On February 22, 1967, two months before his final live gig, John Coltrane walked into Rudy van Gelder’s New Jersey studio with only his drummer in tow. The roughly 50 minutes of music those two men recorded together would not be released until 1974, seven years after Coltrane’s death—and would be regarded by critics as either a bold, clear statement of unrealized possibilities or evidence of disintegration and madness.
 
The structure of each of these tracks is actually quite clear: A percussive churn begins; Coltrane states a melodic theme; the idea is twisted, overblown, and destroyed over many minutes as Ali fills the room with sound; the theme is restated, and the track concludes. Unlike Ascension, Coltrane’s free jazz big band recording from two years prior, there are only two voices for the listener to follow here, and both are speaking clearly. So why do many regard this album as challenging?
 
The issue is perhaps not so much atonality, or even the ferocity of Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali’s sonic battles—album opener “Mars” kicks off with both playing at peak intensity and not letting up for eight of the track’s ten-and-a-half minutes—but the strange, drifting sense of time throughout. On each track, Ali sounds as though he’s playing one long drum solo without marking the beginning or end of each passing bar; bass drum stabs and clusters of hi-hat accents appear seemingly at random, punctuating nothing.
 
Coltrane claimed Ali was capable of “laying down multi-directional rhythms,” which gave him total freedom from the tyranny of the beat. “I feel like I can play at whatever tempo I want to play against what he is doing,” he explained in an interview with critic Nat Hentoff. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time with the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing.”
 
Ali’s own claims about his approach to time were less radical. He maintained that a traditional jazz pulse was still present—just not necessarily acknowledged on the drum kit. “I’m hearing the beat and I’m feeling the beat,” he explains in the album liner notes, “but I’m not playing it. It’s there, but it’s not there.”
 
Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series affirms rhythm as the main recognizable feature of the music: “Above all,” narrator Keith David intones in the very first episode, “it [jazz] swings!” Yet Interstellar Space dispenses with not only the traditional swing pulse but also the idea that performers should lock in and find any kind of shared groove whatsoever. Saxophonist David S. Ware identifies this as the bridge many listeners will never cross. “You can get almost as avant-garde as you want to be, as long as you keep that steady pulse, right?” he says in Ashley Kahn’s 2006 book, The House That Trane Built. “But once you break pulse, I guarantee you, you’re going to lose half your people.”

Larry Young was often called the John Coltrane of the Hammond B-3 organ; Of Love and Peace gives some sense of how he earned that moniker. Recorded immediately after his most successful outing for Blue Note, Unity (1965), the album reflects Young’s avant-garde commitments, boasting two drummers separated into the left and right channels, and featuring free improvisations for which Young gave his band no instructions prior to recording.
 
“Seven Steps to Heaven,” though, is a standard: Miles Davis had written it for his 1963 transitional album of the same name. Davis actually recorded the whole album on the west coast, but was unhappy with the finished product—so he put together a second band in New York and reworked half the tracks. The new version of the song “Seven Steps” marked the very first time Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock would appear on record with Davis, and prefigured the ascendency of his second great quintet.
 
Davis’s ’63 original cooked with tightly wound rhythms and airtight solos; Young's slightly unglued version surpasses that recording’s intensity—and sounds in places like a fistfight between the organist and trumpeter Eddie Gale, known at the time for his work with free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Young’s playing is a brisk workout, studded with dissonances and off-kilter melodic asides; Gale, alto sax player James Spaulding, and tenor Herbert Morgan take turns soloing furiously alongside, around, and occasionally way outside the theme.

In January of 1966, drummer Elvin Jones quit John Coltrane’s group. For five years, across more than 25 albums, both Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner had brought explosive, virtuosic technique and incredible volume to ground Coltrane’s increasingly untethered sounds. Yet by the end of his tenure, the hard-driving timekeeper just wasn’t able to play loud enough: “At times I couldn’t hear what I was doing,” he remarked in an interview a few months after his departure. “Matter of fact, I couldn’t hear what anybody was doing. All I could hear was a lot of noise.”
 
No doubt the “noise” came from the extra musicians Coltrane kept adding to his band. For Ascension, he had created a free jazz big band; for Meditations, he added a second drummer named Rashied Ali. Six years Jones’s junior, Ali abandoned recognizable beats in favor of shifting, amorphous clouds of percussive texture. On this recording, Ali is in the left channel; Jones is in the right, and for the first movement, both drummers essentially adopt Ali’s all-color-no-timekeeping strategy. For “Compassion,” Ali lays out as Jones plays a damaged-sounding waltz.
 
The other new musician on this session is tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders, who creates high-pitched stuttering echolalia alongside Coltrane during parts of the first movement and adds footbells and tambourine to the percussive soup in the second. The 20-minute journey closes with an extended chromatic breakdown by Tyner—who would leave the group just before Jones, having reached similar conclusions. “I didn’t see myself making any contribution to that music,” he later explained. “I didn't have any feeling for the music, and when I don't have feelings, I don't play.” With Meditations, Coltrane introduced Tyner and Jones to future members of his final group and previewed the sound it would pursue; both men took the hint.

