Free jazz, and the related subgenre of avant-garde jazz, grew out of bebop. Free jazz placed even less emphasis upon formal composition and chord structures, discarding such conventions as fixed chord changes or tempos and allowing soloists a wider improvisational latitude. Although the music made various free jazz practitioners covered a wide musical range, the musicians shared a desire to break with the formal structures established by bebop, hard bop, and modal jazz.
One of the earliest free jazz innovators was iconoclastic saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose daring—and, at the time, controversial—late-’50s and early-’60s work was most jazz listeners’ introduction to free jazz. Indeed, it was the title of Coleman’s 1960 LP Free Jazz that was adopted by critics to describe the visionary approach of Coleman and his similarly inclined contemporaries. Pianist Cecil Taylor was another early free jazz pioneer, and the free jazz ethos was soon adopted by such notable musicians as Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Pharaoh Sanders and Archie Shepp.
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