Who else here has sat down and played along with Free Jazz..

by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet?

It's fun....

nope.

I have a passionate dislike of free jazz--I don't usually think it qualifies as music.

Before you start jumping on me for my snobishness, let me explain that my definition of music is "Sound organized in time." Free jazz certainly has sounds, but it usually isn't organized in time, as far as I can tell. There is some that is (and I consider that to be music, though I don't like listening to it), but a lot of it is not. It is musicians getting together and playing whatever the hell they feel like--no time signature, no key signature, no real structure.

You really need no musical ability. You gotta have great chops and really good technical playing, but you don't really need to be able to play musically, which I think is far more important than being able to play lots of notes really quickly.

tell that ornette and coltrane

sure, but they could also play musically

DRM, do you like The Shape of Jazz to Come at all? Coleman and Cherry sound really good on that...pretty damn musical even though they get out there and beyond.

No, but our jazz band did do a free jazz thing last year for about a month. We'd sit down in the dark and just jam together. We had five chairs and five lines of people, and they'd switch out. The bassist, guitarist, drummer, and pianist played the whole time. The lights were off just so we couldn't tell who we were playing with. So much fun.