Free Jazz's Continuity of Influence?

The free jazz/improv element wasn't "dumped" post-New Pop; see Bristol in the '80s passim and everything which happened as a consequence.

Propaganda to thread, obv.

I think it's correct to say that the dub/hiphop template was more urgent and key than the skronk template as far as the Wild Bunch et al were concerned, but I was thinking more in terms of an attitudinal template deriving from the idea of "world music" as exemplified by the Cherry family (as opposed to the bland Gillett global broth of World Music TM) - and Don and Neneh really are absolutely crucial to this whole development; there's a line which extends from Carla Bley via Lou Reed and Talking Heads (and ergo No Wave) via Ian Dury to the post-All Saints Second Coming of New Pop (2001-2), the latter of which could not have happened without Neneh and Cameron McVey. Also an attitudinalising - a kind of Braxtonian darkness, if you will - without which Massive Attack and Tricky wouldn't have had the same punctum (compare the absolute lack of multiple layers in something like Soul II Soul or So Solid). Strange how Maximum Joy, universally regarded as the runt of the '80s Bristol movement, ended up being the most directly influential, via Nellee Hooper and what have you.

Company Week - yes, well DB went out of his way to get the wild cards in there every year (Suzuki and Yoshizawa in '82, Buckethead in '91) if only to try to demolish the idea of a hermetically secure, self-sufficient community of music. If you read the Company Week section in Ben Watson's Bailey biog, he's very good at delineating and pinpointing exactly who made the differences to each year of music and where, when and how they did it, in order to continually derail consumer expectations. I remember very well in '82 - and if you look carefully at the sleeve of the Epiphany/Epiphanies album, you'll see an 18-year-old hirsute (and much better looking bah humbug) me sitting beneath the bell of George Lewis' trombone (though you can't see the newly purchased copy of Lexicon Of Love nestling at my feet, hah) - how it all seemed to be going (via the Tippetts and Wachsmann) up to Vaughan Williams New Age country until the two Japs started inverting everyone's expectations and forced the musicians to think and improvise differently, and better.

Zorn was an occasional Company participator as well, of course, but then I'd have to expand the argument to take in what I christened last year as "the Sonic Youth effect" - i.e. the mode of thinking which actually succeeded in taking improv away from being The Weird Tributary Of Modern Jazz and into more of a self-sufficient and specific musical genre. And you can spot post-Bailey/Arto/Chadbourne motifs coming into the work of the Pixies, Nirvana, the Huskers, Rollins and so on and so forth; such as Brotzmann's Machine Gun now keeps getting referred to as "proto-speed metal." Occasionally you will get the Scott Walkers of this world who will adopt and renew elements of improv strategies into entire new aesthetic pictures (Tilt is as much indebted to Cardew and Barry Guy's LJCO as it is to Scriabin and Bartok). And there are the even more isolated occasional visionaries - the early work of AR Kane stands out as a premier example of improv gambits translated into something not quite pop but eerily exceeding it (note for avant-garde mixers: the end of the 69 album - "Spanish Quay" - segues very nicely into the beginning of AMM's The Inexhaustible Document).

For those with the nerve to venture into post-Maxinquaye Tricky, you might be surprised to find rhythms re-boxed from Ornette's Prime Time decorating Angels With Dirty Faces. PJ Harvey too when she's in one of her rawer moods. And then there are Primal Scream and Spiritualized - the obsessives who stocked up on the free jazz back catalogue (or in the case of one of these bands, borrowed/taped them from me waaaaay back in the day) and refracted it out to freak out a new and not so naive audience. The Aphex Twin without AMM to precede him? Very different indeed.

So, while I could not say that there is a direct, unbroken line of unrelenting free jazz/improv influence on pop as it is known, its elements have endured and evolved to such an extent that, far from being dumped, the influence has continued to be absorbed in less specific but more subtle ways.

Oh yes, and the whole Free Folk thing (at least its Scottish contingent) derives fairly directly from improv-originated procedurals, via mediators like Bill Wells and Richard Youngs.