#free-jazz

#free-jazz

Thurston Moore is obsessed with jazz. Not the mellow, easy-listening variety that serves as background music in elevators and waiting rooms. No, Moore goes for the hard stuff: wailing saxophones, arrhythmic bass lines, drums that follow beats so out of time they might as well come from the deepest reaches of space. Call it broadcasts from Planet Jazz. We're talking free jazz, an experiment in improvisational music that captivated the world's greatest jazz musicians in the second half of the 20th century.

In April 2022, the wild and inquisitively wilful British free-jazz keyboardist and composer Pat Thomas was improvising with his eyes shut in the company of his quartet [Ahmed] at Glasgow's Glue Factory. The music was dedicated to the 1950s-70s legacy of the late Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk bassist, oud player and early global-music pioneer Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the inspiration for the group's work.