Avant garde (1960s) ...........................................................................
With the civil unrest of the 1960s came a slew of brand new types of musical
expression, including a brand new form of jazz. The avant garde/free jazz
movement encouraged composers to find their own path in music and find
their own true individual voice, instead of following the styles and rules of
jazz that had come before. In a lot of ways, the only reason that these musi-
cians were considered jazz performers at all was because they used jazz
instruments (specifically the whole family of horns), and many critics at the
time declared that these pioneers really weren’t jazz musicians — and even
that the atonal, arrhythmic soundscapes they created wasn’t even music.Building on what composers Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane
had started the previous decade with their own forays into improvisational
and modal jazz, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphy, and
Sun Ra stretched the definition of jazz with raw energy and seeming on-the-
spot spontaneous performances that challenged everything that had previ-
ously been expected of music. Present-day free jazz artists worth checking
out include the amazing John Zorn, Mark Feldman, Dave Douglas, and
Tim Berne.Rock ...............................................................................................................
Rock and roll is now more than 60 years old and still going strong. Its influ-
ence on popular music has been so pervasive that some of the more interest-
ing corners of it have been forgotten. Here we mention just a few of these.Krautrock.............................................................................................
In case you didn’t guess it already, Krautrock was German rock. Specifically, it
was a style of experimental German rock from the 1960s and 1970s, dubbed
Krautrockderogatorily by the English press, who were still not open to any-
thing coming out of Germany.Just as free jazz was called jazzmostly because of the instrumentation
involved, Krautrock was considered rockbecause it used the guitar/bass/
percussion dynamic of a rock band. The music, though, drew heavily on
minimalism and other experimental classical music forms. It sometimes
used electronic instruments to give the music a powerfully stark and
machine-driven feel and sound.284 Part V: The Part of Tens