Free jazz demolished the last supports of traditional jazz. Musicians abandoned a preset harmonic grid, steady metre, and familiar forms, leaving improvisation almost without limits — collective, expressive, at times on the edge of chaos.
Its manifesto was Ornette Coleman's album Free Jazz (1960). The late John Coltrane (Ascension), Cecil Taylor, and Albert Ayler followed this path. Free jazz echoed the academic avant-garde (aleatoric music, sonorism) and permanently expanded the very notion of freedom in music. It also had a social dimension — its “new thing” was linked to the civil-rights movement — while the cosmic visions of Sun Ra pushed the genre's boundaries further still.
