Into The Music
Free jazz has always had an image problem. The phrase itself does most of the work: “free” implies difficult, difficult implies inaccessible, inaccessible implies not for you. For decades, that reputation kept avant-garde jazz in a particular cultural corner, the province of academic music departments, late-night listening sessions among the converted, and record store bins that only the initiated dared to dig through. Something is shifting now, and the shift is audible in where the music is landing and who is paying attention.
The most visible evidence is Irreversible Entanglements, the collective led by Moor Mother, whose new album Future Present Past dropped on the legendary Impulse! label this week. Impulse! is not an accidental address. That label released John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in 1964 and has been the spiritual home of American avant-garde jazz ever since. The fact that a contemporary free jazz collective is releasing music there in 2026 and getting reviewed by mainstream music publications is not nothing.
But the broader shift predates any single release. The past five years have seen free jazz and experimental improvised music find new audiences through a combination of factors that would have seemed unlikely in the genre’s earlier eras. Streaming has created discovery channels that do not care about categorical boundaries the way that record stores and radio formats did. A listener who finds their way to Kamasi Washington through a playlist algorithm is two steps from Alice Coltrane and three steps from Pharoah Sanders. That path was possible in the past, but it required either a guide or a very well-stocked record collection. Now it is the algorithm doing the guiding, and the audiences following it are younger and more genre-fluid than any previous generation of jazz listeners.
The London scene has been particularly important here. The cluster of musicians who came up around venues like Cafe OTO and labels like Brownswood Recordings in the 2010s produced artists who moved comfortably between free improvisation, grime, electronic production, and experimental hip-hop. Nubya Garcia, Moses Boyd, Shabaka Hutchings, and their various collaborators made music that was rooted in jazz tradition but completely uninterested in sounding traditional. The BBC and streaming platforms covered them. The audiences who came in through those doors did not have the old genre gatekeeping in their heads.
In the United States, the Chicago and Los Angeles scenes have been running parallel experiments. The AACM, which has been doing this work since the 1960s, suddenly finds itself with new institutional recognition that was not there a decade ago. Artists like Makaya McCraven, who blends live improvisation with hip-hop production methods, have landed press that would have been inconceivable for a jazz drummer fifteen years ago.
What free jazz actually is, for the uninitiated: it emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a reaction against the conventions that bebop had established. If bebop had liberalized jazz from swing’s constraints, free jazz liberalized it from bebop’s. The idea was that melody, harmony, rhythm, and structure were all available for interrogation rather than assumption. Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come in 1959 and Coltrane’s Ascension in 1965 are the canonical starting points, records that still sound genuinely startling if you have not heard them. They are not background music. They demand something from you.
That demand is part of what has always limited the genre’s mass appeal, and part of what makes the current moment interesting. The listeners finding their way to contemporary free jazz are not doing so despite the challenge, but because of it. In a moment when so much mainstream music is engineered for passive consumption, music that requires active listening feels like it is offering something different. Whether that appetite sustains into something more permanent, or whether this is a cyclical moment that will fade back into the margins, is the question worth watching. The music being made right now is good enough to hope the former.
The ‘image problem’ framing in the lede is worth interrogating , free jazz has never been inaccessible, it’s been actively kept inaccessible by gatekeepers who decided it required credentials. Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler were making music in direct dialogue with Black American life in the 1960s, and the ‘difficult’ label was frequently deployed to keep that music from finding the audiences it was actually speaking to. The current moment is interesting precisely because streaming and social media have disrupted those gatekeeping mechanisms. The music was always ready for people; it was the institutions that were in the way.