On February 22, 1967, two months before his final live gig, John Coltrane walked into Rudy van Gelder’s New Jersey studio with only his drummer in tow. The roughly 50 minutes of music those two men recorded together would not be released until 1974, seven years after Coltrane’s death—and would be regarded by critics as either a bold, clear statement of unrealized possibilities or evidence of disintegration and madness.
 
The structure of each of these tracks is actually quite clear: A percussive churn begins; Coltrane states a melodic theme; the idea is twisted, overblown, and destroyed over many minutes as Ali fills the room with sound; the theme is restated, and the track concludes. Unlike Ascension, Coltrane’s free jazz big band recording from two years prior, there are only two voices for the listener to follow here, and both are speaking clearly. So why do many regard this album as challenging?
 
The issue is perhaps not so much atonality, or even the ferocity of Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali’s sonic battles—album opener “Mars” kicks off with both playing at peak intensity and not letting up for eight of the track’s ten-and-a-half minutes—but the strange, drifting sense of time throughout. On each track, Ali sounds as though he’s playing one long drum solo without marking the beginning or end of each passing bar; bass drum stabs and clusters of hi-hat accents appear seemingly at random, punctuating nothing.
 
Coltrane claimed Ali was capable of “laying down multi-directional rhythms,” which gave him total freedom from the tyranny of the beat. “I feel like I can play at whatever tempo I want to play against what he is doing,” he explained in an interview with critic Nat Hentoff. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time with the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing.”
 
Ali’s own claims about his approach to time were less radical. He maintained that a traditional jazz pulse was still present—just not necessarily acknowledged on the drum kit. “I’m hearing the beat and I’m feeling the beat,” he explains in the album liner notes, “but I’m not playing it. It’s there, but it’s not there.”
 
Ken Burns’s Jazz documentary series affirms rhythm as the main recognizable feature of the music: “Above all,” narrator Keith David intones in the very first episode, “it [jazz] swings!” Yet Interstellar Space dispenses with not only the traditional swing pulse but also the idea that performers should lock in and find any kind of shared groove whatsoever. Saxophonist David S. Ware identifies this as the bridge many listeners will never cross. “You can get almost as avant-garde as you want to be, as long as you keep that steady pulse, right?” he says in Ashley Kahn’s 2006 book, The House That Trane Built. “But once you break pulse, I guarantee you, you’re going to lose half your people.”

Larry Young was often called the John Coltrane of the Hammond B-3 organ; Of Love and Peace gives some sense of how he earned that moniker. Recorded immediately after his most successful outing for Blue Note, Unity (1965), the album reflects Young’s avant-garde commitments, boasting two drummers separated into the left and right channels, and featuring free improvisations for which Young gave his band no instructions prior to recording.
 
“Seven Steps to Heaven,” though, is a standard: Miles Davis had written it for his 1963 transitional album of the same name. Davis actually recorded the whole album on the west coast, but was unhappy with the finished product—so he put together a second band in New York and reworked half the tracks. The new version of the song “Seven Steps” marked the very first time Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock would appear on record with Davis, and prefigured the ascendency of his second great quintet.
 
Davis’s ’63 original cooked with tightly wound rhythms and airtight solos; Young's slightly unglued version surpasses that recording’s intensity—and sounds in places like a fistfight between the organist and trumpeter Eddie Gale, known at the time for his work with free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Young’s playing is a brisk workout, studded with dissonances and off-kilter melodic asides; Gale, alto sax player James Spaulding, and tenor Herbert Morgan take turns soloing furiously alongside, around, and occasionally way outside the theme.

In January of 1966, drummer Elvin Jones quit John Coltrane’s group. For five years, across more than 25 albums, both Jones and pianist McCoy Tyner had brought explosive, virtuosic technique and incredible volume to ground Coltrane’s increasingly untethered sounds. Yet by the end of his tenure, the hard-driving timekeeper just wasn’t able to play loud enough: “At times I couldn’t hear what I was doing,” he remarked in an interview a few months after his departure. “Matter of fact, I couldn’t hear what anybody was doing. All I could hear was a lot of noise.”
 
No doubt the “noise” came from the extra musicians Coltrane kept adding to his band. For Ascension, he had created a free jazz big band; for Meditations, he added a second drummer named Rashied Ali. Six years Jones’s junior, Ali abandoned recognizable beats in favor of shifting, amorphous clouds of percussive texture. On this recording, Ali is in the left channel; Jones is in the right, and for the first movement, both drummers essentially adopt Ali’s all-color-no-timekeeping strategy. For “Compassion,” Ali lays out as Jones plays a damaged-sounding waltz.
 
