Free Jazz Unleashed

Free jazz emerged in the 1960s when Ornette Coleman released an album literally called "Free Jazz" — 37 minutes of two quartets improvising simultaneously without predetermined harmony or structure. Critics called it noise. Musicians called it freedom.

Free jazz coincided with the Civil Rights Movement, and the connection was not coincidental. Breaking musical rules became a metaphor for breaking social ones. Archie Shepp explicitly linked his chaotic saxophone to Black liberation.