Acknowledgments

acknowledgments This book presents a close reading of a particular, highly diversifi ed, and widely infl uential musical network/movement, rather than an overview of a received genre, or of the life and work of an individ- ual. I want to express my thanks to the University of Chicago Press, and in particular, my editor, Douglas Mitchell, for seeing the need for this kind of detailed research on post- 1965 African American musical experimentalism. Since the turn of the new century, the study of post- 1965 improvised music has slowly been gathering critical mass in anglophone scholarship, as with the work of Fred Moten, and there is Eric Porter’s analysis of the writings of African American experimental musicians such as Anthony Braxton, Leo Smith, and Marion Brown, Canadian literary theorist Ajay Heble’s set of critical essays, Landing on the Wrong Note, and ethnomusicologist Mike Heffl ey’s book on post- 1965 European improvisation, Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz.1 Sociologist Herman Gray’s work has focused on Steve Coleman and other younger- generation experi- mentalists, while ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong has extensively documented histories and practices in Asian American jazz and improvisation movements.2 Other recent and important studies are published in two no- table anthologies: Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, edited by Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine : : xv xvi : : Acknowledgments Griffi n; and Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble’s The Other Side of Nowhere.3 Heble’s tireless eff orts have led directly to the recent emergence of a peer- reviewed, bi lingual, Web- based journal devoted to improvisation studies, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études Critiques en Improvisation, which is providing a forum for new critical work by a new crop of younger scholars, some of whom are represented in these anthologies. Jason Robinson, Julie Dawn Smith, Michael Dessen, Dana Reason Myers, Stephen Lehman, Salim Washington, David Borgo, Daniel Widener, Tamar Barzel, Kevin McNeilly, Ellen Waterman, Vijay Iyer, and Jason Stanyek explore experimental improvisation by combining ethnographic and historical practice. To many of us, the work of Sherrie Tucker, while not directly concerned with experimental music, has nonetheless been important for its theoriz- ing of the place of gender analysis as a necessary component of our work. As my UCSD colleague, the psychoacoustician Gerald Balzano, pointed out to me at the outset of my academic career, the teaching of improvisation as an academic discipline requires an exemplary source literature, and my aim is for this book to take its place among the growing body of new studies on improvisation. Finally, my interest in anglophone work should not be taken as un- dermining my interest in work on improvised music by nonanglophone writers, whose work I draw upon extensively in this book. In a globalized environment, the lack of attention paid in the United States to the very well- developed nonanglophone writing on improvisation by people like Ekkehard Jost, Wolfram Knauer, Bert Noglik, Franco Bolelli, Hans Kumpf, Davide Sparti, Christian Broecking, Jean Jamin, Patrick Williams, Francisco Martinelli, Alexandre Pierrepont, and the late Peter Niklas Wilson (one of the few whose writings have been rendered in English) can be seen as a serious lacuna that impoverishes Stateside scholarship. Here, as in the anglophone case, some of the most intriguing texts have been written by practicing musicians, such as vibraphonist Christopher Dell’s Prinzip Impro- visation. I’d also like to thank all the people who have been asking me about when this book would fi nally be fi nished and available. It has been very gratify- ing to receive the moral support and encouragement of so many people, including both colleagues and members of the concertgoing public. Af- ter my 2005 interactive computer performance with the drummer Louis Moholo- Moholo at Johannesburg’s UNYAZI festival—the fi rst computer music festival held on the African continent—I found that even in South Africa, a country I had never visited, people were anticipating the book’s Acknowledgments : : xvii arrival, even to the point of creating rumors to the eff ect that it had been published and asking me where they could obtain it. I should probably explain to those readers why it took so long to bring this book to fruition. For one thing, the work on the book coincided with a number of dramatic changes in my life. To summarize, I got married, changed jobs, and moved house, and in the meantime, my wife and I had a baby. All the while, I continued to pursue other academic writing, perfor- mances, composition, and teaching. Here, I thank my family—my father, George T. Lewis, my sister Cheryl, and her new nephew (my father’s new grandson), Tadashi George Masaoka Lewis, whose amazing attention at eight months of age allowed