Avant-garde jazz (also known as avant-jazz) is a style of music and improvisation that combines avant-garde art music and composition with jazz. Avant-jazz often sounds very similar to free jazz, but differs in that, despite its distinct departure from traditional harmony, it has a predetermined structure over which improvisation may take place. This structure may be composed note for note in advance, partially or even completely.
Musicians who incorporated the innovations of free and avant-garde jazz, but remained within a more conventional framework, recorded for Blue Note Records. Miles Davis's second quintet (Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams), as well as others such as Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill, are the best-remembered representatives of this style.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians began pursuing their own variety of avant-garde jazz, sometimes described as "postmodern" jazz. The AACM musicians (Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago) tended towards eclecticism, and incorporated developments in 20th century classical music (particularly Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage) as well as funk and ska, in addition to Dixieland and other elements of jazz history. Rahsaan Roland Kirk also made use of pastiche.
Jazz also became considerably more international in the 1970s, as saxophonists Gato Barbieri (Argentine), Kaoru Abe (Japanese), Peter Brötzmann (German), and pianist Sergey Kuryokhin (Russian), attest. European free jazz, in particular, began to develop. Evan Parker and Derek Bailey were pioneers of the new non-idiomatic style. Some veteran avant-garde jazz musicians (Charlie Haden), and much of the new blood, including a number who had played with Miles Davis in the 1970s (Dave Holland, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea) and several Europeans (Jan Garbarek, among them), began to record for the ECM label. The ECM sound, invariably recorded by Manfred Eicher, tended towards an elegant, refined, polished style that owed a great deal to the history of classical music. ECM also released recordings of minimalist and medieval music, and work by the Art Ensemble of Chicago (who were considerably messier than the ECM stereotype would indicate). A number of the AACM and ECM musicians would collaborate with one another, for example in the group Circle.
Many of the AACM musicians moved to New York City, where they provided the nucleus of the loft jazz scene. The World Saxophone Quartet also emerged from this milieu.
John Zorn, in particular, became an iconic figure in the "downtown" music scene, performing in free jazz, free improvisation, and a variety of rock and extreme music styles. Many of these musicians actually resided in Brooklyn; Tim Berne is a prominent representative.
Likewise, there was an increase in vitality in the remnants of the loft jazz scene in New York, centered around David S. Ware. Matthew Shipp, Susie Ibarra, and William Parker practised a more traditional variety of avant-garde jazz than the punk jazz-inflected downtown musicians, though some collaboration did occur between the two camps. Matthew Shipp eventually collaborated with illbient and alternative hip hop musicians (DJ Spooky, Anti-Pop Consortium, El-P), and moved towards a distinctive brand of nu jazz comparable to that of Craig Taborn.
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