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ekkehard jost 13 / THE EUROPEAN JAZZ AVANT-GARDE OF THE LATE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S WHERE DID EMANCIPATION LEAD? W riting jazz history—as with any other kind of historiography—necessitates a reliance on documentation. What cannot be verified by written sources or recordings will either fall into oblivion or be consigned to mythology. Something recalled by a contemporary may be rather vague, whether glorified by nostalgia or distorted by failing memory: Did Buddy Bolden really play that loud? What exactly happened when bebop was ‘‘invented’’ at Minton’s Playhouse? Was the Swiss saxophonist Werner ‘‘Barbu’’ Lüdi really an unrecognized pioneer of free jazz in Germany, or did someone else in Wanne-Eickel, Itzehoe, or wherever start it earlier? Is it true that, from as early as 1957, the ‘‘Reform Art Unit’’ in Vienna were playing a form of music that, as they have claimed, omitted all conventional principles of musical creation∞ —and, if so, how important was that in the development of avant-garde jazz in Europe? In general, our presumptions about history imply that any event not publicized will not be accepted as part of history. Almost from the very start, jazz has been publicized through the mass media: articles in magazines, radio broadcasts, and— most important—recordings. Anyone or anything not documented through any of these media channels was almost automatically eliminated from the process of historical reflection. As regrettable as this may seem, it is a fact we cannot overlook. If we accept that statements made about music that has long since faded away— especially music for which no written scores exist and large portions of which cannot be pinned down by scores—are necessarily filtered by memory and saturated with personal preferences that cannot be controlled a posteriori, we soon realize that the gap between past and present needs to be bridged by analyzing significant documents from the past—in our case, mainly recordings. Recorded musical documents (records, broadcasts, etc.) are, however, subject to the mechanics of selection. This is an important truth, especially if we want to address the earliest phase of European free jazz. Usually, record companies are profitoriented and mostly interested in recordings with potential for quick profit. Since few people in the record business believed European free jazz would become a commercial success, documentation of the music was initially sparse. A more 276 e k k e h a r d j o s t complete picture of what went on at the time only began to emerge as musical cooperatives such as fmp, incus, and icp started to make their own recordings— that is, when an increasing number of musicians turned to recording the music themselves. In addition to these objective, formal restrictions, there are subjective factors to consider. In the earliest years of free jazz in Europe, I observed the music’s development with my own eyes and ears, particularly in West Germany and West Berlin. I regularly attended the ‘‘Free Music Workshops’’ at the Academy of Arts in Berlin and the ‘‘Total Music Meetings’’ in the Quartier Latin, but I could neither listen to the sessions held at the Little Theatre Club in London nor experience the Free Jazz Workshop de Lyon or the Lille Jazz Action. I was generally aware of the self-recordings by musicians in my own country but knew less about those in Scandinavia or Great Britain. Therefore, my personal view of the way free jazz developed in Europe could be considered ‘‘ethnocentric,’’ and if I place more emphasis on one event or another, it may be due to my own geographical location. Yet another limitation on plotting this history is subjective but in a more general sense: listening to records as an objective documentation of music does not mean this alone enables able us to write history objectively. Anyone claiming an ability to describe objective facts without letting even a tinge of personal opinion intrude is inevitably caught in a kind of naive positivism. The act of selection itself—what an author chooses to write about—is based on the author’s own opinion, what he or she thinks is or is not worth writing about, and thus depends on the author’s own valuations. As such, I cannot conceal from the reader that my approach to analyzing the structural elements of free jazz in Europe is embedded in my own subjective experiences. All this, of course, is quite normal and not very new. But in...

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