Free Jazz

I love free jazz. At least, I love the idea of free jazz. The basic concept is to freely improvise whatever you want. Ultimately, it's an open conversation between musicians. There's little, if any, preconceived notions of what is going to be said, but when done well the end result will speak volumes. The problem is many musicians don't really know how to listen and you get the equivalent to one of those conversations where everybody keeps changing the subject back to themselves and talking over each other. When you consider that most people don't even know how to listen to jazz when it's played straight ahead, never leaving the form and rarely going too far outside the chord changes, it's a wonder anybody ever decided to take things further.