I made the mistake of "liking" an R.I.P. tribute to the recently departed jazz musician Carla Bley on Facebook, and now my feed is inundated with posts mourning her passing.  

Almost all of those Facebook posts refer to her as a "free jazz composer." But isn't "free jazz composer" something of an oxymoron?  Music is either free, that is improvised without constraint, or else it's composed. Some composers, including Bley at times early in her career, composed pieces with space for the performers to freely improvise, but the vast majority of her work was highly compositional. She has appeared on albums with noted free-jazz musicians and has performed in free-jazz settings, but even then her playing was the orderly glue that kept the performances together.  

I suspect that the authors of many of the tributes I see never heard her music and are just copy-pasting other tributes.  I suspect many of them are auto-generated by AI bots.  I suspect the activity of idiots.

The saxophonist Joe Lovano, who is a real flesh-and-blood, sentient human and not a bot, said her "simplistic, complex organization of tones, harmonies, compositions, and orchestrations were completely original and captured an American Sound all its own."  

Not free-jazz, folks. 

Also, full disclosure, that's not Carla Bley in the picture above. Doesn't even look like her, really, except for a superficial similarity of hair style.  No, that's a generated AI image based on the prompt "Carla Bley performing live in Copley Square."