so maybe I'm a good person to ask, I dunno. Kind of an in-betweener on this subject.

How I got introduced to free jazz was the same way I got introduced to all jazz: a simple "overview of jazz" class in college that ran the gamut from Jellyroll Morton and Louis Armstrong to "Bitches Brew" and Ornette (and stopped roughly there, though I kept exploring on my own for years afterward). My first tastes of free jazz were:

The Shape of Jazz to Come (Ornette)
Ascension (Coltrane)

...and that was about it. I found the former intriguing, and the latter unlistenable. Which is still about how I feel.

With Ornette, you're listening for melody, I think. That guy is ALWAYS playing a melody, even when he's saying goodbye to changes and even the song's basic key. "Lonely Woman" is just a pretty tune, first and foremost, and that was my gateway drug to appreciating free jazz. Ornette had a few albums and a few tunes where he really cut loose and it's hard to follow. But for the most part, his material - and especially those classic quartet albums - are about worshiping the melody to the exclusion of all else, even the constraints of harmony and traditional chord structures. In a way he's the least radical of free jazz players, many of whom were basically terrorists against rhythm and tonality. Ornette was more like a dude following his own muse down a lonely, overgrown (but beautiful) path.

Coltrane's take on free jazz was part of his whole evolution from harmonic jazz to modal playing to completely out and atonal wildness. I find it easiest to digest in the midpoint between #2 and #3. If he starts with a modal head and rips into one of those darkly beautiful solos, and THEN takes it all the way out, it clicks with me. The energy of it makes sense. When he just blasts the paint off the walls from the start, I'm not usually into it. It always strikes me as a noble failure - I get what he's trying to do, but I can't imagine wanting to listen to it more than once. I need a seed of melody or scale or something to make it make sense, and to put the experimentation into perspective.

So you might guess from that that I have mixed feelings about Albert Ayler (sometimes really like him, sometimes don't), Cecil Tayler (not really a fan), and Sun Ra (his middle-of-the-road albums are some of my all-time favorite jazz, but his most outre stuff does little for me). To me, freedom is a cool concept but often results in pure noise if you insist on pushing it into a realm where there's no rhythm, no harmony, no melody, no NOTHING except instruments fighting each other to be heard. And I can hang with avant garde music that is quieter - John Cage type stuff - because the spareness and minimalism is more relaxing; I can also do atonal geniuses like Webern and Schoenberg, because their music feels crafted and alien rather than chaotic and noisy. It's just the really loud, abrasive free jazz at the very outer fringes that sometimes gives me fits.