ep1str0phy

KE/GQ on Kickstarter! (video on the link) Hey, Organissimo-type people. You may or may not have already heard the story, but I'm completing work on a new album (due in the Spring). For those who remember the Grex album I released last Fall, this is a more explicit improv/jazz-oriented companion: a sonic essay on my Filipino-American origins, entitled Suite: Taglish. This project means a great deal to me as both a personal landmark and a symbol--it's a one time grouping of spectacular musicians (all dear friends--Asian Improv Arts co-founder Francis Wong (Max Roach, Cecil Taylor) on reeds, American Indian music scholar/Grammy winner John-Carlos Perea (Paul Winter) on bass, Bay Area dynamo Jordan Glenn (Wiener Kids, John Schott, Sarah Wilson) on drums, and my partner and Grex bandmate Rei Scampavia on keys), a multicultural gathering meant to reflect the increasingly heterogenous (but strangely personal) character of contemporary jazz. Make no mistake, this isn't "just" free jazz--it's a combination of dozens of musical ideas (straight ahead jazz, rock, Great American Songbook stuff, free improv, IDM) appropriate to my particular cultural experience. It's my hope that exposure for this album will help to open doors and minds for/to the prospect of a new, truly unique Filipino-American music. Anyway, we're looking for some financial help with the mastering, replication, and packaging. The album is in its final stages of mixing--we just need a push out of the door. As of this posting, we're at roughly 2/3rd of the way there--we have a little over a week left. Absolutely any amount helps, and anything you could contribute (even if it just means telling your friends) would be immensely appreciated. Also, this being a Kickstarter, donors will inevitably receive copies of the CD... Anyway, (hopefully) you can look for this in the early spring--and thanks for listening!

Count me as a fan of that CT album, too... Recently been listening to: Keith Jarrett: Backhand Sam Rivers: Streams Paul Motian: Le Voyage & Marion Brown: Afternoon of a Georgia Faun My fiancee/bandmate custom made a T-shirt of the latter for me (knowing it was one of my favorite albums). Marion Brown fashion Ts are precisely the kind of wonderful absurdness I'm into. On a completely different level, I can understand--to a certain degree--why these dates (Faun excluded) tend to pop up as LPs rather than CDs... While Le Voyage is easily the match of Dance and definitely one of Motian's strongest albums, Backhand feels like a retread of musical conceits essayed elsewhere more delightfully (Birth) and/or more excitingly (Fort Yawuh), and Streams is hampered by a lesser rhythm section (and also a degree of technical iciness--I think Sam mentioned that he didn't like this one that much...). Another tangent/rumination on Rivers, but rummaging through Rivers's back catalog has made me appreciate the Holland/Altschul trio more and more. Compare something like Paragon to any of the trio music on Impulse! and the non-Holland/Altschul sides tend to feel a little weak. Replacing Altschul takes some of the chaotic whimsy out of the band; substituting anyone for Holland, including otherwise spectacular bass players such as Cecil McBee, destabilizes the group and kills some of its propulsion. I almost prefer the apeshit bombast of the trio dates with Joe Daley to the stuff on Hues, the latter of which comprises merely paler, less precise variation on the Holland/Altschul music.

(Since my intended post went long, I thought it might as well just start the blog I'd been waiting to get off the ground. Thoughts here: Grex Blog, though the most relevant paragraph is below:) I’ve been so bummed out by all the death news that I excused myself from jazz internetalia for a minute… it’s surely a downer that we’ve lost the likes of Motian and Rivers, and it’s a lesser shame that (in light of all the recent ego battles and who/what sucks conversations) memorializing the dead seems to be one of the few unifying factors among jazz punditry. Really, it’s all on us–most of the people we’ve lost lived long, full musical lives, and they died in the “best” way possible for folks in our line of work–with boots on, and kicking. Half of me wants to spend the holidays listening to Motian’s autumnal recordings and getting reacquainted with stuff like Waves and the Rivers/Holland duos (that I haven’t broken out in ages), the other half knows that it’s time to step up, put some back into making my own music, and make sure the circle goes unbroken. I mean, the way Sam went out, still energetic, intellectually lucid, creatively viable and full of ideas–new music–that’s as much of a Butch and Sundance ending as anyone can hope for.

