Germany's leading experimental musicians, and guests from other countries, met to share and advance free-improvising ideas that had already been broached in the US by innovators including Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor and George Russell. The Berlin Jazz Days festival was challenged that year by a radical alternative: the Total Music Meeting. The Vietnam war, strikes and student protests that almost brought down the French government, and a fast-changing moral climate inevitably exerted an influence on the music.
Of course, the seeds of these changes in the perception of jazz were not planted in any one year, nor blown by any single wind, but 1968 was a significant year for jazz in Europe, as it was across culture, politics and the arts. The festival's closing weekend might have been dominated by Sonny Rollins – a surviving colossus from a circle that included Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis – but it also included South African free-jazz percussionist Louis Moholo-Moholo, deconstructionist trio the Bad Plus, young British thrash-guitar blasters trioVD, former punk guitarist Billy Jenkins, sometime John Zorn trumpeter Dave Douglas, and jazz-savvy producer Matthew Herbert working with the London Sinfonietta.Īudiences increasingly attend these shows without wondering whether or not they fit a written-in-stone definition of jazz – or, for that matter, whether they follow the dictates of the tempered scale, a 4/4 swing pulse, or even a narrative shape with an explicit beginning, middle and end.
As this year's London Jazz festival drew to an end yesterday (21 November), my thoughts turned to how vehemently the event's diversity would have been resisted not so many years ago.
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