Recommend me a decent history of free jazz

" As Serious As Your Life, March 20, 2003
Reviewer: cellblock63 from Malden, Massachusetts United States
Val Wilmer presents a complete ignorant and biased review of the life of many key figures in the jazz movement. Her writing is more akin to a groupie trying to "suck-up" to her favorite group. With her "band chick" approach and total lack of knowledge about music, Wilmer manages to string along several stories about these musicians, in which each experience becomes granite evidence of the validity of their approach to music as welll as proof of Wilmer's superior knowledge of Jazz and music in general.
PLease!!!! Wilmer loves this music because it dispenses with such unnnecessary items as Harmony, Melody, Time, and general ability on the given instrument..making it a music analyzed only in superlatives.
Some of the information on Ed Blackwell is informative - but she manages to contradict herself on many occasions. For example...Tony Williams, in Wilmer's opinion is no longer important because he still plays time which in her opinion is useless. However, five stars for Ed Blackwell...come on Wilmer, he played more traditionally than Tony Williams ever did.
For fans of Jazz and so-called free jazz - spare yourselves the Wilmer - "I am in love with these sexy Black Musicians" approach. Poor. "

Tony Williams played free as well as anybody and time better than anybody, so I hope she's not hatin', but I'd still like to read this sometime.

He also wrote a biography of Ornette Coleman.

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/1844670031.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

I have no idea what to do in a record store when confronted by the jazz section, and I think the only jazz I own is Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, Bitches' Brew, and a bootleg from 1960, and some dodgy compilations.

Without looking at this thread I actually went out and bought a 2nd hand copy of the val wilmer this morning, but I read it a couple of years ago and I can't remember too much black nationalism.

Frank Kofsky's bk on coltrane is really full of it tho'. Music-politics are inseparable.

Andrew- I haven't but Ben is doing a reading of it on thursday at ray's.

Litweiler comes across as too much of a true believer in free jazz as the ultimate fulfillment of jazz's unfolding telos. I think it's worth looking at, but problematic.

Not specifically a free jazz history, but I like John Szwed's Jazz 101.

http://www.matchlessrecordings.com/pub_set.html

Minute Particulars
meanings in music making in the wake of hierarchical realignments and other essays
Edwin Prévost

The only way we have any purchase on the world is by our own actions. And just the thought of the usual strategies for political and cultural response - applying the democratic process - in the face of the overwhelming odds of tradition and existing economic and political power is immobilising. Our activities must be closer to home, closer to our being. To borrow from William Blake: it is in the development of 'the minute particulars' that we have real power. As musicians our power is in how we decide to create sound. Now we place a sound next to another. How we chime with or divert a musical course in dialogue with others - while at the same time developing the structure, the nature and the dynamic of dialogue itself. As an audience too we must decide how we discern and positively support these practical efforts in music-making, and insist upon such aesthetic priorities. If these considerations begin to command our musical lives and even become the basis for musical appreciation and cultural critique, then the power of those who wish to do things to others is challenged by the determination of those who choose to do things with others.

Actually, Ekkehard Jost's book will probably teach you more, although it is indeed quite theory-heavy, as previously stated.

phil's book is very enjoyable as well.

NOW JAZZ NOW - 100 Essential Free Jazz & Improvisation Recordings [1960-80]
Writing from Thurston Moore, Byron Coley, Mats Gustafsson
Preface by Neneh Cherry. Afterword by Joe McPhee

Due: December 5th

https://soundsoftheuniverse.com/product/writing-from-thurston-moore-byron-coley-mats-gustafsson

Thurston Moore, Neneh Cherry, Mats Gustafsson and Joe Mcphee have put together this illustrated collector’s guide to Free Jazz records — 277-pages pages of amazing album art, labels, sleeve notes and collector musings on life-long obsessions of record collecting on Free Jazz and Free Improvisation on vinyl.

Wicked!