The other new musician on this session is tenor sax player Pharoah Sanders, who creates high-pitched stuttering echolalia alongside Coltrane during parts of the first movement and adds footbells and tambourine to the percussive soup in the second. The 20-minute journey closes with an extended chromatic breakdown by Tyner—who would leave the group just before Jones, having reached similar conclusions. “I didn’t see myself making any contribution to that music,” he later explained. “I didn't have any feeling for the music, and when I don't have feelings, I don't play.” With Meditations, Coltrane introduced Tyner and Jones to future members of his final group and previewed the sound it would pursue; both men took the hint.

As a teenager, for two consecutive summers, saxophonist Albert Ayler toured with legendary blues harmonica player Little Walter. Walter straddled the line between musical tradition and cutting-edge modernity: In the 1940s, he began cupping a bullet microphone to his harp, running it through a guitar amp, and creating an unearthly wail that could cut through any band—making him one of the first musicians to deliberately employ electronic distortion.
 
Two decades later, Ayler was similarly fusing past and future, creating music that referenced his juke joint R&B training yet skewed toward improvisatory noise, amateurism, and spiritual exultation. Bells offers a peek at a time when Ayler’s band was in flux; this live performance includes his brother Don Ayler, an unschooled trumpeter with a flat, affectless playing style and a history of mental illness.
 
The track is actually three conjoined compositions: “Holy Ghost,” an unnamed piece, and the titular “Bells.” Bursts of speed and collective improvised noise in the first five minutes give way to a second section consisting of searching melodic phrases ending with long single notes, delivered with a quavering, exaggerated vibrato. The rest of the ensemble returns at the end for rounds of repetitive childlike sing-song punctuated by more ecstatic noise. The concert thus moves between confrontational altissimo abstraction, cartoonish lyricism, and simple melodies redolent of military marches, gospel hymns, and traditional New Orleans jazz.
 
John Coltrane adored Albert Ayler; his own late playing owes an unmistakable debt to Ayler’s mix of hymn-like simplicity and expressive excess. He eventually persuaded Impulse records to give Ayler a contract, but the signing may have ultimately doomed his hero: With his album New Grass (1968), Ayler tried to reinvent himself as a crossover R&B or commercial rock artist, playing songs that featured female vocals and undercooked peace-and-love lyrics courtesy of his girlfriend Mary Parks, yet that were still incongruously punctuated by long squealing bursts of atonal sax.
 
The music on this record and its follow-up, Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe (1969), looks different in retrospect, and has been subject to critical reappraisal over the years, but at the time, most saw it as a betrayal—one from which Ayler and his career never really recovered. On November 25, 1970, his body was found in New York’s East River, a presumed suicide.

When he first appeared on the scene, Ornette Coleman was considered an enfant terrible. Wielding a cheap plastic alto sax, and playing a form of stripped-down jazz rooted in blues but divorced from traditional chord changes, Coleman left critics and musicians sharply divided. His 1959 New York debut at The Five Spot delighted the New York Philharmonic’s Leonard Bernstein; trumpeter Roy Eldridge, meanwhile, was unmoved. “I listened to him high and I listened to him cold sober,” he told a music critic. “I even played with him. I think he’s jiving, baby.”
 
In December of 1960, Coleman recorded a riotous album that would only add fuel to the critical fire: Free Jazz consisted of a single 40-minute continuous improvisation with no recurring melodic themes. Two quartets played simultaneously, separated into the left and right stereo channels; the session boasted two competing rhythm sections, trumpeters Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard, and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy—all roaring together for one continuous take split over two album sides. With Free Jazz, Coleman had basically invented a new form of music, but not a profitable one: Atlantic records dropped him within the year for poor sales.
 
At the Golden Circle is the sound of Coleman having climbed back onstage after a two-year hiatus. Now recording for Blue Note, and touring Europe with an intimate trio format—just bass and drums behind him—Coleman played with dynamic, ever-shifting good humor. On “Faces and Places,” he jumps from one melodic or rhythmic idea to the next, jousting with elastic virtuoso bassist David Izenzon. The recording is anchored by thick washes of drummer Charles Moffett’s ride cymbal, sitting up-front in the soundstage and humming with overtones. Both volumes of At the Golden Circle show a jazz explorer in top form with like-minded players, emerging from self-imposed exile to newfound acceptance.