Whoa--that's an amazing band, Allen.

Thanks for the kind words, folks! Making music for your muse and making music for others can be two completely different things, but I'm genuinely glad when people take to our more agonizing creative choices... Speaking of which, the White Album thing (as a model of length and eclecticism) was something that occurred to me in the process of editing and sequencing the album, and I was wondering if someone thought the same. We actually left off some of our favorite live pieces--music that is fun to play/in the ethos but completely derailed the momentum of the album (ex. a more explicit head/improv/head free jazz duo piece, a somewhat drawn out Marion Brown tribute, a solo piano piece, etc. etc.). Maybe it's because sprawling epics like The White Album have been burned into our aesthetic consciousnesses, but it can be easy to take for granted just how tightly constructed and internally coherent some of these grab bag kind of projects actually are. Another way of putting it--it's in certain ways absurd how songs like "Not Guilty" and "Circles" can get left off of an album when "Wild Honey Pie" and "Good Night" avoid the chopping block, but there's a lot to be said for the complexity of composing an album itself (a process that entails, in macrocosm, any number of the normal musical variables--key and intervallic relations if you're intense like Coltrane, but really anything like space, orchestration, tempo, etc.). I'm squarely of the mind that the most successful album constructions--like The White Album or even something briefer and more deceptively simple, like Tago Mago or Songs for a Tailor--are as eloquent and wonderful as the most revered album length pieces (A Love Supreme, People In Sorrow, Afternoon of a Georgia Faun, Freedom Now Suite, etc.).

Actually, I think I agree with you--I think it's when the crassness is cyncial that things get ugly. This is going to sound terrible, but I suppose that albums like Duke Ellington & John Coltrane or Ballads are somewhat crass, too, but I would never want to be deprived of that music--I think that Coltrane was playing "mellower" in a very genuine way. And, for what it's worth, I don't think Chick was necessarily being cynical when he made the shift to more commercial music--my understanding is that it was a direct outgrowth of the way in which he responded to Scientology. Judging from the pretty candid statements in Forces In Motion, Chick seemed more or less enthusiastic about going the "let's make some money" route (crass but not necessarily disdainful of others/the music). This is not the best place for gross condemnations of belief systems (of any sort), so let it be said that a lot of Chick's market considerations were informed by psychology--and he's probably at peace with this. The wacky thing is that, judging by the statements above, the guy who played the spectacular piano solo on Afternoon of a Georgia Faun--the piano player in Circle, the Lost Quintet--is still in there somewhere. I mean, I'd like to think the Marion Brown-espousing contingent is a market consideration to (i.e., if Chick were to head back into the studio and play some super out shit--or randomly reunite with the other 3/4 of Circle--I'd want to listen).

But that need will be met only if there is some sort of consensus along the same lines as the artist's vision...which mean that the artist will have found an audience. I pretty much think that anybody who creates in the marketplace and says they don't want to communicate is either crazy or a liar. Or both! The question is - how much of your ideas do you want to communicate, are you going to be satisfied getting some of your points across to more people, or do you need to make all of your points to whoever will listen. The only real "sellout" is to say that you want to be heard even if you don't get to make any of your points. Everything else is...a decision. Absolutely--and these kinds of creative decisions can be/are often profoundly harrowing, since (as per your statement above) I'd think that most (definitely not all--I've met some extremely obstinate "outsider" artists who would rather play and be left alone than be "in the game") creative people would want to communicate. There's actually a pretty heady discussion going on among the SF/Bay Area community regarding the (only recent) tangible recognition on the part of an apparent "people's newspaper" of the fact that we have an underground music scene out here--and everyone agrees that at least part of the reason the underground music scene exists is because experimental artists wanted to a place to air their works. Experimentalism/dissonance/anything that might pose a challenge to anyone's listening tastes is not antithetical to the existence of or desire for an audience. Look at what happened to Albert Ayler... I would personally draw the line at invoking "crassness"--or, more generously, simply catering to what you think the mass audience wants--as a creative impetus. I totally agree that Monk's words may be parsed to mean that he thought an audience was out there, whether it found him sooner or later. The other example is guys like the Art Ensemble--their early music had spectacular, resonant moments (some of my favorite music ever) that nonetheless echoed only underground for some time--my understanding was that it took Europe to make the world realize that the AACM needed their moment. Roscoe's advice to me was always, "Your audience will find you"--and that was 100% correct in his case. Of course, the notion that there is an audience for anything presupposes the existence of an intrinsic, relatable quality in any given musical expression--and yes, some stuff is just noise, and some music just sucks. But imagine being the Art Ensemble--cats who practiced together from morning to night, days on end--having a shared understanding that your music is something special, or even the minority recognition that guys like Larry or Chuck could offer before breaking big... it is worthwhile to listen to the minority opinion. I'd hate to think that we'd be deprived of the AECO, Ornette, or even Bird, Monk, etc. due to weak nerves or a desire for quick returns. Or, paraphrasing a (dubious) Wayne Gretzky quote that Steve Jobs bandied about (sorry, I'm reading this article right now), sometimes it is worthwhile to aim for where the puck is going to be. On the other hand, history has been saddled with tons of crappy music essayed by folks attempting to catch up to existing trends--my first thought was Jackie McLean's Monuments--something that isn't absolutely devoid of artistic content but an artistic compromise nonetheless. I'd rather have a handful of folks on a jazz board geek out on something as profound as One Step Beyond than have no one so much as remember that I made Monuments under the pretense that it would shake some asses. In other words, I don't think that crassness has to do with the end result of the music so much as it has to do with intentions and timeliness.

