Dave Liebman: Placing Free Jazz and the Avant Garde in Musical and Historical Perspective

AAJ: Audiences often get turned off at radically new music, and sometimes they miss a chance to hear something interesting and deep. Some of the free jazz musicians have told me that sometimes even today the whole audience walks out and they wind up playing in an empty nightclub. The same thing happened with Ornette Coleman when he performed on a concert stage (Verizon Hall) at Philadelphia's Kimmel Center just a few years ago. A lot of the audience walked out on him.

DL: Exactly! I admire musicians who just go out and play and are not concerned with audience reactions. It's like being in a Zen mind set. They do it because it's meaningful to them, and sometimes it catches on. I have a lot of respect for guys who stick to it. Ornette and Cecil eventually got well rewarded for what they did. They received record opportunities, awards, grants, and so on. They stuck to their guns. And if you stick to something, eventually you get rewarded. But you have to stay on course.

Postscript: Liebman's Chromaticism and Free Jazz

AAJ: It remains something of a mystery as to why some people love this music and others flee from it. But I have another question which I want to be sure we cover before we conclude. It has to do with one of the concepts you're well-known for: the use of chromaticism in jazz improvising. Chromaticism generally means the use of notes and progressions that purposely clash with the written material and that don't fit in with the musical agenda but properly used are very effective. My question is, how does chromaticism relate to free jazz, if at all? It does seem to me that it frees the musician to a lot of new possibilities.

DL: Free jazz, chromaticism, they all fit in. It's the way you do it. It shouldn't be random or careless. It should be seamless. It should be like story-telling with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The musicians now are getting very good at doing that.

AAJ: So if musicians take your classes on chromaticism, they're going to learn a new way of improvising, and then they go out into this open, free jazz environment and they do anything they want to. So what are they bringing with them from your chromatic approach that's useful?

DL: This is a good question. The chromatic approach that I use for teaching purposes is basically a workbook on various ways of hearing chromatically. Bach used chromaticism. It's not new. The way I teach it, it's a way to think that you can use for example on a blues. The main thing with my chromatic approach is that it gives you a way to get out of the box of tonality. It offers a lot more choices of what to play.

AAJ: It sounds like it's a step towards free jazz.

DL: My book is a lot about harmony. That's different from free jazz. But it gets you to think about doing harmony in new ways.

AAJ: We're just about to run out of time. How would you like to wrap this up? It's a rather complex subject matter. What would be your summation?

DL: There are no rules in music. There are only guidelines and taste. And you can never account for taste. What sounds musical to you might sound like the devil to me. Music is the most subjective of the arts. It brings in that whole element of "who am I; what do I want to say; how do I do it?" You just go on trying to express yourself through the medium that you are most comfortable with. When you really have something mastered and at your disposal, it's enough for a lifetime.

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