"Free Jazz" Concert Ad = Free Admission

Forty-two years after their previous album, the Swedish band Archimedes Badkar eventually released Perfect Time in 2020. It features a cover version of “Smiling Faces Going Places” by Don Cherry, the American trumpeter who once resided in Sweden and sometimes played with Archimedes Badkar on stage. The group’s version is introduced by a recorded snippet of unknown date of Cherry reminiscing about a concert that he, as a member of one of Ornette Coleman’s groups, had been scheduled to play on 17 November 1961. “One funny story is -- one of the first free jazz concerts that we played was in Cincinnati. You know, it was a double quartet. And it was advertised as ‘Free Jazz.’ And everyone came to a free concert. So we actually never played that concert.”

In a February 1997 Down Beat interview by John Corbett, saxophonist Steve Lacy, another member of the double quartet, also claimed that the Cincinnati fans mistook “Free Jazz” for free admission. That interview (“Forget Paris”) is included in Jason Weiss, ed., Steve Lacy: Conversations (2006); Frank Alkyer, ed., Down Beat: The Great Jazz Interviews (2009); and John Corbett, Microgroove: Forays into Other Music (2015).

The legend is discussed in Jeff Wilson, “The Ornette Coleman Concert That Never Happened — Or Did It?” No Recess! Magazine, 29 August 2017.

One is reminded of bands (real and apocryphal) cheekily named “Free Beer.”