A small story to motivate this review. Once upon a time, there was a scholar in a field of the humanities who wrote quite obscurely, even for the humanities, although his prose did not approach the glories of the postmodern. Most agreed that his writing was incomprehensible. It was sesquipedalian, if not totally obscure. In his defense, some would say that, ah, it is a case of poor translation into English, which is not his native language. But then it turned out that reading him in his native language proved just as difficult. Whereupon yet another group of scholars decided that his native language was not his native language, because no one could write so turgidly. And so it went. Ad infinitum.

Free jazz is a bit like the professor whose native language was never quite clear. Some of its practitioners, to be fair, were perfectly comprehensible, even if they managed to sound a bit different in the 1960s.