Originally Posted by MoonlitSunshine

To say "no structure" is to say that the musicians are basically all doing their own thing without thought for the other musicians. Playing in the same key is a structure, a weak one, but a structure nonetheless. Music without any structure at all just pisses me off, because you've left music at that point, and gone back to noise (by definition: noise is a collection of unrelated frequencies).

Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong, Ry Cooder... all these guys would be considered mostly "structured" Jazz, and their music is fantastic. "Free" jazz, as defined by jazz with no structure whatsoever, to me just sounds like 4, 5 guys on a stage soloing, which is not interesting. To me, music is all about harmonies, cadences, interactions between lines and notes in order to create a whole that is greater than the parts. Structured music may be standardised, it may get boring at times due to excessive use of a certain system, but it has a beauty to it that a group of soloists will only ever find by chance.