The eMusic Dozen: Free Jazz

The first release on the legendary free-jazz label ESP Disk is also the best. From the striking opening track, "Ghosts," saxophonist Albert Ayler is a man possessed — with focus and control (no, really). Amid the squawks and screams of Ayler's horn, you can hear elements of r&b, gospel, New Orleans jazz, and folk music. His singular style has birthed hundreds of horrible imitators, but Ayler's playing taps into the hum of the soul. This 1964 performance also features bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, and the trio moves as one transcendent unit.

Free jazz musicians frequently get their chops busted because they don't choose to make "swing" a regular part of their repertoire. William Parker is the most respected bassist in improvised music, but he's not known as someone whose music would be confused with bebop. But on 2000's O'Neal's Porch not only does Parker swing, he hits a home run: This is the finest album of his already righteous career. A tribute to Parker's late uncle, the CD features eight original tracks of inside-out jazz that have just the right balance of cacophony and groove to appease mainstreamers and avant-heads alike. Parker is joined by trumpeter Lewis Barnes, saxophonist Rob Brown, and drummer Hamid Drake; together, they created one of the most exquisite jazz records of the new millennium.

Despite his claims, Sun Ra was born in Birmingham, Alabama, not the planet Saturn. "The Magic City" was a phrase that Birmingham used to entice visitors, but the man born there as Sonny Blount recasts it as a futuristic place that would be great if not for the scourge of racism. The title track of this 1965 album is a 27-minute collective improvisation with Ra playing piano and the Clavioline, a small, portable electronic keyboard. This recording includes everything great about Sun Ra and his Arkestra: spooky space-jazz rumbles punctuated by sudden explosions that sound like a rocket ship launching into the heavens.

Cecil Taylor is known for his percussive, frequently atonal piano playing. But on this album, some of the atonal stuff isn't by choice: Taylor is playing what can kindly be called a crap upright piano. The recording quality is dodgy, too, but no matter. If anyone can overcome an out-of-tune keyboard and rinky-dink sound to create an all-time classic recording it's Taylor, a magus of the 88s. This trio date documents an entire evening in Paris when Taylor, Jimmy Lyons (whose alto sax lines were still tied to bop) and Sunny Murray (the first free-jazz drummer) were breaking away from tradition and defining the avant garde. On this night, the Beautiful One truly did arrive.

As the artistic mind behind Thirsty Ear's Blue Series, Matthew Shipp has overseen or made some of the most compelling jazz and jazztronica records in recent years. The 2001 album New Orbit is acoustic, but it portends the electronic-steeped experiments Shipp would begin on the following year's Nu Bop. The band features bassist William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver — Shipp's partners in David S. Ware's group — joined by trumpet giant Wadada Leo Smith. The music is moody and free but not overly noisy, very much living up to the "Cosmic Consciousness" tag that Shipp scrawled in the CD booklet.

John Coxon and Ashley Wales came out of the mid-'90s drum 'n' bass scene in England, cutting progressive electronica records as Spring Heel Jack. But with Wales' classical music background and Coxson's love of all things from electric-era Miles Davis, it was only a matter of time before they left breakbeats behind. Soon after hooking up with the Thirsty Ear label in the U.S., Spring Heel Jack started making sprawling avant-electronica-cum-free-jazz records that called on first-class musicians to lay improvised foundations for Wales and Coxon to mix and remix. Live is Spring Heel Jack's third foray into this world, and the two long tracks feature Fender Rhodes keyboardist Matthew Shipp, bassist William Parker, saxophonist Evan Parker, drummer Han Bennink and Spiritualized's J. Spaceman. Together they create cumulous clouds of alluring ambient noise.