Weird--I didn't get it. (I tried messaging you on the forum, but it seems like your mailbox is full!) Try sending again (or messaging me here, if somehow that works...) Thanks!

Just wanted to mention--I picked up both the Mitchell and the Freeman this past week. This is all spectacular music, and I'm glad we get to hear it even now, at the waning of the CD era. It isn't often this happens, but the Freeman reminded me of why I ever wanted to "just" play straight jazz in the first place--if it all sounded as free and wild as this, I might journey into that territory more often than I do.

This reissue series is a sleeper miracle. I had more or less resigned myself to never getting a decent CD copy of Sweet Earth Flying, but here it is--in 2011, after the tip over toward the obliteration of the CD industry. I was actually inspired to write an extended blog post on Sweet Earth, so I won't reiterate those thoughts here--but damn it feels good to come back from the local brick and mortar cradling a new copy of World Galaxy, etc. Some technical comments, but with as much value as these twofers pack, I (as a collector/musician/obsessive) would prefer paying double the price for two late 90's Impulse digipacks (complete with the virtually unnecessary third panel--"The New Wave of Jazz is On Impulse!"--legible liner notes, and bonus tracks). I've spent a lot of time dissecting the concept and formal construction behind stuff like Sweet Earth lately, and yes, bonus tracks would cheapen the profundity and eloquence of the original album construction somewhat, but I've finally grown accustomed enough to listening to music in this mixed, digested digital form that if the music hits hard enough, it doesn't really matter if it wasn't on the original LP (especially if it was a space considerations thing). The Marion Brown discography mentions that "Sweet Earth Flying Pt. 2" remains unreleased, which could be (or could not be) a royal bummer, since the original album is probably my favorite non-Coltrane Coltrane-idiomatic music ever.

All (received) paypal orders have shipped! Thanks for the interest and support, guys. This is music that we've bled out for on stage, and I'm glad to have the whole weird package out there and accessible. As for the phenomenon you mention, 7/4--part of it may just be a generational thing, a lot of it (on the West Coast) having to do with expanding horizons on the rock scene/overlap with jazz and experimental music. A musician will tend to absorb his or her surroundings, and a drummer (for example) will be playing straight ahead one day, accompanying a dance group the next morning, rehearsing electropop in the afternoon, and playing free jazz in the evening. There are people out here who tend to stick to specific idioms or practices (and this is not necessarily a generational/age-based phenomenon, since I've had both younger and much older friends espouse a bit of idiomatic "extremisim"--that is, I PLAY FREE MUSIC), and the current trend of people playing anything and everything creative isn't necessarily an evolve-or-die imperative--i.e., you can do well sticking to a very specific set of guns. I do think, however, that the music that comes out of this multidisciplinary slough tends to be some of the most consistently interesting and viscerally engaging made out here (e.g., the aforementioned Wiener Kids, the legendary Graham Connah's crazy big band, Ben Goldberg's hybridizations--I've played in a big band of his a couple of times and always wind up taking this screaming blues--and very much blues--solo--the wonderful electric piano trio Beep, work by the likes of Phillip Greenlief, Moe! Staiano, Dominique Leone, Aaron Novik, the list goes on...) I'm reminded of something that Ethan Iverson posted recently (regarding a duo with Marcus Belgrave)--I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something to the effect of "the musical decision should always be the correct one, and not the one dictated by convention." Exposure to Bay Area musical environment and extended work with guys as contrarian as Fred and Roscoe has altered my brain chemistry a bit--I would never have (maybe four years ago) devoted large chunks of a nominally "experimental" album to weird pop songs, but it felt profoundly right to do it on Second Marriage (as it feels profoundly right to play zydeco, polka, or jug band music alongside free jazz or free improv in the music that essays more or less nightly on the scene out here).

