My roommate plays in a band called Secret Architecture. I did some listening, (link below)

The first song, "The last song was Freebird," is pretty normal, straight ahead for jazz. It has its lead melody, (a head), and then the pianist improvises over the chord changes (maybe a bit too long), then a nice transition into the saxophone improvisation. This improv does dive close to the 'free jazz cacophony' at some points, but it also builds in that direction, so it works, especially since the transition out of the sax solo back to the 'head' melody is done well.

The other song I briefly checked out was 'the snow on seht', which seems much closer to free jazz, but its more like minimalist free jazz. Very relaxing, calming, not crazy banging, they're actually listening to each other.

But, free jazz in the sense of the video I posted above ... I've never been able to get into, and 'atonal' jazz, I'm not sure I've listened to any outside of free jazz. My negative opinion of classical atonality probably serves as a weathervane though.



Of course ... the biggest issue is ... what does 'contemporary' even mean, beyond describing the time something is written in. As a 'classical' composer, I've thought about this a lot in regards to classical music. The fact is, 'contemporary classical' is just a bullshit term, and branding ourselves (myself) as a composer of 'contemporary classical' music is almost entirely pointless. I mean, under the umbrella of "contemporary classical" is just about everything written in the past 100 years. Neo-classical, neo-romanticism, serialism, modernism, post-modernism, minimalism, spectralism, folk-song influenced modality, sound art ... ? How do you sell it to people? It's a formless, shapeless and idealess term.

As you stated, the only people you can really sell it to are 'hipster trash'. People who will go to a concert solely because its different and hip somehow. If we look at the past 60/70 years of 'classical' music, I think the one thing that stands out is how the only composers to achieve any mainstream popularity in that time were the 'minimalists', Steve Reich and Philip Glass (and John Adams maybe). They started off playing music mostly in clubs in New York, and they branded themselves as something else (I don't know who coined the term minimalist, or if it was simply stolen from the art world). Not classical composers (of course, at that time classical composers in academia were almost all modernists/post-modernists, no tonality allowed), but composers of their own music and sound, and this 'identity' they forged has to have helped them become as famous as they became.

Now, I'm not saying that all I have to do is brand my music in some unique way to become famous, there's a lot more to it than that ... but I do think its time in both classical and jazz that purveyors of this music begin to come up with something new. I don't think being one of hundreds of parisitic twins on the ass of the dying classical music elephant is helpful.



What this has to do with your question ... I imagine you could find contemporary jazz you like, there's a ton of different styles out there now. You just have to sift through all the shit, and there's tons of that unfortunately.