[Dixielandjazz] FREE JAZZ AND

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

I suppose one of the occasions of "Free Jazz" starting up was the horrendous attenuation of notions of jazz from which everybody suffers, the legend that there once was dixieland and then there was bop, and that that was that until the era of Trane clones...
And what was supposedly new was yet another of an astonishing number of failures to reinvent the wheel... 
More seriously:
What about Don Ellis's comment on Henry Allen as the most avant-garde trumpeter in New York  . . .   and Bill Russell's analyses of Jim Robinson's rhythms....
 
And then there was Stan Tracey, who has reminisced about giving up playing for small audiences and going "free jazz" and playing for nobody at all, and his mordant reflection that one night when he was actually on television (Public Service Broadcasting!) performing this stuff, somewhere else in London his friend Paul Gonsalves might that night have turned on a television set and seen and heard Stan doing this stuff, highly uncongenial to Gonsalves, and ... actually that was the night Paul Gonsalves died....