As a teenager, for two consecutive summers, saxophonist Albert Ayler toured with legendary blues harmonica player Little Walter. Walter straddled the line between musical tradition and cutting-edge modernity: In the 1940s, he began cupping a bullet microphone to his harp, running it through a guitar amp, and creating an unearthly wail that could cut through any band—making him one of the first musicians to deliberately employ electronic distortion.
 
Two decades later, Ayler was similarly fusing past and future, creating music that referenced his juke joint R&B training yet skewed toward improvisatory noise, amateurism, and spiritual exultation. Bells offers a peek at a time when Ayler’s band was in flux; this live performance includes his brother Don Ayler, an unschooled trumpeter with a flat, affectless playing style and a history of mental illness.
 
The track is actually three conjoined compositions: “Holy Ghost,” an unnamed piece, and the titular “Bells.” Bursts of speed and collective improvised noise in the first five minutes give way to a second section consisting of searching melodic phrases ending with long single notes, delivered with a quavering, exaggerated vibrato. The rest of the ensemble returns at the end for rounds of repetitive childlike sing-song punctuated by more ecstatic noise. The concert thus moves between confrontational altissimo abstraction, cartoonish lyricism, and simple melodies redolent of military marches, gospel hymns, and traditional New Orleans jazz.
 
John Coltrane adored Albert Ayler; his own late playing owes an unmistakable debt to Ayler’s mix of hymn-like simplicity and expressive excess. He eventually persuaded Impulse records to give Ayler a contract, but the signing may have ultimately doomed his hero: With his album New Grass (1968), Ayler tried to reinvent himself as a crossover R&B or commercial rock artist, playing songs that featured female vocals and undercooked peace-and-love lyrics courtesy of his girlfriend Mary Parks, yet that were still incongruously punctuated by long squealing bursts of atonal sax.
 
The music on this record and its follow-up, Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe (1969), looks different in retrospect, and has been subject to critical reappraisal over the years, but at the time, most saw it as a betrayal—one from which Ayler and his career never really recovered. On November 25, 1970, his body was found in New York’s East River, a presumed suicide.

When he first appeared on the scene, Ornette Coleman was considered an enfant terrible. Wielding a cheap plastic alto sax, and playing a form of stripped-down jazz rooted in blues but divorced from traditional chord changes, Coleman left critics and musicians sharply divided. His 1959 New York debut at The Five Spot delighted the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein; trumpeter Roy Eldridge, meanwhile, was unmoved. “I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober,” he told a music critic. “I even played with him. I think he’s jiving, baby.”
 
In December of 1960, Coleman recorded a riotous album that would only add fuel to the critical fire: Free Jazz consisted of a single 40-minute continuous improvisation with no recurring melodic themes. Two quartets played simultaneously, separated into the left and right stereo channels; the session boasted two competing rhythm sections, trumpeters Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard, and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy—all roaring together for one continuous take split over two album sides. With Free Jazz, Coleman had basically invented a new form of music, but not a profitable one: Atlantic records dropped him within the year for poor sales.
 
At the Golden Circle is the sound of Coleman having climbed back onstage after a two-year hiatus. Now recording for Blue Note, and touring Europe with an intimate trio format—just bass and drums behind him—Coleman played with dynamic, ever-shifting good humor. On “Faces and Places,” he jumps from one melodic or rhythmic idea to the next, jousting with elastic virtuoso bassist David Izenzon. The recording is anchored by thick washes of drummer Charles Moffett’s ride cymbal, sitting up-front in the soundstage and humming with overtones. Both volumes of At the Golden Circle show a jazz explorer in top form with like-minded players, emerging from self-imposed exile to newfound acceptance.

In December of 1965, having just finished their first full-length studio album together, E.S.P., Miles Davis’s second great quintet—including Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, and a young drumming firebrand named Tony Williams—prepped for a gig at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel. Oddly, the sets they played over the course of their two-night engagement contained none of the original music the group had just recorded, and instead consisted entirely of standards that had been in Davis’s live repertoire for many years.
 
The eccentric treatments the group committed to tape over those seven sets were apparently the results of a dare: Prior to the gig, according to Shorter’s biographer Michelle Mercer, Williams challenged his bandmates to “break free of their accustomed musical ideas and techniques” and try instead to play “anti-music.” Thus did the quintet arrive at a frenzied double-time version of “So What”—which first appeared as the lead-off track for Kind of Blue, Davis’s inescapable quintuple-platinum hit record.
 
“So What” as Davis’s sextet recorded it in 1959 is perhaps the most immediately recognizable jazz tune. From the melodic theme, delivered not by the horn players as one would expect but instead by bassist Paul Chambers, to pianist Bill Evans’s chord voicings—so distinctive that some critics have taken to calling them the “So What chords”—the song in its original form seduces the listener despite the bandleader's eccentric arranging choices.
 
The second great quintet’s version, by contrast, is hilariously irreverent: The band races headlong through the changes, slurring the melodic theme, crashing from solo to solo, and playing with a ferocity that likely pleased their leader given that within a year or two he would begin referring to his immortal ‘50s outing as “warmed-over turkey.”
 
