I’ve been on the air in Minneapolis-St. Paul for forty years, and I’ve watched the eulogies for free jazz roll in like snowstorms. In 1965, Down Beat ran a debate between Ornette Coleman and Roy Eldridge asking if jazz was dying at all. The question never stopped. Every decade, critics pronounced free jazz finished—too abstract for listeners, too academic in practice, a musical dead-end that the tradition had already moved past.
Today, in 2025, I’m here to tell you something different. The free jazz tradition is healthier than at any moment since the 1970s. Not mainstream healthier. Not commercially healthier. But alive, multiplying, and serious in its commitment to music that refuses to settle.
What Makes Free Jazz Actual Jazz?
When listeners tell me they don’t like free jazz, they’re usually describing something they heard: a wash of dissonance, the absence of a steady beat, a saxophone screaming in ways that no instrument should scream. But that’s exactly wrong. Free jazz isn’t a sound. It’s a commitment.
The commitment is simple: never let the music’s own conventions become its prison. Ornette Coleman freed harmony from chord progressions. Cecil Taylor freed rhythm from meter. Albert Ayler freed the saxophone from every expectation about what it should sound like. John Coltrane freed the album from the song form’s grip.
What binds these freedoms together isn’t similarity. It’s direction. All of them point toward what hasn’t been played yet, away from what’s already been codified. That’s the actual tradition. That’s what we keep returning to when we want to know who’s doing real work today.
The Philosophies Underneath
Free jazz emerged from a specific historical moment—a refusal, in the early 1960s, to accept jazz as a fixed language. The founding musicians weren’t trying to destroy jazz. They were trying to save it from becoming a museum piece. That distinction matters, because it explains why the tradition is still productive sixty years later.
The musicians I hear today aren’t recreating Coleman or Taylor. They’re extending the refusal. They’re asking: what can this instrument do that we haven’t asked it to do yet? What can this ensemble discover about itself if we remove the predictable structures? That’s a living tradition, not a historical one.
Who Is Extending the Tradition Right Now?
Matana Roberts has been central to the free jazz conversation for two decades, and her work remains some of the most formally inventive saxophone music being produced. Her approach to improvisation draws from the extended technique tradition but also from her own research into Black diaspora sound and memory. Her COIN COIN series is a sprawling investigation into improvisation’s relationship to history and voice—uncompromising work that doesn’t court commercial audiences but builds something far more important: a permanent space for radical sonic inquiry.
Mary Halvorson extends the free jazz tradition through guitar—an instrument that free jazz has historically marginalized. Her approach to harmony is rooted in the same fundamental freedom that Coleman applied to the saxophone: she plays the right note, where “right” means true to the musical moment rather than to the expected chord. Her ensembles with Chris Lightcap, Tomas Fujita, and others have included some of the most distinctive improvisers of the current generation.
Irreversible Entanglements, anchored by vocalist Camae Ayewa and saxophonist Keir Neuringer alongside bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes, represents the most visible flag-carrying of the tradition in the mid-2020s. Their combination of Ayewa’s voice—ranging from spoken word to wordless utterance—with dual reeds, bass, and drums produces music that is politically and formally explicit in ways that would have been recognizable to Archie Shepp.
Their album Protect Your Light (2024, International Anthem) reached number three on the Billboard Contemporary Jazz chart—a rare commercial moment for music that refuses to compromise on what free actually means.
Their work doesn’t exist in a sterile experimental vacuum. It connects directly to Black activist discourse, community-making, and the insistence that music is a tool for social refusal. Ayewa’s leadership is central to understanding what the tradition looks like in 2025: women at the center, not the margins.
Who Else Is Working
Nate Wooley is making some of the most formally rigorous free trumpet music currently being produced. His work with extended technique and composition-improvisation hybrids places him in direct conversation with the AACM tradition while being entirely his own voice. His engagement with notation and structure—combined with his commitment to pure improvisational freedom—shows that these aren’t opposite poles. They’re tools to be deployed together.
Ken Vandermark has been one of the central figures in Chicago’s free jazz scene for thirty years and remains extraordinarily productive. His work with the Resonance Ensemble, his collaborations with European musicians, and his tireless documentation of the tradition demonstrates what commitment over decades actually looks like. He’s less visible than some younger players, but his archive of recordings and his mentorship have shaped the current generation.
The Comet Is Coming are British and younger, integrating free jazz idioms with electronic music and funk. They’ve reached audiences that traditional free jazz venues never accessed, which some debate as dilution or evolution depending on where you stand on such questions. But they’ve also shown that free jazz doesn’t live in one sonic world anymore.
Where Can You Actually Hear This Stuff?
The institutional infrastructure supporting free jazz in 2025 is more robust than at any point since the 1970s loft scene. International Anthem in Chicago, founded in 2014 with now over 80 releases in its catalog, is arguably the most important free jazz label operating today. Catalytic Sound functions as a musician-run cooperative with over 30 artists, operating as distribution network, collective, and community all at once. Blank Forms, operating out of a 120-seat venue in Brooklyn, documents and releases recordings from the experimental end of the tradition—preserving work that might otherwise vanish.
Live, the music exists where it always has: small rooms of 50 to 200 seats, arts spaces, places where commercial viability has been relieved by institutional support or dedicated communities. Big Ears Festival in Knoxville draws over 15,000 attendees annually. Le Guess Who? in Utrecht and Moers Festival in Germany (running since 1972, over 50 editions) serve similar functions in Europe. Active scenes operate in New York, Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. Minneapolis has several dedicated spaces, though we could always use more.
Contemporary Free Jazz Artists, Albums & Labels
| Artist | Recent Album | Year | Label | City |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Matana Roberts | COIN COIN Chapter Ten: Genocide | 2021 | Constellation | Brooklyn |
| Mary Halvorson | Saturn Using Kabl Artemis | 2023 | Firehouse 12 | New Haven |
| Irreversible Entanglements | Protect Your Light | 2024 | International Anthem | Chicago |
| Nate Wooley | The Green Pen Sessions | 2023 | Firehouse 12 | New Haven |
| Ken Vandermark & Resonance Ensemble | Chicago Underground Duo | 2023 | Atavistic | Chicago |
| The Comet Is Coming | Do Not Assume | 2023 | Impulse! | London |
| Jorja Chalmers | Towards Space | 2023 | Blank Forms | Brooklyn |
| Avery Sharpe Trio | Beyond Tomorrow | 2024 | Steeplechase | New York |
What Has Actually Shifted Since the 1970s?
The relationship between free jazz and recording technology has changed in ways the founding generation couldn’t have imagined. Digital recording removed the session-cost barrier that made free jazz records expensive propositions for labels. Streaming means a record released on International Anthem reaches the same potential audiences as a Blue Note release.
But the core relationship between the music and its listener hasn’t changed. Free jazz still demands attention. It still rewards repeated listening far more than passive background consumption. It still functions best when heard live, in a room, with other people who have made the deliberate choice to be present for it.
What Has Stayed True
Here’s what I know from forty years on the air: the musicians playing free jazz today are not maintaining a historical practice. They’re extending a living one, which is infinitely harder. Every album, every performance, every session requires the same commitment the founding generation made—to insist that the music not become convention, that freedom remain the point, that what hasn’t been played yet is more important than what’s already established.
That refusal is the tradition. That’s what connects Ornette Coleman in 1959 to Matana Roberts in 2024. Not a sound. Not a style. A commitment to music as an ongoing argument with itself about what freedom actually means.
The tradition is sixty years old. It shows no signs of resolution. If anything, it’s accelerating.
Explore more in our free jazz collection.
