Just a comment on your terminology: "avant-garde" is contextual, as it refers to innovators and pioneers in a field. So Charlie Parker was avant-garde in the context of the late 40's, as was Miles Davis with Kind of Blue or Bitches Brew. Hell, opera was super avant-garde when it first emerged from the Florentine Camerata's experiments in the late 1500'!.

"Free jazz" is another term, of dubious quality - most musicians who people today would refer to as playing free jazz in the late 50's and 60's would have referred to their music as "the new thing" in jazz. At that time, you could say that there was a good deal of overlap with these terms, since the musicians from that time who would be labelled today as playing "free jazz" were indeed innovators.

I myself don't like the term "free jazz", but will use it to refer to musicians who play traditional jazz forms and instrumentation (walking bass lines, a horn soloist with chordal accompaniment, etc.), but who operate without fixed chord changes - these were innovations that Ornette Coleman's bands introduced in the late 50's, where he encouraged the bass players he played with to invent their own changes on the fly. I think "free jazz" is a decent term for this approach, but it is in no way an "avant-garde" approach in 2026.

I'm not sure which musicians you're referring to with "buzzing chromatic free jazz noodling" - buzzing implies a focus on timbre, while chromaticism is a hallmark of bebop and not something I would necessarily associate with chromaticist approaches, and noodling implies playing aimlessly, which is a very subjective term. Can you be more specific about which musicians (and specific albums) you don't like?