free jazz

noun

1. spontaneously experimental, free-form jazz, popularized as an avant-garde phenomenon in the 1960s by various soloists and characterized by random expression and disregard for traditional structures, tonalities, and rhythms.

Example Sentences

With Coleman’s band in the ’50s and ’60s, and on his own formidable catalog as a bandleader, he helped pioneer free jazz, a style that subverted the studied cool of bebop with blasts of atonality and mercurial song structures.

From Los Angeles Times

A new docuseries on Hulu, “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” traces the path that the free jazz ensemble that is Black Twitter took in becoming an arbiter of cultural shifts time and again, a harbor of soft but insistent vigilantism.

From Los Angeles Times

It was the 1970s, and Dianne McIntyre was a dancer on a mission: to soak up live music, specifically, she said, “so-called avant-garde jazz,” free jazz or, when labels really start to irritate her, just “whatever.”

From New York Times

Later in the concert, she switched to piano and led her group — which also included two drummers and two bassists — in a squall of free jazz that “Journey in Satchidananda” doesn’t begin to foreshadow.

From New York Times

“He was a serious bass player from New York, the first person who introduced to me free jazz. But I felt the song was so simple, so easygoing, so … pop, that it didn’t fit what I wanted” at the time.

From New York Times