I’ve been subscribed to the Metafilter RSS feed for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve seen discussion veer into”free jazz”. Since Metafilter is no longer accepting new users, the only way I can participate in the comments is by trackback…

The post is seeded around a pointer to an extensive “consumer guide” to the music of William Parker, Matthew Shipp, and their circle of musicians. The poster (languagehat) writes:

Getting slightly bored with pop and looking to expand your horizons? Can’t believe the musty Burns/Marsalis version is all there is to jazz? Try the “avant jazz” tradition whose central figures are the amazing bassist William Parker. . ., David S. Ware. . ., and pianist Matthew Shipp. . . .

On my first reading, I took this to mean that Parker/Ware/Shipp are the central figures in “avant jazz”, which is an astonishing statement (although that’s not too far from the thesis of the article which gave the MeFi post its title.) Upon rereading, I parsed it as recommending one of the “avant jazz” traditions: that one in which these musicians have done much work. To think of “avant jazz” as a single tradition is just short-sighted. (As an aside, this whole question of terminology has been kicked around quite a bit in a current AllAboutJazz.com thread in which Ken Vandermark has challenged critics to be more clear with their terms. However, being lazy, I’m going to continue (for this post, at least) to use “avant jazz” as a catch-all for music which some might call jazz but which isn’t part of the “musty Burns/Marsalis version”.)

Although I have a boundless love for the bass playing of William Parker, I have never much cottoned on to Ware or Shipp. It may be that I haven’t had the chance to see them live, while I’ve seen Parker a few times (and especially when he plays with Hamid Drake: that is a opportunity not to be missed.) I don’t have a real great taste for heavy energy-jazz blowing, and right or wrong, that’s the box into which I put Ware and his projects. (The beauty of DJing is that I can dig around in the library and see how I feel about their music now. The beauty of this kind of jazz is that the same music can sound very different to the same listener at different times. Heraclitus would understand.)

One other comment I was going to make on MetaFilter: aladfar mentioned that he was nearly ready to download some tracks from iTunes, except for his concern about DRM music. Last week I signed up for the free trial at eMusic.com – they don’t seem to have any albums led by Ware, Shipp or Parker, but they have a pretty decent collection of non-DRM MP3s from Atavistic, including the Unheard Music Series, Leo, and ESP among others. Given that many “avant jazz” albums are only one or two tracks long, downloading (from either iTunes or eMusic or any other per-track-priced service) can be a very inexpensive way to experiment with a lot of music.