ABSTRACT
Avant-garde jazz, since its first moments of emergence, has been intimately linked with, and described through, images of progress, radical change and new frontiers. Early forms of jazz were shaped by the encounters between an essentially oral musical culture and modernity as defined by the new technologies of recording. In the words of Bernard Gendron, it is bebop that gets credit in the jazz canon for being the first modernist jazz, the first jazz avant-garde, the first jazz form in which art transcends entertainment. Modern jazz is an instrumental music, at times casually referred to as abstract. Anthony Braxton's first recording was the compositions of New Jazz, released on the specialist new jazz label Delmark in 1968. Free Jazz is subtitled a Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. The prevalence of saxophone and trumpet within this spectrum may always draw the music back into a recognizable jazz sound world.
