June 15, 2007

'This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture'

By RICHARD BYRNE

In the late 1950s and 1960s, writes Iain Anderson, "free jazz" and its practitioners aroused a range of emotions in jazz's large audience.

"A cursory examination of reader letters published in Down Beat during the mid-1960s," he observes in his book, This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press), "reveals the disruption and division caused by free improvisation among fans, musicians, businessmen, educators, and critics." For