Cheap admission and open participation drew overflowing crowds to jazz avant-garde.

Evidence

Admission was one dollar. Only musicians without current gigs were invited to play—twenty-three combos and soloists in all. A student reporter for the Columbia Spectator was thrilled. The Village scene was passé, he wrote, “musician’s jazz, it seems, may be heading uptown once again.” The Cellar’s capacity was around ninety but, as A. B. Spellman would write in The Nation, “the attendance was far greater than anyone expected … Hundreds of people were turned away.” The cream of the avant-garde—Coleman, Taylor, and Archie Shepp—were in the audience. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 577

Categorization

• SEED: The one-dollar admission, no-gig requirement, and overflow crowd is a concrete data point for the material-conditions argument: what it took to generate density of avant-garde activity.