The first volume introduces the subject of free improvisation, the philosophy and practice of the music as well as its early history and context. This history is considered from a very broad perspective, asking questions of how improvisation without a score came to be possible for musicians and how spontaneity became a core value in the post-WW2 era.
Subjects covered included surrealist automatism, stream-of-consciousness in literature and vocalisation, the free music of Percy Grainger, experiments in musical freedom by Charles Ives, Django Reinhardt, Henri Michaux, Roy Eldridge, George Gurdjieff, Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, Chico Hamilton, Charles Mingus, Pauline Oliveros, Eric Dolphy and many others, followed by the free improvising groups that emerged from the beginning of the 1960s: Group Ongaku, Nuova Consonanza, MEV, AMM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble.
The relationship between free jazz and that strand of free improvisation that sought to distance itself from jazz is analysed, as are connections to 1960s rock bands such as The Beatles, Cream and Pink Floyd and to the post-John Cage era of indeterminacy in composition. Though the book is not strictly chronological, nor is it exclusively a history, it ends with late 1960s international developments including free music from Roscoe Mitchell in Chicago, Peter Brötzmann in Berlin and Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg in Amsterdam.
