European free jazz

As the British drummer Eddie Prévost, of long-standing improvising ensemble AMM, has put it, 'the music of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler gave us permission to disobey.

[3] Germans played a form of free jazz that had something in common with the aleatoric music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann and was performed by Derek Bailey, Joachim Kuhn, Albert Mangelsdorff, Manfred Schoof, John Surman, and Alexander von Schlippenbach.

[7] "A number of jazz musicians migrated to other parts of the world, where they received an opposite response, being considered the ultimate expression of high culture.

The social context in both cases included a reaction by musicians against a mainstream jazz culture they felt to be colluding with an oppressive Western hegemony that was intrinsically racist, historically imperialistic and exploitive, venally decadent and vicious as its power was challenged".

[10] Due in part to the provocative nature of the music as well as the freedom it granted both the musician and the listener, many Europeans associated the backlash toward American society conveyed in free jazz with the counter-culture and anti-imperialist movements in Europe during the late 1960s.

The music under the "free-jazz" rubric – that of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Sun Ra and their bands, to name the major pioneers with the most impact in Europe – ignited the jazz scenes there in the mid-to-late 1960s.

The subsequent free-jazz movement in their countries was linked to the events and spirit of the 1968 student protests and riots in Paris and Berlin (the " '68ers") as it was to new assertions of black identity in America.

The racial conflict specific to the United States translated in Europe to an international radical leftism – one with a youthful white more than an angry black face – hostile to Western imperialistic capitalism and faux-culture.

"Reflecting their diverse backgrounds, these musicians often blend personal narrative reminiscent of an Afrological perspective with some sonic imagery characteristic of European forms spanning several centuries".

The following year he toured Europe in a quintet led by Mike Mantler and Carla Bley, and they began an association with the Globe Unity Orchestra that lasted until 1981".

[15] In Germany some of the second generation free jazz players came from a more European music background, like Georg Gräwe, Theo Jörgensmann, or Hannes Bauer.

[26] During this time, there were fears that if free jazz was only considered as a mechanism for political commentary, that it would lose its validity as an art form, or at worst, be subject to censorship by European governments.