Interestingly, my first response to my friend's statement was defensive--and deep fans of the music can cite any number of instances where so-called "avant jazz" cats rendered performances that were/are as much about "virtuosity" as anything else. Naturally, it's difficult (for open-minded people) to witness anything on the level of Evan Parker's circular breathing control, the harmonic concept on Interstellar Space, or Roscoe after the 80's and not think about the sheer mechanics involved, among other things. One of the great "natural" occurrences on the Mills campus back when I was attending (and I'd treat it as a natural thing, since it happened with striking regularity) was Roscoe's morning warm-up--hours of scales and circular breathing that were totally and legitimately technical practice. Actually, the value of practice was probably the greatest lesson he imparted to me (and I seldom fail to make my three hours a day). That being said--and this might have something to do with Allen or Jim's posts above--I think part of creative mastery in the jazz idiom has to do with technical control in both "negative" and "positive" senses--or, rather, truly great (and not just "good") musicians know how to turn off selected mechanical and intellectual facilities and let intuition and feel take over. Sometimes activating the off switch results in what might otherwise be considered clams or screw ups--and this is what I meant talking about Wadud and Phillip's jarring lack of synchronicity on certain parts "Dogon A.D."--but those mistakes happen--and correctness doesn't happen--because other stuff does. (I mean, listen to Wadud's tone on "Dogon"--or the way Hemphill just soars over that craziness.) I think it's interesting that "Theme de Yoyo" sounds like it does, considering Lester Bowie was musical director for an R&B band (and Melvin Jackson's Funky Skull is a genuine testament to just how tight and punchy the AACM horns could be--and then there's Brass Fantasy...). The horns on "Yoyo" are crazy asynchronous--it sounds like a four square church meeting at times--and the time feel of the band is waaay out of the pocket in spots. But just like "Dogon A.D." is not really about the meter, I don't think something like "Theme de Yoyo" is ultimately about the fact that the AEC is playing an R&B tune. Rather, I think the R&B element of "Yoyo" is incidental to the fact that it's just a brutally good, "free" sounding performance. If the AEC wanted to nail those horn parts or lock in the groove, they easily could have--but the important parts of the performance wind up being the same things that are important in, say, Ayler (energy, forward motion, vocalistic qualities, the use of rhythmic disjunction as a way of ratcheting up tension). Honestly, I think "Yoyo" would have sucked had it been all about "playing the groove," and the AEC recognized this--the genius move is that they discovered that you didn't need to sound like Ayler, Trane, Ornette, or Cecil to play "free"--and that you could, in fact, sound like something as potentially whack as a funk band. Ultimately, the amateurishness is built into the concept, because a "professional" performance would draw your attention away from what's really great about the music.

Looks like I'll be making some mailings tomorrow! Thanks for the response, guys!

