Though there are many important precedents and developments, free improvisation developed gradually, making it difficult to pinpoint a single moment when the style was born. Free improvisation primarily descends from the
Indeterminacy movement and
free jazz. Guitarist
Derek Bailey contends that free improvisation must have been the earliest musical style, because "mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation." Similarly,
Keith Rowe stated, "Other players got into playing freely, way before
AMM, way before Derek [Bailey]! Who knows when free playing started? You can imagine
lute players in the 1500s getting drunk and doing improvisations for people in front of a log fire.. the noise, the clatter must have been enormous. You read absolutely incredible descriptions of that. I cannot believe that musicians back then didn't float off into free playing. The
melisma in
Monteverdi must derive from that. But it was all in the context of a repertoire." The London-based independent radio station
Resonance 104.4FM, founded by the
London Musicians Collective, frequently broadcasts experimental and free improvised performance works.
WNUR 89.3 FM ("Chicago's Sound Experiment") is another source for free improvised music on the radio. Taran's Free Jazz Hour broadcast on Radio-G 101.5 FM, Angers and 101.3 FM,
Nantes is entirely dedicated to free jazz and other freely improvised music. A l'improviste.
Classical precedents By the middle decades of the 20th century, composers such as
Henry Cowell,
Earle Brown,
David Tudor,
La Monte Young,
Jackson Mac Low,
Morton Feldman,
Sylvano Bussotti,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, and
George Crumb, re-introduced improvisation to European art music, with compositions that allowed or even required musicians to improvise. One notable example of this is
Cornelius Cardew's
Treatise: a
graphic score with no conventional notation whatsoever, which musicians were invited to interpret. Improvisation is still commonly practised by some organists at concerts or church services, and courses in improvisation (including free improvisation) are part of many higher education programmes for church musicians.
International free improvisation Since 2002
New Zealand collective Vitamin S has hosted weekly improvisations based around randomly drawn trios. Vitamin S takes the form beyond music and includes improvisers from other forms such as dance, theatre and puppetry. Since 2006, improvisational music in many forms has been supported and promoted by ISIM, the International Society for Improvised Music. ISIM comprises some 300 performing artists and scholars worldwide, including
Pauline Oliveros,
Robert Dick,
Jane Ira Bloom,
Roman Stolyar,
Mark Dresser, and many others. Founded in Manchester, England, in 2007,
the Noise Upstairs has been an institution dedicated to the practice of improvised music, hosting regular concerts and creative workshops where they have promoted international and UK-based artists such as
Ken Vandermark,
Lê Quan Ninh,
Ingrid Laubrock, and
Yuri Landman. On top of these events, the Noise Upstairs runs monthly jam nights. In Berlin, Germany, from the 1990s onwards, a school of free improvisation emerged known as
echtzeitmusik (‘real-time music’ or ‘immediate music’). This has been sustained by supportive venues such as
ausland, Anorak Club, Labor Sonor, and others.
The downtown scene In late 1970s New York a group of musicians came together who shared an interest in free improvisation as well as rock, jazz, contemporary classical, world music and pop. They performed at lofts, apartments, basements and venues located predominantly in
downtown New York (
8BC,
Pyramid Club, Environ,
Roulette,
The Knitting Factory and
Tonic) and held regular concerts of free improvisation which featured many of the prominent figures in the scene, including
John Zorn,
Bill Laswell,
George E. Lewis,
Fred Frith,
Tom Cora,
Toshinori Kondo,
Wayne Horvitz,
Eugene Chadbourne,
Zeena Parkins,
Anthony Coleman,
Polly Bradfield,
Ikue Mori,
Robert Dick,
Ned Rothenberg,
Bob Ostertag,
Christian Marclay,
David Moss,
Kramer and many others. They worked with each other, independently and with many of the leading European improvisers of the time, including
Derek Bailey,
Evan Parker,
Han Bennink,
Misha Mengelberg,
Peter Brötzmann and others. Many of these musicians continue to use improvisation in one form or another in their work.
Electronic free improvisation Electronic devices such as oscillators, echoes, filters and alarm clocks were an integral part of free improvisation performances by groups such as
Kluster at the underground scene at Zodiac Club in
Berlin in the late 1960s. For the 1975
jazz-rock concert recording
Agharta,
Miles Davis and his band employed free improvisation and electronics, particularly guitarist
Pete Cosey who improvised sounds by running his guitar through a
ring modulator and an
EMS Synthi A. But it was only later that traditional instruments were disbanded altogether in favour of pure electronic free improvisation. In 1984, the Swiss improvisation duo
Voice Crack started making use of strictly "cracked everyday electronics".
Electroacoustic improvisation A recent branch of improvised music is characterized by quiet, slow moving, minimalistic textures and often utilizing laptop computers or unorthodox forms of electronics. Developing worldwide in the mid-to-late 1990s, with centers in New York, Tokyo and Austria, this style has been called
lowercase music or EAI (
electroacoustic improvisation), and is represented, for instance, by the American record label
Erstwhile Records and the Austrian label
Mego. EAI is often radically different even from established free improvisation. Eyles writes, "One of the problems of describing this music is that it requires a new vocabulary and ways of conveying its sound and impact; such vocabulary does not yet exist – how do you describe the subtle differences between different types of
controlled feedback? I've yet to see anyone do it convincingly – hence the use of words like 'shape' and 'texture'!" == Legacy ==