I'm one of those jazz fans that local jazz fans accuse of as just being into noise (ie. free jazz). I like the straight stuff, too, but "free" is like a stigma around my circles.
I mean, once I mention Sun Ra, the eyes start rolling, even though the relatively simplistic swing of
Jazz In Silhouette is my absolute favorite.
But it's tunes like this which make me wonder why free jazz gets such a bad rap among my peers:
Alice Coltrane - Blue Nile
i love free jazz, Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman, it's great stuff.
Eric Dolphy is one of my all time favorite jazz musicians, he straddles a very blurred line between free jazz and more traditional jazz that i love. and i think he brings a lot of emotion to his playing, to his more avant garde playing too.
i used to have 'free jazz parties' when i lived in Philly, where we would spend hours listening to the most outrageous free jazz and out-there avant garde stuff we could get our hands on. and then as the night went on, we would progress to crazy jamming all night and morning. it was pretty insane because we had over a dozen people on instruments a lot of times, and a very diverse group from excellent musicians to novices. sometimes we would have even 2 dozen people, and it would get so big that you ended up breaking into small groups of players
within the larger whole group. it was a lot of fun.
the Alice Coltrane song you posted is great, and i think a lot of people would call it free jazz. i usually use the term free jazz in a pretty extreme sense though, probably
too extreme, haha. so i tend to associate it with a whole lot less structure. for me, when i think of free jazz i tend to think of something more like John Coltrane's Ascension:
[YOUTUBE="tgrQhBTDfhk"]Ascension - Coltrane[/YOUTUBE]
here is Ornette Coleman improvising on a song i really love:
[YOUTUBE="na_3r_bf5gA"]Dancing In Your Head - Ornette Coleman[/YOUTUBE]