Ha! It just makes me think of Braxton--I got through about 1.5 volumes of the Tri-Axium writings and thought, "Where the hell does he find time to write all this?" But then that's the point--some folks need to think about what they do as much as they do what they do. I always amazed at how lucid the comments are from the board's musician contingent--aren't we supposed to be laconic and uncommunicative? (Answer: yes, but but only some of the time.) More on topic, but I gave Roscoe's Sound a spin last night (after spending some time absorbing both Dogon and Before There Was Sound). As much as I love music like the WSQ's albums and the Art Ensemble's ECMs, there's something really special about hearing this music in early, ragged form. One of my friends at Mills (and one of the top Indian percussionists in the world--he was actually one of the West Coast guys they called up for the Miles From India project, which was weird--he'd come to class talking about hanging with Ron Carter and we'd have spent our time merely talking about him) was just getting into out music a couple years back, totally blown away by Roscoe's intensity and work ethic. We were listening to "Theme de Yoyo" and he said, "These guys are such amateurs and virtuosos at the same time..."--and this wasn't an insult--it was more a way of saying that part of what made the music so amazing was how it was able evoke this sense of chaotic looseness despite the sheer technicality of the improvisations and charts.

Wow--thanks for all the support, guys! BTW--orders ship tomorrow for receipts that are in before, well, around 10am PST tomorrow! And, to clarify, it's $10 USD after shipping and I do take paypal.

Whoa--yeah, I had a duo with Will Redmond. To be fair, that duo wasn't particularly well developed at the time (and the time constraints on that concert were kind of tense), but that gig was fun. Good to meet you!

Thanks for the interest, guys! PayPal works--send me your address via the email above (and I'll get you details)... As far as the chamber pop thing--one of the weird attributes of the Bay Area free jazz scene--and this seems to be the case with many of the younger scenes in the States--is a seeming ambivalence toward classification "as" jazz. A lot of the most creative territory is being tilled by folks who essentially play jazz but have limited interaction with the straight ahead scene (not a rule, just a common thread... and by "limited," I mean it's never anyone's bread and butter--just one of many things folks out here do). Mills College is sort of an axis of this kind of music making... a lot of nominal "jazz people" have come in and out of teaching situations at the institution (Braxton, most famously, but also Roscoe and a number of other people in stints--India Cooke, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Muhal...). In fact, I don't think I ever heard the word jazz in one of Roscoe's classes--and we certainly didn't use any conventional jazz "texts" (though there was plenty of stuff out of classical pedgagoy--Adler's The Study of Orchestration, Read's Music Notation, Stick Control, a whole bunch of Schoenberg...). I think the "chamber pop" term came about as a means of classifying what is more or less a hybrid of mainstream pop and 20th century/new music tendencies (Joanna Newsom was a Mills person and seems to be the textbook practitioner of this), but I think of it as a catch all for a hybridization of general experimental tendencies (taking after both Western tradition and, at this point, kind of idiom-transcendent guys like Roscoe or Fred Frith) and any number of popular song traditions.

Hello, all- Scarce few of you will know that my secret identity is Karl Evangelista (www.karlevangelista.com) of the group Grex (www.grexsounds.com)--I'm a Bay Area music guy/frequent hustler in an artistically rich environment that is (at the same time) more or less a press vacuum. For "name" perspective (though I'm reluctant to do that, often), I've studied heavily under Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, and Myra Melford, and I've played under some names that (occasionally) come up in these parts--Frith, Eddie Gale, Ben Goldberg, Damon Smith, and Francis Wong. That these guys are themselves not more well known is a shame unto itself, but there you go... Anyway, Grex recently released an album (entitled "Second Marriage") on my SUA label. I thought there might be some interest here. Some sound samples: Grex on Soundcloud... Grex is augmented on this date by drummer Jordan Glenn (a Bay Area staple, of the criminally unsung trio Wiener Kids), reedman Cory Wright, and bassist Jason Hoopes. The sound of the album is itself kind of difficult to summarize, but it's an amalgamation of the local lineage of free improv, the sort of chamber pop that still flourishes at Mills College, and the darker edges of free jazz that the band has come to love so much (Bill Dixon, some Mal Waldron, Sonny Sharrock's jazz projects, late Trane, etc.). For perspective, we were recorded by local "hyperpianist" Scott R. Looney and had the album mastered by Splatter Trio mastermind (and brilliant guitarist) Myles Boisen. If you're looking for a capsule of what the extremely fertile but inexplicably invisible Bay Area scene is like right now--or are simply looking for something new and weird to listen to--I'm unabashedly proud of this particular project. It'll be a second before our distribution channels float this album nationwide, but it's available via me right now (ep1str0phy@hotmail.com). I'll discount it for O people to $10 (and that includes shipping). Thanks! K/Ep1

Thanks, Larry!

