Tom Surgal on his new free jazz documentary Fire Music

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

(9/7/21)Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and ‘70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers—Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and John Coltrane—are now acknowledged as central to the evolution of jazz as one of America’s greatest art forms. Documentarian and drummer Tom Surgal’s new film Fire Music examines what free jazz was (to the music scene then) and what it is. Join us for a look at the architects of a movement whose radical brand of improvisation pushed harmonic and rhythmic boundaries way beyond the formal confines of bebop in this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI.