Kwami Coleman

Kwami Coleman,
Stanford University

Kwami Coleman is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at Stanford University and an adjunct instructor at Vassar College. Kwami’s dissertation, titled The ‘Second Quintet’: Miles Davis and Change, 1959-1967, explores the quintet’s use of free improvisation in light of the musical innovations of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane and other musicians in the early 1960s. A pianist by training, Kwami is also active as a musician in New York City.

Talk Title: The New Thing & The Blue Thing: Free Improvisation, Mainstream Jazz and the Jazz Avant-Garde Reconsidered

The jazz avant-garde of the 1960s is typically portrayed as a radical break in the stylistic constellation of jazz history. Critics and jazz historians alike have presented the music of artists like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor as decisive movements away from tradition, evolving as a separate entity from mainstream jazz. This paper explores an alternate view by considering the varied applications of free improvisation in and out of the jazz mainstream. It explains how free improvisation was applied as an extension of musical thought in jazz – a sonic rupture that can suggest a radical continuity, not divergence.

This paper’s title is taken from Ted Curson’s 1965 LP where free improvisation interfaces with familiar forms like the blues. What links the music by Curson (whom critic Nat Hentoff describes as a “member of the avant-garde”) to that of Coleman, Taylor and well-established veterans like John Coltrane and Miles Davis, is a flexible approach to musical structure, improvisation, timbre, and expression. ‘Freedom’ though achieved through various means, as this paper will explore, was a central quality in this period’s most innovative music.

WEB LINK: http://humsci.stanford.edu/faces/story/kwami_coleman