Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation

Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation is an album by jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, recorded in 1960. The original release embodied a painting by Jackson Pollock, on the front of the cover. It involves two separate quartets, one to each stereo channel; the rhythm sections play simultaneously, and though there is a succession of solos as is usual in jazz, they are peppered with freeform commentaries by the other horns that often turn into full-scale collective improvisation. The pre-composed material is a series of brief, dissonant fanfares for the horns which serve as interludes between solos. Not least among the album's achievements was that it was the first LP-length improvisation, nearly forty minutes in length, which was unheard of at the time. It served as the blueprint for later large-ensemble free jazz recordings such as John Coltrane's Ascension and Peter Brötzmann's Machine Gun.