Non-idiomatic improvisation

A dear friend of mine and a major musical influence and booster has seemingly fallen into the pit of weirdness that is free-form improvisation. This guy is a GREAT player though and can make this music sound good. The examples I heard were based on throwing the I Ching for the years 1958 to 1997. Here for instance is 1962.

Now compare that to one of the old guys Derek Bailey. This is from his 1975 piece "First". Okay, that was weird, but you can see the guitar is a great thing for this kind of music. Listen to how it's used in this piece by Caroline Kraabel, Burkhard Beins and John Bisset. 13 musicians/3 venues. At 2:13pm three trios started playing - one in a Tent, one in a Gallery and one in a Church Hall. After ten minutes the remaining musicians set out, and when one of them entered a venue they ousted one of the trio playing there - who went off to another venue and displaced another musician - and so on...

Sounds like fun, but would I want to listen to it? ALL of it?

The point of "freedom" in improvisation is to eliminate chords entirely. Depending on how far you are willing to go, you can chuck traditional melody, rhythm, timbre and form too. There are many different approaches to free playing, but free is "no rules". Dereck Baily calls it "non-idiomatic improvisation - more possibilities per cubic second than any genre ".

When playing free music in a solo setting, you can change the directions of the music at any time, and are accountable only to yourself. You can change tempo, you can play without tempo, you can vary the intensity of your performance as you see fit. When playing music with no set form in a group setting, communication becomes especially important, because there is no automatic frame of reference to keep everyone together. Hard and easy all at once.

Am I excited by this? I think so. Sure is fuckin' nutty though. Guess I'll have to try some.