free jazz

A new docuseries on Hulu, “Black Twitter: A People’s History,” traces the path that the free jazz ensemble that is Black Twitter took in becoming an arbiter of cultural shifts time and again, a harbor of soft but insistent vigilantism.

It was the 1970s, and Dianne McIntyre was a dancer on a mission: to soak up live music, specifically, she said, “so-called avant-garde jazz,” free jazz or, when labels really start to irritate her, just “whatever.”

Later in the concert, she switched to piano and led her group — which also included two drummers and two bassists — in a squall of free jazz that “Journey in Satchidananda” doesn’t begin to foreshadow.

“He was a serious bass player from New York, the first person who introduced to me free jazz. But I felt the song was so simple, so easygoing, so … pop, that it didn’t fit what I wanted” at the time.

There was historically rooted free jazz, courtesy of the downtown doyen William Parker and his ensemble, In Order to Survive.