Having spent the most time in the past with vinyl rips of Dogon A.D. (I think Screwgun's online "release" of the album in the mid-2000s was a big part of how the music developed such a huge cultural cache in recent years--though I don't think I'm overstating the case when I say that this has long been one of the most influential albums among the under 40 set of jazz experimentalists), this reissue is a revelation. The depth of the sound field and the starkness of the separation make it sound like something else altogether... I'd been listening to this clammy, fuzzy sound for so long that it felt like vinyl clicks and pops were a fundamental part of the album. That being said, I'm really amazed at how rough this music is--and I mean that in the best way possible. The passage of time, naturally, forges innovations into steely, precise techniques--this being one of my criticisms of a lot of free jazz of the past fifteen or twenty years. Any number of younger bands could cut the living hell out of an 11/4 vamp (or 11/16--I heard someone say that the "Dogon" vamp was 11/4, but it's pretty easy to hear as two quarters + three 16ths, I think), but I can't think of too many current musicians who could take an odd-metered exercise and make it about anything other than the meter--which is precisely what this band does. I love how/when Wadud and Wilson get off each other now and again, because this would totally derail a lesser music; Dogon just floats through its technical hiccups because Hemphill's music prioritizes the vocalistic and sonic over the mechanical. It's actually easy to hear Dogon as the inception of later schools of riff-y/odd-metered experimentalism, or rather as a validation of that "idiom" as a platform for freer improvisation. Kind of like how Roscoe, Muhal, and the AACM invoked subtraction and silence as a different way of getting at the emotional/spiritual ecstasy of old-school, combustible free jazz (ala Trane), Hemphill invoked angular cyclicalism and stasis as organizing principles--just another way "out" of the free music soup and into something fresh and full of possibility.

I really enjoy The Big Gundown, though I'll admit that I have a difficult to listening to it "objectively," or rather without an ear for the subsequent twenty five or so years of musical development. This sort of brutal, quick cut postmodernism is common parlance in jazz, rock, and experimental music now, and I have a hard time listening to The Big Gundown as anything other than a fine example of certain performance practices. On the other hand, I have a visceral, deep reaction to stuff like Material's Memory Serves or Massacre's Killing Time--the sort of music that wonderfully and perfectly captures a specific concept and time (probably more limited in "scope" than The Big Gundown, although by no means less thoughtful or technically spectacular). Maybe the narrower focus of those albums makes the music sound less esoteric/conceptual and more "free"? The conceptual angle keeps stuff like the Lulu trios or Spy vs. Spy at a distance. The Ornette album in particular is a spectacularly drastic deconstruction of Ornette's music--actually really fascinating for the fact that it makes those warm themes sound alienating and disconcerting without altering them in any fundamental way. At the same time, I much more likely to "get" something aesthetic or deep out of the source material (be it Morricone, 50's/60's hard bop, or Ornette), if only because commentary on an idea is by its very nature a step removed from what made the idea so appealing in the first place.

Thanks for calling me out on that--and also, well, there you go--and that band had Jimmy Garrison, too, yes? That's the last time, for me, Shepp ever hit as hard and as directly as when Trane was alive (excepting the '71 stuff with Alice Coltrane--which never really recorded and was really guided by the old master's ghost). The BYG/Actuel stuff is extremely diffuse--free, yes, but creatively all over the map. I could be reading too much into things, but I get the distinct sense that those few years after '67 were a "coming to terms with Trane's specter" time for everyone. To put things another way--that Jimmy Garrison interlude on Attica Blues always struck me as extremely referential, in a postmodern sort of sense. It's like, only a handful of years after the fact, Shepp was having Garrison play an artifact of himself, bridging the gap between this new sort of hybridized R&B/free jazz/pop muchness (a spiritual cousin to what Pharoah or even Ayler, briefly, were doing at the turn of the 70's) and "classic" free jazz by self-consciously invoking the sound of the 60's. It's a really "you can't go home again" kind of moment, to my ears.