Pure free jazz might not need composers — you just get up, blow, and bash — but experimental jazz certainly does, and Henry Threadgill is one of its greatest. He's also one of the most versatile. The abstract funk of Everybodys Mouth's A Book is by Threadgill's Make a Move band — guitarist Brandon Ross, bassist Stomu Takeishi, vibraphonist and marimba player Bryan Carrott, and drummer Dafnis Prieto — and it's a perfect introduction to his work. Threadgill's alto saxophone and flute are taut and dry, and he weaves odd melodic fragments from a small symphony of instruments into a sound that is at once claustrophobic and expansive. Threadgill creates mostly composed music that sounds improvised, as you can hear on the very different chamber-jazz album Up Popped the Two Lips, released simultaneously with Everybodys in 2001.

Trappist monks don't make a vow of silence, but they'd rather be praying or working than gabbing. The same is true of this trio, who decided to drop one "p" and keep the musical banter to a minimum. Drummer Martin Brandlmayr, guitarist and electronics tweaker Martin Siewert and bassist Joe Williamson make beautiful, improvised, alien-folk music. While playing their bodies must be connected to shock wires, Clockwork Orange style — how else to explain the restraint they exhibit on 2004's Ballroom? Headphones are a listener's best friend for Trapist's second album, but don't be surprised if your mind drifts and you forget that music is even being played. In fact, you might start to think you're hearing the sound of your brain rattling around in your dome — which you are.

Ken Vandermark is a tough, energetic saxophonist and clarinetist who takes a punk-rock, get-in-the-van mentality toward his career and touring. He's one of the most prolific modern American jazz musicians but also one of the most consistent, especially when recording with the Vandermark 5. At this point the group featured Jeb Bishop (trombone), Tim Mulvenna (drums), Dave Rempis (saxophones), and Kent Kessler (bass) — which was then (as now) strictly an underground sensation — and you'd be hard-pressed to find a tighter working unit. Free Jazz Classics Volume 1 originally came as limited edition bonus disc with the V5 album Burn the Incline (1999), and it includes smart reworkings of tunes by Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, Cecil Taylor, Joe McPhee, Sun Ra, Eric Dolphy, and Lester Bowie.

The second volume originally came packaged with 2001's Acoustic Machine. Despite being a bonus disc, this record, like the first volume, stands tall on its own. Again Vandermark tweaks the concept of a tribute album — a tired mainstay of the jazz world — by interpreting the compositions of avant-garde heavyweights Jimmy Giuffre, Julius Hemphill, Carla Bley, Don Cherry, Archie Shepp, and Frank Wright. There are no standard-issue "I Got Rhythm" changes found among the two volumes of Free Jazz Classics — and we're all the better for it.

Pat Metheny chose Cuong Vu to be the trumpeter in his group after hearing him on the radio. But it wasn't just the horn that piqued the ax-man's interest: Vu has the voice of an angel, a whispery tenor coo. His horn gets most of the airtime on these discs, but he might as well be singing through it: Vu's melody lines sound like lullabies even when he's distorting them with wah-wah and delay. He made two great albums in 2000, the quartet date Bound and the trio session Pure, that sound like something Miles Davis would have made had he jumped straight from the avant-funk world of 1975 to the electronica-steeped universe of the '90s. The influences of drum 'n' bass, Björk, and Radiohead combine with Vu's experimental-jazz and modern-classical studies for a sound that have appeal for psychedelic-rock fans as well as improv nuts. And each album is among the best free-jazztronica documents yet to be recorded.

Sonny Rollins wrote and recorded "The Freedom Suite" in 1958 with drummer Max Roach and bassist Oscar Pettiford. The piece grew out of Rollins's realization that no matter how much acclaim he had received, he was still just a black man in America. The cry of passion that Rollins rips out of his tenor sax on "The Freedom Suite" is stunning — certainly not one to be tampered with. But Rollins' friend, disciple and fellow tenor saxophonist David S. Ware tackled the suite in 2002, and not only did he manage to build on it by including a pianist, Matthew Shipp, but he made it fiercer, freer — and twice as long. Bassist William Parker, and drummer Guillermo E. Brown lay down a pummeling foundation, but it's Ware who makes The Freedom Suite live up to its name.