Free Improvisation

Emerging in the UK, US, and Europe through the mid-to-late 1960s out of free jazz and contemporary classical music — including the influence of serialism and indeterminacy — free improvisation commits to what Derek Bailey called “playing without memory,” with no stylistic or idiomatic commitment to any preexisting genre. Where free jazz retained much of jazz’s own harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary, free improvisation abandons idiomatic structure more radically, building instead on timbre, texture, and spontaneous real-time interaction between players. AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble were among the pioneering groups to establish the practice.