ABSTRACT
Free jazz is a disruptive child in the musical family: the one who insists on being contrary wherever possible, unwilling to be polite at the dinner table, most likely to be angry and frustrated with her siblings; the sort of child about whom adults despair because they know full well that should she decide to, she could play very nicely with the other children but is unlikely to pay heed. As "Dark Wing Duck" so eloquently puts it: any other music is better than jazz: Jazz is crap. It is the expressively stunted, coldly artificial meandering of narcissistic pseudo-intellectual poseurs. It is to music as flatulence is to oratory. Most work on free jazz examines it in isolation, often with an air of exclusivity, often bestowing a sacrosanct infallibility to the narratives and memoirs of the musicians themselves or interpreting the music through the aegis of an academically approved theoretical framework insisted on by musicologists.
