The avant-garde movement in jazz in the 1960's was a period in music that was marked by several specific traits. The United States in the 60's was going through rapid changes socially, and having some major political changes also. In this paper, I would like to follow the development of the avant-garde movement, from the very causes of the movement to avant-garde from the "Modality" and "3rd Stream" periods, all the way through to the major innovators of the period. Also included in my discussion will be the social and political changes facing the nation in the 1960's, the philosophy that the avant-garde movement was based on, and the ways that musicians tested fellow musicians on the "validity" of this "free jazz" period.

In the 1960's the country saw a sweeping change in the social system. The strong family values of the 1950's began to become very "loose". The country was taking major strides in its development. It was said that "The 1960's was a decade where old values went up in smoke and new sounds symbolized a new state of mind (Time Video)." As the country changed so rapidly, there were both high and low spots in history. For example, the country came together a

There were more changes sweeping the nation, in the sounds of the changing music industry. The smooth sounds in mainstream music of the early 1960's began to fall to the rock-and-roll music of the mid 1960's. This led to a society of young people that turned to a freer lifestyle, and increased drug use, and eventually a major event bringing together a large group of young Americans to show their disapproval with the "traditional" America, and the one they preferred, at the Woodstock Festival. In jazz, the music styles also changed with the feelings of the nation.

The country saw another great American in the 1960's: John F. Kennedy. As the country was enjoying a rather prosperous beginning of the decade, the young and good-looking Kennedy held the presidency. Kennedy was charismatic, and brought hopes of good times to the nation, and promised our advancing as the dominant world power over Russia. Unfortunately, like King, Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The deaths of these two men held the country together in one common emotion... grief.

Although jazz was still not considered to be mainstream, it was in a different situation than in previous periods. "Jazz, by the onset of the 1960's, had earned unprecedented artistic recognition as well as economic security. It had taken a long time, and there were still several areas in which an improvement in the esthetic approach to the music was desperately needed. Jazz, at the end of it's sixth decade, recognized at last as America's one true native contribution to the arts, was clearly within reach of the two goals towards which it had been striving with so little success for many frustrating years: security and maturity (Feather 51)." Again showing the revolutionary and emotional spirit of jazz and the surprising success of the avant-garde period is the following quote; "For a time it seemed as if experimentation and revolution might lead to musical anarchy, but by the 1970's the avant-garde had once again begun to draw on the rich tradition of jazz, with world folk music as an additional source (Collier's Encyclopedia 518)."

Feather, Leonard. The New Edition of The Encyclopedia of Jazz. New York:

"The Vietnam War was highly unpopular with the American people. Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson lost the election to Republican Richard M. Nixon. Young people carried on anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic convention in Chicago. The high expenditures for war influenced inflation that gripped our country. In the mid 1960's we saw the construction industry hard hit as war spending drove up mortgage interest rates. By the early 1970's, the inflation was the worst the nation had experienced since the years just after World War II (Encyclopedia Americana V.28, 112h)."

Then the slowing of the revolutionary spirit of the 1960's began to come to an end, with global problems facing the nation in the 1970's. The age of this free, improvisational jazz expressing the feelings of the nation in times of rejoice and mourning was coming to a close rather quickly. Social problems such as unemployment and the oil crisis made Americans move back to a more traditional lifestyle. "Within a few years of Coltrane's passing, the storm quieted. By the early 1970's, it had become clear that the period of rapid and sometimes almost overpowering change in jazz had come to an end. In its place came a period of what might be called 'peaceful coexistence' of many kinds of jazz (Ploski 1199-1200)." So came the end to the avant-garde period, but in our historical remembrance of it, we can never f

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Approximate Word count = 2412
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)