Free Jazz’s radicalism consisted of group improvisation without stated head or tune

Evidence

Controversy over Gitler’s notice resulted in a two-issue Down Beat symposium on racial prejudice and the magazine was obliged to deal with another controversy with the September 1961 release of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz. The magazine ran two reviews—positive and negative—of an LP as radical in its way as Lincoln’s gut-wrenching screams in We Insist! and no less insistent on liberation. Spellman concluded his Kulchur #5 essay with praise of the LP’s existential, emancipatory quality: “Free Jazz beat the New Orleans method of group improvisation by starting out without head or tune, without even stating a word, thus forcing each man to use his entire store of musical materials.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 327