Sp5. How has jazz contributed to freedom?
In his liner notes for the Far East Side Band release of "Caverns," Richard Oyama observes that:
- When Louis Armstrong disparaged bebop as incomprehensible "Chinese music," he could not have foreseen a time—now—when American music would prove to be large, inclusive and resilient enough to encompass not only jazz innovators such as Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but also a brilliant confluence of Asian music and instrumentation, and the freedom of collective improvisation.
- One might even say that it is the music, rather than the body politic, which has fulfilled the promise of the democratic "American experiment" in its boundless capacity to absorb new cultural forms and sounds, and in that way to continually reinvent and revitalize the textures of American music.
Is this really true? Why believe it?
