I had opportunity to think about this recently when a very kind reader of Last Plane to Jakarta bought me a subscription to Atavistic’s unbelievably great Unheard Music Series. The Unheard Music imprint reissues jazz albums which, when they were new, were very hard to find, and which have now been out of print for years. Most of these albums date from the immediate post-bop period of jazz, when musicians had begun to ask themselves what the next step might be after improvised soloing. The solo, once a fairly disruptive event within popular song, had become a predictable element in jazz composition; even the best jazz records offered few surprises. There are some people who cannot be happy unless they are constantly being surprised, and these people in the sixties began to play what came to be called “free jazz.” |