Jazz Articles

Ilgenfritz/Khoury/Michalowski/Weaver: Babardah

by Clifford Allen
December 8, 2004

Free improvisation is a tool, just as paint or the written word, in the process of making art. Art critic Clement Greenberg might roll over in his grave that I quote him on such generic art-making terms, but his oft-repeated line on the modernist process carries some weight here: “Modernism... [is] the use of the characteristic methods of the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence." Free improvisation ...