Avant-Garde Jazz

Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. Avant-jazz often sounds very similar to free jazz, but differs in that, despite its distinct departure from traditional harmony, it has a predetermined structure over which improvisation may take place. This structure may be composed note for note in advance, partially or even completely.

The origins of avant-garde jazz are in the innovations of the immediate acolytes of Charlie Parker. Based in New York City, now-canonical musicians such as Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane introduced modal improvisation and experimented with atonality and dissonance. Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman became a new vanguard of controversial jazz innovators, outside the range of what many fans considered listenable.

This description is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses materials from the Wikipedia article "Avant-garde jazz".