Free Funk

Free funk is the meeting of avant-garde jazz and funk that developed in the United States during the 1970s, in which the collective freedom of free jazz was set over insistent dance grooves. Its central figure, *Ornette Coleman*, formalised the approach as harmolodics — the equal weighting of harmony, melody and rhythm — and embodied it in his electric band *Prime Time*, with its doubled guitars, basses and drums. Around him, *James Blood Ulmer*, *Ronald Shannon Jackson* and *Jamaaladeen Tacuma* built music of dense, interlocking riffs and open improvisation that retained funk's physical drive while discarding conventional chord changes and solo hierarchies.