A new listener to freely improvised music comes to this experience not as a fresh mind. Every listener has a wealth of listening experience. They may have been taught western classical. They may be embued with the folk music of their ethnic culture. They may have been thoroughly lost in the hedonism of rock and roll. When such a person comes to another form of music, whose rules of performance (and of listening) are different from what they have experienced so far, they are confused. The sounds, the anticipated meanings and the expected effects, do not occur. They suffer what I call an aesthetic mis-match. Small wonder then without gaining some understanding about the rules of engagement and the musical objectives, that a new listener is completely bewildered by what they hear. If this is the case, then it follows that there must be some kind of specific analytical framework for free improvisation, as there is for every other kind of music. To deny this fact is in a way to deny entry for others into this world, and it also hampers the music's development.

- Eddie Prévost