How to Play Avant-Garde Jazz

Within the wide field of jazz, the playing of "avant-garde" jazz includes either a great opportunity or a great headache, depending on who you ask. Jazz is already an abstract process: playing it in an "avant-garde" way makes that process even more abstract. So how do you do it well? Don't let your "avant-garde" music fall into complete pandemonium. Always keep a standard chord progression and tempo, if not in the sounds, then at least in your head. Poor musicians often use the "avant-garde" or other abstracting labels to hide incompetence; you'll want to prove you are not among them by offering structural "reason" behind your chaotic melodies.

Instructions

1. Pick a chord progression for a bar sequence, including beginning and ending chords. Make your grooves resolve to these as needed.

2. Resolve solos or bars to an end note that sounds good. Although some jazz fans really don't care about melodic intervals or hearing a "solid" note resolution, others need it to really value the integrity of the music. Show that you care about avoiding dissonance by resolving your solo to the chord note at the end of a bar.

3. Keep strange tempos relevant to the driving beat of a drum set. If you don't have anyone on drums, provide some kind of rhythm with instrumentation like the bass guitar. Music without tempo often drowns in itself and becomes unappealing to even the most hard-core jazz fan.

4. Keep instruments in tune. Don't let the poetic license of being an avant-garde player keep you from maintaining the tuning of strings or other instruments. Out of tune music is not really artistic, in all but a very few cases, it's just bad.

5. Keep an ear to the old-timers. For young or relatively inexperienced jazz players who want to really innovate, it's important not to get carried away; one way to stay level is to listen religiously to jazz masters who have gone before you to see what is really considered tonically credible in jazz.