us both to sit with each other quietly, each beavering away on his own project. My amazing wife, Miya Masaoka, was patient enough to let it all happen in the midst of her work as a sound artist and composer. Not all of the interviews found their way into a book that could easily have been (and at the midpoint of the work, really was) three times as long as the present version. To incorporate all of the many observations from the ninety- plus people I did interview was a practical impossibility, and I regret not being able to use all the insights I gained from that work. For similar reasons, including a detailed discography was beyond the scope of this book. In the interests of partial redress of this absence, I have included an appendix in which more recent recordings by AACM artists are listed. A full discography, of course, would be a book in itself, and I am hoping that some enterprising person takes on that task. A fi nal regret concerns the lack of detailed musical analyses in this volume. Because of the scope of the book, however, focusing on particular musical approaches ran the risk of inappropriately exemplifying the work of particular individuals as emblem- atic of the AACM as a whole. Perhaps there are other milieus in which I (or others) can pursue the analytic project. Overall, there is certainly much more work to be done on the AACM, and my hope is that this published research can help future scholars to go further. A project of this magnitude cannot be realized without the support of an entire community, of whom only a few could ever be acknowledged in a limited space. I apologize for my fallibilities and poor recollection in possibly not acknowledging each and every one of the many people who helped this project along. I am indebted to the Academic Senate of the University of California, San Diego, including the Critical Studies/Experi- mental Practices area of the Department of Music, under whose auspices I began the research for the book, and to Columbia University, where the xviii : : Acknowledgments work was completed. The support of my colleagues in both institutions, as well as the resources of the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music at Columbia, was critical in allowing me to complete the project. I’d like to thank Wolfram Knauer, Arndt Weidler, and the Jazz- Institut Darmstadt for their tremendous support in allowing me to create an ex- tensive photocopy library of contemporaneous reviews from German and French journals; Mary Lui, for access to the Larayne Black Archive at the Chicago Historical Society; and Deborah Gillaspie, the curator of the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago, for access to the Ja- mil B. Figi Collection. Special thanks are also due to Columbia’s Jazz Study Group at the Center for Jazz Studies, to whom many of these ideas were ex- posed as they crystallized, and particularly to Farah Jasmine Griffi n, Robert O’Meally, and Brent Hayes Edwards for supporting my eff orts; and to Mark Burford, then editor of Current Musicology, and Quincy Troupe, then editor of Black Renaissance Noire, who published early versions of some chapters. I thank the Center for Black Music Research for their ongoing support of my eff orts, as well as the scholars associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris—in particular, Patrick Williams, Jean Jamin, and their many fi ne students, such as Alexandre Pierrepont, whose set of AACM interviews in the journal Improjazz constitutes an important source for future work. I completed the initial transcriptions and overall structure of the project at a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, and I am grateful to the foundation, and to Chinary Ung for placing me in touch with them. The University of California Humanities Research Institute, and its director, David Theo Goldberg, provided important research support during my 2002 residency there, and the members of the residency were invaluable in allowing me to bounce ideas off them: Renee Coulombe, Susan Leigh Foster, Anthea Kraut, Jason Stanyek, Eric Porter, Simon Penny, Georgina Born, Adriene Jenik, and Antoinette LaFarge. I owe immeasurable debts to three people whose early encouragement and support were crucial in forg- ing my career as a scholar: my former colleagues, Jann Pasler of UCSD’s program in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices, and Peter Gena, chair of the Time Arts Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and Samuel Floyd, founder of the Center for Black Music Research. Substantial portions of two earlier articles of mine appear in this book. Text from my “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New York, 1970–1985,” from Current Musicology 71–73 (Spring 2001–Spring 2002), 100–157 was apportioned across chapters 4, 9, and 11; and chapter 7 is an Acknowledgments : : xix expanded version of “The AACM in Paris,” from Black Renaissance Noire 5, no.

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