Heading into the second half of the ‘60s, Miles was ready to discard all of his previous notions of jazz and occupy new sonic territory—and he’d clearly found the group of young musicians to take him there.

In 1959, at the age of 26, Wayne Shorter joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Over the next four years, the young tenor sax player became indispensable as the band’s musical director and primary composer. Shorter would go on to write a number of enduring standards and help change the direction of jazz not once but twice—first with Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, which came to define post-bop and presaged the shift to fusion; then with keyboard player Joe Zawinul in the band Weather Report through the ‘70s, taking elements of funk, world music, and electronically processed sounds into rock arenas worldwide.
 
Here, in a stripped-down quartet, with sympathetic backing on piano from frequent collaborator Herbie Hancock, Shorter demonstrates how simple or familiar structures—in this case, a 12-bar blues, albeit one mostly set in elliptical-sounding 6/8 time—could offer space for players to develop brooding abstract moods and textures. Shorter and Hancock would go on to record this composition again a year later on an album with Davis, who arguably opened the door for these types of sounds in 1958 with his pioneering modal jazz album Kind of Blue.

Tenor sax player Joe Henderson is often thought of as a gifted journeyman musician, fitting himself to a variety of settings and projects. From 1963 to 1968, Henderson appeared on a whopping 30 albums for Blue Note records—from pianist and founding Jazz Messenger Horace Silver’s classic bossa nova-tinged hard bop album, Song for My Father (1965), to composer Andrew Hill’s intense, eccentric, thoroughly modern debut, Black Fire (1964).
 
But Henderson was an important modern jazz voice in his own right, both for his compositions—many of which became standards—and for his distinctive approach to soloing. In his songs, Henderson relied on traditional forms like the 12-bar blues, but always included unusual chord changes and harmonic surprises. His playing was similarly rooted in bebop traditions, but full of idiosyncratic expressive choices, particularly in his instrument’s upper altissimo register.
 
Mode for Joe was Henderson’s last date as a bandleader for Blue Note records in this decade, and it highlights both the saxophonist’s distinctive yet malleable voice and his position hovering between hard- and post-bop, old music and new. Pianist Cedar Walton composed this title track, and it serves as a showcase for fine extended playing from vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson and trumpeter Lee Morgan, but it’s Henderson’s schizophrenic opening solo—at turns melodic, bluesy, honking with overtones, and atonally sideways—that commands attention.

​Producer Bob Thiele really, really, really did not want tenor sax player Archie Shepp on Impulse Records—but Impulse superstar John Coltrane insisted that he deserved a shot. Thus did Thiele eventually arrive at a compromise: Shepp could record an album for his label, but all of the tunes would have to be Coltrane’s, and the marketing would emphasize the star connection.
 
The resulting album, Four for Trane, effectively linked the old guard to the new—and offered unusual takes on three Coltrane compositions from Giant Steps (1960) and one from Coltrane Plays the Blues (1962). Part of the credit for the album’s excellence goes to trombonist and arranger Roswell Rudd; part to a rhythm section featuring former Coltrane and Ornette Coleman collaborators. But the star, of course, is Shepp, whose playing here feels fluid and unforced—despite his angular lines, growling tone, and frequent squealing forays past the upper reaches of his instrument’s natural range.
 
The following year, Shepp would share a live album with his mentor and label-mate: New Thing at Newport, which documented Shepp and Coltrane playing separate sets at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 2, 1965. That same summer, he also appeared on Ascension (1965), Coltrane’s roaring big band free jazz experiment, featuring two bassists, seven horn players, and one single extended track, split across two album sides. “The ensemble passages were based on chords,” Shepp later recalled, “but the chords were optional…there is a definite tonal center, like a B-flat minor. But there are different roads to that center.”
 
Ascension divided jazz critics and made clear that Coltrane was allying himself with a new generation of players like Shepp; the session would mark the beginning of the end for Coltrane’s classic quartet.

​During the 1940s, Art Blakey played drums in a number of popular groups, including the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra and Billy Eckstine’s big band. Blakey was in demand as a hard-swinging timekeeper, favoring dance rhythms undergirded by hi-hat pedal stomping and locked-in, unwavering tempos.
 
His true importance, though, lay in his abilities as a bandleader. Beginning in 1955, he co-led a quintet that appeared on their Blue Note debut as Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers; by the time the group recorded a pair of live albums at the Café Bohemia that November, the name at the top of the bill was Blakey’s. Silver left the following year, but Blakey would continue to record under that moniker as the sole original band member for more than three decades, serving as a mentor for generations of players.
 
By the time of Free for All, Blakey had already gone through three band lineups. This fresh bunch of Messengers included young lions Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone and Freddie Hubbard on trumpet; their energy no doubt inspires Blakey’s aggressive attack and non-stop soloing here. Shorter wrote this tune; his composing and playing are the epitome of post-bop, a type of semi-traditional jazz that emphasizes original compositions, loose attitudes towards rhythm and song structure, and abstract-sounding approaches to soloing.