Cook / Coursil / Gale / Robinson / Tintweiss: Ave B Free Jam

A small story to motivate this review. Once upon a time, there was a scholar in a field of the humanities who wrote quite obscurely, even for the humanities, although his prose did not approach the glories of the postmodern. Most agreed that his writing was incomprehensible. It was sesquipedalian, if not totally obscure. In his defense, some would say that, ah, it is a case of poor translation into English, which is not his native language. But then it turned out that reading him in his native language proved just as difficult. Whereupon yet another group of scholars decided that his native language was not his native language, because no one could write so turgidly. And so it went. Ad infinitum.

Free jazz is a bit like the professor whose native language was never quite clear. Some of its practitioners, to be fair, were perfectly comprehensible, even if they managed to sound a bit different in the 1960s. Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, all wrote things that, even if they pushed the boundaries, were recognizable as music. For the most part, it could not be confused with practice, even with all the devices that characterized that esoteric form..

This recording pushes those boundaries even further. It is free, collective improvisation. Honestly, one can try randomly jumping from track to track to track with little loss of continuity. Drop in anywhere, and feel at home. Warren Gale and Jacques Coursil are the "lead voices." Perry Robinson surfaces on bass clarinet. The rhythm section of Laurence Cook and Steve Tintweiss makes quite a ruckus. The recording itself was made on reel-to-reel in New York City in 1967. It is, therefore, a historical artifact of the avant-garde.

Strictly for aficionados of the genre. Others will likely be mystified.