The bastard love child of no wave and free jazz is real
by Marshall Bowden
Punk Jazz is a ghost genre, an archeological dig through the decades to find the place where the anarchic, DIY ethos of punk meets free jazz. From its birth in New York City, the bastard love child of the brief No Wave movement and the city’s free jazz/loft jazz community, punk jazz has existed on the fringes and in the shadows of popular music. From the post punk work of groups like Pigbag, The Pop Group, and The Birthday Party through connections to the European free jazz community via Rip Rig + Panic and Neneh Cherry, to Scandinavian improvisors like The Thing. the ideas. influences, and spirit of punk jazz is unmistakable.
The story of New York’s late seventies No Wave movement is only partially the story of punk jazz. Post economic collapse, NYC became an abandoned ghost town that was a laboratory for creative artists and musicians without the means to live in the city under normal circumstances. That situation led to the development of punk rock and its performance spaces like CBGBs and the Mudd Club, a scene that had already matured by 1977, when many of the resident bands had signed record contracts, released albums, and gone out on national or regional tours. No New York was a bit of a reaction to that as well as the sublimation of punk by the burgeoning New Wave scene fostered by record companies.
No New York artists attempted to play music that did not follow basic 1950s rock norms (guitar based, blues based, song structure). Sometimes that resulted in noise (DNA , Mars, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks), but there quickly developed a second wave of groups–some composed of the ashes of previous No Wave bands–that was influenced by free jazz blowing and the confluence of poetry, jazz, and urban film noir imagery. These included Lydia Lunch’s Eight Eyed Spy and John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards. James Chance and The Contortions had been around since the start of No Wave, and they mined a more R&B dance territory, but Chance’s incendiary bursts of Albert Ayler-inspired blowing put him solidly in the jazz punk camp.
Free jazz and punk rock are like mirrors held up to each other, each exaggerating certain elements of the other while shading out other things entirely. Whereas free jazz musicians were often trained (sometimes informally) jazz musicians who chose to play outside the confines of jazz music tradition as well as recent developments, punk jazz artists were typically non-musicians (initially) who had both an ear for music and a strong interest in jazz or in exploring musical ideas beyond traditional rock. Both genres tend to emphasize simple, folk-derived melodies as well as techniques on horns, particularly the saxophone, that approximate the human voice’s ability to wail, moan, exclaim, speak, pray, and otherwise convey emotion outside of any technical considerations.
The post punk punk jazz groups that emerged in the U.K. around 1979 were influenced by the experimentation that was taking place in New York City, but they also had other role models for involving horns in pop music, the most obvious being ska and reggae. All the British Ska bands had a horn section of some kind–Specials, Madness, The Selecter, Bad Manners, Members, UB40, so that style of unison horn playing lines heard on Pigbag records, for example, is second nature to British listeners. To American listeners it sometimes sounds a bit like a marching band, which harkens back to Albert Ayler, patron saint of punk jazz.
The roots of what became punk jazz in the No New York years was sowed earlier in New York’s musical history, with the free jazz movement of John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, and especially Albert Ayler. Coleman was a large influence, especially his focus on melody over harmonic development, but Ayler pushed the boundaries between jazz and popular music as much as any musician at the time. Ayler moved to New York City from Cleveland and immersed himself in the city’s free jazz scene. He worked to develop his unique instrumental voice, frequently inspired by spirituals, folk songs, and New Orleans marching music. In 1966 he sent for his brother Donald to move to NYC and play trumpet in his band. Donald was a largely unschooled, visceral trumpet player who would have been out of his element in many bands, but who turned out to be the perfect support for his brother.
Two years later Ayler was recording New Grass, a record that puts his saxophone work in a more blues-oriented context and which destroyed his credentials with the free jazz movement. Ayler’s body was found in the East River in November of 1970, the year that John Lurie turned eighteen. Ayler’s music gained status with young musicians in the years after his death. He was an outsider to the New York jazz world, much more so than Ornette Coleman. But Coleman’s band Prime Time, which debuted in 1975, sounded very much like what some of the No New York and ZE Records acts were arriving at as well: a danceable base (funk, fractured disco) with harmolodic improvisation over top, resulting in what sounds like dance club free jazz.
Europe welcomed many American jazz artists in the early seventies, and some chose to make their homes in European countries. The continent developed its own free jazz artists including well known names such as Peter Brotzmann, Hans Bennink, Evan Parker, and others. These artists collaborated with other musicians from across the musical spectrum, and many maintained an attitude that could be considered ‘punk’ in the truest sense–uncompromising, unconcerned with marketplace considerations, DIY.
One artist who chose to live in Europe for many years was Don Cherry, who first came to prominence playing in Ornette Coleman’s band. Cherry began to incorporate elements of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian music in his work. One of his daughters, Neneh, became part of Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith’s (both formerly of The Pop Group) collective Rip Rig + Panic. The band’s debut, God, combined free jazz/free improvisation with punk, funk, and reggae. The record was a ‘genre ender’ as it is difficult to adequately describe its boundaries and it sounds like little that has come before or after–but it is definitely punk jazz.
Neneh Cherry went on to have an eclectic recording career, successfully managing stylistic twists and turns through hip hop, electronica, dance music, and trip hop. Trip hop is also a very jazz influenced genre, something like the opposite of punk jazz, and Cherry has proven adept at that style as well. In 2012 she recorded The Cherry Thing, a record on which she collaborated on new material with The Thing, a Scandanavian free jazz trio who has collaborated with a variety of artists as well as recording their own work. As younger free jazz musicians, they have been influenced not only by the original wave of free jazz, but by subsequent developments in the U.K. and other European countries, which is far from homogenous. They have also been influenced by rock and popular music, and that means they are conversant with the many inflections of punk jazz that have popped up, ensuring that pockets of punk jazz will continue to simmer, boil up, and occasionally erupt into public view.