Page "Free improvisation" Paragraph 13

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the free jazz movement coalesced around such important ( and disparate ) figures as Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and John Coltrane, as well as many lesser-known figures such as Joe Maneri and Joe Harriott.

Free jazz allowed for radical improvised departures from the harmonic and rhythmic material of the composition – for instance, by permitting performers to ignore conventional repeating song-structures.

Such music often seemed far removed from the preceding jazz tradition, even though it almost always preserved one or more central elements of that tradition while abandoning others.