‘I almost always play it in hiding, alone’: can anyone get into free jazz, history’s most maligned music?

In the 1980s, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore asked his friend, the writer Byron Coley, to furnish him with a selection of jazz tapes to listen to on tour. Moore had experienced New York’s fabled avant-garde jazz loft scene first-hand in the late 1970s but “wasn’t so clued in”, he says. “Perhaps I was too young and too preoccupied by the flurry of activity in punk and no wave.” Now, he was keen to learn more.

View image in fullscreen ‘Freedom to experiment’ … Thurston Moore. Photograph: Vera Marmelo

The tapes, “of Coltrane, Mingus, Dolphy, Sun Ra, Monk et al”, led him by degrees to free jazz: the style of jazz unmoored from standard rhythms and phrasings, resulting in arguably the most challenging and far-out music one can listen to. “A music both liberated and yet wholly indebted to the learned techniques of its tradition” is how Moore enthusiastically describes it. “In some ways, it’s similar to noise and art rock, where the freedom to experiment with open form comes from a scholarship of the music’s historical lineage … truly a soul music, both political and spiritual.”

Moore became a longstanding booster of this music. Sonic Youth played live with fabled avant-garde jazz ensemble the New York Art Quartet, while Moore released free jazz albums on his own Ecstatic Peace! label. His latest project is the book Now Jazz Now: 100 Essential Free Jazz and Improvisation Recordings 1960-80, co-written with Coley and Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson.

An attempt to counter what he calls “dry and ac