Absolutely--those all strike me as "waning 60's" albums. I only have a general sense regarding whether or not Trane's death had an immediate and brutal impact on the course of improvised music at the time, but it did sort of coincide with the peak of the 60's counterculture. All the "major" 60's albums after that seem to be either assessing the foregoing decade or offering possibilities for the future (seriously--Brotzmann, SME, The Blue Notes, The Art Ensemble, Braxton, etc.) Think about two of the key Trane acolytes--Shepp and Pharoah. Shepp's first album (someone please correct me if I'm off base) post-Trane is entitled The Way Ahead, for heaven's sakes--and what ensued, in that cat's catalog, at least, was a slow scramble for thematic and idiomatic coherence--sort of a trainwreck when you considered the brute focus of stuff like Four For Trane or Shepp's last album prior to Trane's passing (The Magic of Ju-Ju). It's of course often wonderful music--and I know at least Jim has extolled the virtues of this period--but I think a lot of that has to do with the sense of confusion rather than in spite of it. Pharoah, too, seemed to alter his aesthetic trajectory in the wake of Trane's passing--evolving his spiritual abstractions into these monolithic, immoveable, cyclical swaths of modalism--and, really, stuff like Izipho Zam and Karma does sound like it's trying to reconcile the preceding decade's pull toward openness and "outward motion" with the exact opposite (closed cycles, musical that always pulls "in").

That's certainly true for certain "self-conscious" avant rock acts like early Gong or even Yoko/out John Lennon, but there are certainly a number of so-called prog or avant rock bands that wound up interacting with and/or engaging in unprecedented sonic innovation. Hendrix for one. Henry Cow (a more obvious "avant" suspect) is another; while drawing heavily from blues and classical traditions, they spawned at least some music that was the first of its kind (Fred Frith--who, fully disclosure, I've studied under for a lengthy period--and yes, this probably does color my opinion, but in this case we're dealing with a common opinion/sentiment--was one of the key innovators of free improv guitar/prepared electronic instrumentation alongside Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe, among others. I reference the ongoing and actually pretty inane debate regarding who used alligator clips as guitar preparation first--Rowe or Frith... prepared/extended electric guitar certainly did not originate in jazz or classical any more than outre/extended drum kit--emphasis on drum kit and not percussion--started anywhere outside of free jazz.) Also--yeah, Sonny Sharrock and James "Blood" Ulmer--and, really, just Sonny here, since Blood was technically later--but Sonny is/was special--a total anomaly whose innovations (unlike Ayler's) were not immediately adopted by his contemporaries and whose personal technical extensions did not really come out of jazz (more an extrapolation on R&B/rock chording inspired by free jazz saxophone). Larry Coryell, certain elements of Jim Hall, and early John McLaughlin were pretty out, too, but none of that was really "extended" stuff that wasn't already informed by rock innovations (namely Hendrix in the first and third casees).

Oh yeah--Gong (the early incarnations of which date to the late 60's and interacted with the free jazz diaspora in the Euro/BYG camp), Musica Elettronica Viva, Third Ear Band, Taj Mahal Travellers, Yoshi Wada, Yoko Ono--just following different threads (Japanese Fluxus, Euro prog/avant rock). Interesting discussion a little ways up--there are plenty of artists whose work began in the 60's but peaked (in terms of both creativity and timeliness) in the 1970s. I've always understood a lot of paradigmatic Euro free improv--and even some American restructuralist music like the Art Ensemble--to be fundamentally 70's or 80's in character. It's interesting how some of Brotzmann's most lucid and aggressive work was essayed in the late 60's, even though his music (as Niko notes) has a very post-60's feel to it: not so much "free" and "consciousness-expanding" as it is dark, cynical, and at times strikingly internal. I'm really moved by the trio with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo for this reason--it's inebriated, wounded music, sort of subsisting through the shit rather than actively combating it. Granted, guys like Moholo were truly and actively combating something--Apartheid--but these guys are different sorts of warriors from truth-is-marching-in Ayler or even melt-your-face late 60's Brotzmann and Blue Notes. It's almost as if the "fight" in this music is in the mere fact of its existence. It's not building something up out of the 60's (or "with" the 60's, as real recombinative music like the Art Ensemble or Braxton does)--it's played squarely in a format pioneered like a decade and a half earlier, and it's fighting against the notion of (to put it harshly) its own political and social fecklessness. This is the music of its era in the way that Ayler was a 60's joint (and, for that reason, maybe did peak much later than its inception, as Clifford mentions).