Customer Reviews

The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 (Da Capo Paperback)

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Litweiler's "Freedom Principle" is a pretty good book if you know nothing about "free jazz" (a terrible label, by the way) and want to learn about the dominant performers in the music. He provides some interesting commentary on Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, AACM members, and the European performers. Considering when the book was published, it is somewhat out-dated, since many of the artists he mentions (that are still living, of course) have gone on to develop their creativity far beyond the point where Litweiler begins and ends his analysis of it.

Litweiler also develops some perspectives that seem rather off to me. For example, he says that "Among the great jazz musicians, Ayler's emotional range may be the most limited" (p.151). Ayler's music, in my opinion, is quite the opposite. When discussing Miles Davis' fusion period, he states "the content of his music declined to a search for the new idea or effect, and innovation became valueless" (p.224). Considering how many artists have been inspired by Miles' late 60s-mid 70s period (e.g., there have been a flood of reissues documenting this period of his career, and new people are discovering and loving his music from this period every day), this statement seems to be a little too bold, if not totally erroneous. Miles made the most challenging and innovative fusion music of the 70s, and his creativity inspired and influenced not only jazz musicians of the period but also funk and rock musicians. The textures he explored on those early 70s albums are as artful and challenging as anything before or since. He also claims that Sun Ra's love for popular music is a weakness: "Sun Ra's most impenetrable music, as composer and improviser, has been influenced by the most flabby kinds of popular musics. He is the only jazz musician who ever recorded a version of 'Holiday for Strings'" (p.143). Maybe it is just me, but I find the implied tone of the last sentence a little insulting to Sun Ra and his magnificent legacy. Such commentary smacks of elitist arrogance.

This aside, I must say that Litweiler's book about Ornette Coleman is excellent. Compared with "The Freedom Principle," it is like day and night--I almost wonder if they were written by the same person.

Litweiler has been a jazz critic for many years and has written a fine book about Ornette Coleman. But this book is really a disappointment. A good scholarly book about the free jazz movement is long overdue, at least in this country, but Litweiler isn't the person to do it. This book reads more like the opinions of a fan rather than thoughtful and considered ideas.

Litweiler often makes statements of opinions and masquerades them as fact. And he For example, he castigates Keith Jarrett mercilessly, questioning Jarrett's originality on spurious grounds. He makes statements to the effect that what Jarrett does is the same as any college music student does when they sit in a practice room and improvise in the style of Bach or Chopin. I have news for him, I never heard anyone do this in any of the music schools that I attended. Classical musicians never improvise, no matter how good it would be for them to learn. So, far from being something that "every student does" this is a pretty rare skill.

And again, Litweiler castigates Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders for interest in popular music and tonal music respectively. In this, Litweiler shows his own bias, which is definately for the New York Energy school as opposed to the more modal school of Sanders, or the interest that Ra had in situating himself within the jazz canon.

I think the worst thing, though, is that Litweiler completely misses the spiritual side of the music. Free jazz is mostly a spiritual thing for the performers, and for the open listener. Ascension wasn't a raw expression of anger, it was a "rasing of the spirits" in the old Yoruba sense. Litweiler's interest in so much in the "advanced" ideas of free jazz that he misses the point.

A better introduction to this music might be Eberhardt Jost's classic, Free Jazz. It is much more rational and scholarly, though like this book, it's a bit out of date. David Such also wrote a wonderful book on the subject, Avante-Gard Music and Musicians. Such is both an ethnomusicologist and an avant-garde performer, and knows what he's talking about from the inside.

Freedom Principle definitely suffers from the author's avocation as music critic--the prose is choppy, and the big thematic ideas occasionally get lost in the minutiae. Chapter 1 "Steps in Search of Freedom" is especially desultory and poorly focused. The chapters on individual players are better.

That said, the book is an excellent introduction to the free jazz movement, and covers the major players well, with very insightful discussions of individual works and solos.

Litweiler is at his worst when his own opinions come blazing through; he loves free jazz and despises rock. It's an opinion shared by others, to be sure, but he belabors his point, and, in the final chapters, all but bludgeons his reader with it. It's a fairly ironic twist in a book dedicated to the unbridled freedom of musical expression.

This is book is an excellent overview of the subject. That said, most of the book is dedicated to the major figures (Coltrane, Davis, Coleman, Sun Ra, Mingus, etc.) and there are other books available dedicated to these subjects with more detail. But if you haven't read the critical biographies on the major figures, this is a good place to start to learn about jazz during 1958-1975, and there are interesting sections on some less well known musicians who you can't read about anywhere else.

An excellent summary of the formative years of America's neglected music. Covers important figures intelligently and succinctly. Best used as an introduction to the field, from which you can move on to biographies of individuals.

The book is clearly written by a serious Free jazz devotee, but it suffers for a lack of coherency and an excessive interjection of the authors opinions.
The book provides short biographical summaries for a number of major Free jazz musicians. The majority of the text focusses on Litweiler's assesment of specific pieces or albums by those artists. There is little in the way of broader overall history, nor is there sufficient larger scale musical biography about most of the artists. The value of the book lies in the breadth of music surveyed and in Litweiler's passionate descriptions of certain albums. Along with those articulate and passionate reviews, however, come many dismissive comments about many remarkable musicians. Litweiler's intolerance of anything insufficiently "free" to meet his standard relegates him to the status of a narrow-minded acolyte rather than serious music critic.
I would definately not recommend this book as a first or second read. I will look elsewhere for a better history and more sophisticated criticism of free jazz.