at punk and alt-rock gigs. “I had become very tired of live gigs, because I felt they were more of the same: people were dressing up and doing the right moves,” he says. “Free jazz is something created on the spot; you can recognise when it works and doesn’t work. I love the fact that some parts of the concert are 100% connected and sometimes they drift apart. It’s about feelings, physicality, happening in the moment.”
Haugland’s label is best known for releasing dance music, by Lindstrøm, Todd Terje and Kelly Lee Owens, among others. It also releases a lot of free jazz, but “not because it’s selling; it’s something I need to do for myself”. He has also published a book on the subject, Johannes Rød’s exhaustive Free Jazz and Improvisation on LP and CD 1965-2024. But, as Haugland cheerfully admits: “I almost always play free jazz in hiding, when I’m alone, because people think I’m mad to listen to it, that it’s impossible to like. There’s an old expression: ‘It sounds like Polish free jazz or something.’ Like ‘Polish free jazz’ was the worst thing in the world.”
I know what he means. I am not a listener who requires music to be melodic or rhythmically straightforward. I am the proud owner of the notorious Swans live album Public Castration Is a Good Idea – the original, I might add, not the recent reissue – and an 11-album box set of recordings from the extreme electronic label Come Organisation, hours of wilfully hideous noise for which I happily shelled out nearly 300 quid a few years back. I genuinely love Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and prefer Yoko Ono’s early 70s albums to those of her husband. And I love jazz, a late-flowering passion, and not just the perennially hip stuff: I’m as happy listening to Fats Waller or Duke Ellington’s late 20s Columbia recordings as I am Bitches Brew or Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. And yet, somehow, free jazz has remained a closed book to me.
Both Moore and Haugland are kind enough to offer recommendations for a relative neophyte. Moore suggests Machine Gun by the Peter Brötzmann Octet or Afrodisiaca by John Tchicai and Cadentia Nova Danica. Haugland opts for Joe McPhee’s Tenor, which he describes as “poetry; I feel like McPhee is pouring his whole soul through the saxophone”, and Silent Tongues, a 1975 live album by pianist Cecil Taylor, a titanic figure in free jazz. (If you want an idea of how reviled the genre is in some quarters, hasten to Ken Burns’ epic, beautifully researched, hugely illuminating but crushingly conservative 2001 documentary series Jazz, in which Taylor’s approach to music is dismissed as “bullshit”). “I love to listen to it on low volume, as it fills my living room with an emotion I cannot describe,” says Haugland. “To me it is relaxing and beautiful.”
I’d heard of Brötzmann’s Machine Gun, an album preceded by its reputation as a particularly confrontational listen, but even one of the best-known free jazz albums is harder to find than you’d think: it’s been removed from streaming services and YouTube, and vinyl pressings are the province of secondhand retailers. I eventually find it on the Internet Archive, and discover that its advance publicity was not exaggerated. It’s furious and completely unremitting, like a bomb that won’t stop going off for the best part of an hour.
And yet I don’t find it unlistenable at all, perhaps because I can contextualise it culturally. Brötzmann was part of the same artistic ferment that gave the world krautrock, and Machine Gun strikes me as grappling with the same issues as Can or Faust: how to make original music, with an identity distinct from Anglo-American musical traditions, in a country whose own sense of national identity had been horribly scarred. Its sound also seems to speak loudly of the tumult and upheaval of 1968, which means it works perfectly amid the tumult of 2025. And if you like Haugland’s idea of free jazz as analogous to the unpredictable wildness of a punk gig, well, here’s the evidence.
It also works as a kind of palate cleanser: everything else I’m recommended feels positively dulcet by comparison, a breeze. On Afrodisiaca’s 21-minute title track, long passages of solo trumpet or fluttering woodwind give way to ominous silences or explosive, rattling crescendos, to startling effect. The tracks on side two feel less structured, but they never completely give up on the idea of melody.
I try Cecil Taylor’s Silent Tongues on low volume, as recommended, but that doesn’t work at all. It’s too complex and distracting to act as ambient music. Nevertheless, there’s something fascinating about its complexity – and as with Brötzmann in post-Nazi Germany, there is a political implication to Black artists determinedly expressing their freedom in a US that so often denied it.
The astonishingly dextrous runs on Silent Tongues’ Jitney No 2 show incredible artistic technique being put to an alternative use. I don’t respond to it in the purely emotional way Haugland does, but it draws me closer to what Moore said about free jazz being “wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition”. It’s not so much musicians doing exactly what they want, more that they are guided through the idea of free self-expression by what they already know – a useful corrective to the commonly held notion that it’s a racket anyone could make.
But with Joe McPhee’s Tenor, I do get that instinctive emotional response. The sound of McPhee playing, unaccompanied, in a Swiss farmhouse, it is immediately and completely spellbinding. It shifts from a kind of melancholy, bluesy lyricism to piercing discordancy, carrying you along with them. However far out it gets, nothing about it feels jarring or difficult – the opposite of Machine Gun, which feels like being pinned against the wall. You’d have to pick your moment and mood with the latter – not that I have a problem with that – but not with Tenor: you could call it beautiful without fear of being seen as deliberately contrary.
I’m not sure how many of the other albums in Now Jazz Now would fit that description, but, in Thurston Moore’s view at least, exploration is the point. “The records are the research,” he says, “and the research is the spirit of so much of this music’s essential vocabulary. Research and reveal and join the revolution of the free!” Perhaps I will.
• Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80 is published by Ecstatic Peace Library on 5 December. Free Jazz and Improvisation on LP and CD 1965-2024 is out now, published by Smalltown Supersound
• This article was amended on 28 November 2025 to correct a misspelling of the surname of Jimmy Giuffre.
