Not just in free-jazz but in stuff like P-funk as well when you have horn-riffs, vocal-chants, bootsys bass and Worell playing like three different keyboard lines on top off eachother-I just always dug that shit. Also, Beefheart clicked immediately for me as well and Public Enemy too when I was young.

I have bigger problems with "horisontal" complexity like when you have lots of changes *along* the time-line like in prog-rock and stuff; it often sounds wanky to me. Of course, I dig a lot of extreme metal that has lots of riffs- and tempo-changes compared with "regular" music but even there, I like it more when it sounds as if they are just going for creating a total, complete and dynamic headbanging experience with the structure rather than making it sound like "look at us! We are great musicians playing all this difficult stuff!" like in a lot of tech-death and proggy stuff overall...

Not to go on about Cecil but there is this "song" called "Holiday en masque" that lasts for 30 minutes that starts off quite accessible but in the last half, it just goes off into this EXTREMELY dense and abrasive polytonal colledctive improvisation. At first, I just heard it as a freak-out, as a way for the musicians to go off after the very structured and through-composed feel of the rest of the record but after a few listens, I started to hear that the different instruments all seemed to play variations of different melodies against eachother and the drums followed in an awesome matter and so onand it's NOW dope as fuck to me but it's just SO dense that I couldn't hear it on the first listening(s).

Basically, I think the sheer *density* and intensity of a lot of free/avantgarde jazz kind of obscures the brilliance of the interplay and even melodies and stuff; even "Ascension" is a lot like that even if it's a bit more primal I guess; they are clearly playing a series of modes during the collective improvs because you can easily hear when the tonal-center changes BUT it's like all instruments cancel eachothers individual lines out so you get this sheer mass of sound, like this simultaneously static *and* constantly changing soundfield.

I think it's pretty darn cool but a bit more "restraint" and less "peel the paint off the walls" would have led to an easier appreciation of the music rather than people just dismissing it as noise upon first (or second or third) listening or, on the opposite end, just saying that it great but it's like noise or Jackson Pollock and that is cool as "art"; opinions like the latter does more to hurt than to help IMO and is the reason why many go on about the emperors new clothes and the listeners being "duped" and shit...