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.

While I like 20th century classical, I got into it from reading that it was an influence on Cecil and Dolphy and others and to *my* ears, it often sounds as if they are rejecting conventional tonalities and rhythm for the sake of it. Free-jazz, I hear as *expanding* conventional tonalities, rhythms etc.

It's worth pointing out that *very* little free-jazz is actually atonal. You might have different tonalities playing simultaneously or musicians going in of one tonality and into another and rhythms constantly changing but it is still more often than not rooted in conventional melody/harmony/etc. Like if you listen to that Cecil track up there; sure, he does those crazy runs and percussive clusters but the bulk of it is still firmly rooted in the chord-voicings, progressions etc. that you can find in ragtime, stride-playing, boogie-woogie etc. as well as modern ,post-bop jazz of course. And even when he was at his wildest, Coltrane was still arpeggiating functional chords, playing modes etc.; he just shifted tonalities more often than he did in the "My favorite Things"-era when he could stay in the same scale for like 15 minutes or when he was arpeggiating chords over a preset progression like he did with Monk, Miles or much of "Giant Steps". Basically, he was still playing like Coltrane, just changing at will rather than by any preset forms.

Of course, guys like Dolphy, Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell (AEOC) was self-consciously utilizing 12 tone techniques every now and then but all those guys were just as likely to rip out some bebop.

And I guess Cecil because of his dense chords and clusters might give up the most atonal feel of all "big" avantgardists but I actually think you can generally hear a tonal centre in both his chords and "melodies", even blues and shit, just very distorted and twisted due to the close voicings and dissonant colour-tones...

EDIT:Guys like Ayler and Sanders were of course often playing around with sheer *sound* and utilizing the "freak"-register of the instrument; that type of stuff is hard to put in a conventional tonal framework since the notes are so "distorted" and doesn't necessary resemble any tempered notes but on the other hand, those guys solo-constructions were generally very basic so I tend to hear them more as playing around with sheer sound and tonal distortions and throwing in a bit of conventional melody. Still, I don't know if it truly is atonal since they used "anchor-sounds" to base their phrases around so to speak