Free jazz is a subgenre of Jazz that originated in the early 1960s. Appearing in the dawn of what would later become the more widespread Avant-Garde Jazz movement, free jazz attempts to break free from the conventions and patterns imposed by earlier jazz subgenres in terms of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic sequences and changes within which improvisation, one of the essential aspects of jazz, occurs. Dissonance, atonality, disposal of regular harmonic structures and increased rhythmic changes are prevalent in the style.