The Simply Complicated

It was as if seeds bearing blood had penetrated deep within the earth’s soil that bloomed electric forces; “Flower power”, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis continued to propagate the “process of liberation” into the next decade.   

   

 

                     The period was bursting with violence, war and destruction that would forever stain the common fabrics of U.S. American “normality”.  The prominent jazz bass “virtuoso”, Charles Mingus once said that “anyone can make the simple complicated. Creativity is making the complicated simple.” One of United States history’s most significant decades, the 1960’s, can “simply” be described as a time of complication.

Racial and economic classifications and other social concepts were on the cusp of societal and political divergence. People were on either side united in opposing groups.  These modern phenomena brought about the avant-garde jazz sounds of “free-tonality”.  The sonic intensity dynamically absorbed the nation; free-jazz was selflessly filling the emptiness in the people attached to the array of social turmoil current in the U.S.  It was a platform that made room for common grounds.  Musicians Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Art Blakey, Ornete Coleman, and other 1960’s jazz greats creatively manipulated the nation’s international “ugliness” and made it attractive. “Free-jazz is an illusion” neither simple nor complicated, beats forged pulses and rhythms evolved into “free-playing”.

“Free-jazz” was introduced to the world in the 1960’s. “The style must be listened to without this need for self-affirmation. The music does not follow the listener anymore; the listener must follow the music. They transposed in off-pattern dynamics that overshadowed, the traditional European-fashioned ways of playing and listening to music.  “Leading jazz musicians claimed an affinity between their music and radical politics; […] ‘new thing’, ‘free jazz’, ‘energy music’ – suggested revolutionary hopes”.  

1950’s be-bop musician, trumpeter Miles Davis, was a trend-setter on the “smooth” jazz scene (“smooth” refers to the mellow mood quality of that particular jazz sound); until the turn of the century when society’s visions and creative expressions collided. Jazz and society were at a stage of freedom. “The people” moved in a “by any means necessary”, very avant-garde tenor. The “charlatans” swung in harmony with the movement.  A screaming manifestation of sounds surged throughout the world. The music was an expression of the causes and effects extant during a decade bearing turbulent environments. “Musicians play because of the world around them and what goes on […], and don’t forget there was a lot of violence in the 60’s.” 

As jazz musicians moved further away from composing European-style quality tunes, many also began finding double standards in the European derived Christian religion.  “Whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church.” Yusef Lateef, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Art Blakey are among some of the jazz musicians who began to embrace Islam.

The Muslim religion sparked their fascination with Arabic and Indian music. Jazz music adopted traditional elements from a panorama of worldly ingredients. This convergence of “spiritual unity to complete communion and communication with the globe as a unity- and, through that, love, and peace for everybody and salvation in pan-religious ecstasy… cosmic ascension and elation to mythological suns and nebulae and heliocentric worlds” expanded the fields.

Ornette Coleman made Peace in 1959. John Coltrane introduced A Love Supreme in 1965. Yusef Lateef blended Japanese, Chinese and Egyptian elements to play the blues, producing a record titled The Golden Flute; A flat, G flat, and C in 1966. In this piece, Lateefs’ flute dances over the raga like a charmer entices his cobra to dance out of a basket. Miles Davis worked with Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea to record Filles de Kilimanjaro in 1968.  All of these works were designed using the essentials of the world harmony, “free-jazz” approach.

 The influential acoustics during the 1960’s included powerful voices. President John F. Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcom X, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. publicly addressed social injustices and lead in the call for equality and civil rights for all humankind universally. Their calls were answered to by rallying allies as well as assassins. In 1970 improvised electronics blended with rock rhythms and pitched “Fusion or jazz-rock”.

It was a new approach to the musical abstract, as theoretical as the ensuing Vietnam War. It was as if seeds bearing blood had penetrated deep within the earth’s soil that bloomed electric forces; “Flower power”, Jimi Hendrix and Miles Davis continued to propagate the “process of liberation” into the next decade.