Richard Gilman-Opalsky

“Freejazz reaches back to what jazz was originally, rebelling against the ultra-sophisticated art form it has become.”

--Archie Shepp

Freejazz, according to the great tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, is a rebellion against the bourgeois world of “high art.” It is a music that self-consciously identifies as a kind of sonic insurrection, both within and against music itself. It makes good sense to begin this article with a quote from Shepp.

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In the existing world, largely governed by the logic of capital and the pathologies of accumulation, real madness is the absence of revolt.

Wherever revolt is absent in the world today, we should worry about human health and sanity. A society that does not revolt against a social order that damages it with such escalating facility--psychologically, collectively, ecologically--is a society at the terminal stage.

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