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 musi- cal 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 experi- mental 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 im- provisation 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 schol- ars, 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 experi- mental 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 improvisa- tion 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 an- glophone 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. 3 (Spring/Summer 2004). I would like to thank those journals for allow- ing me to include that work here. Thanks to John Litweiler and Bernard Gendron, who read early drafts of the manuscript and provided many important suggestions; to good friends Bonnie Wright and Lisle Ellis for crucial emotional support; to Maggi Payne, Neil Leonard, and Harumi Makino for various kinds of help and general insight; to Ted Panken, for making his archive of interviews available to me well before their appearance on the Web; and to Sharon Friedman Castlewitz, for her multiyear eff orts in sending me clippings of virtually everything written about the AACM in the Chicago press, mak- ing me aware of the tremendous respect and overall cachet the collective’s younger members have earned and maintained to the present day. Special thanks are due to Tracy McMullen, Robert Freeberg, and my North Park neighbor Dan Ashworth, who saved crucial materials from damage due to a sudden water problem in my San Diego home; and among my current Columbia graduate students, I’d like to thank in particular Benjamin Piekut and Rebecca Kim. Kim provided me with important perspectives and refer- ences on the history of John Cage in Chicago; Piekut pointed out relevant perspectives from research he performed on the letters of Henry Cowell at the New York Public Library, and shared references on African American perspectives on New York’s downtown art and music scenes of the 1950s and 1960s. Among those who provided needed help with my French transla- tions were Chadwick Jenkins, Jean- Jacques Avenel, and Julianna Vamos. A number of musicians and scholars provided access to their personal archives, including George Lipsitz, Douglas Ewart, Reggie Nicholson, Jo- seph Jarman, Leo Smith, King Mock, John Stubblefi eld, Amina Claudine Myers, Famoudou Don Moye, J. D. Parran, Oliver Lake, and the late Evod Magek. In particular, the photographs of Nancy Carter- Hill, Robert Seng- stacke, Terry Martin, Scott Pollard, and AACM bassist Leonard Jones, some of which appear in this volume, provided invaluable insight into the early activities of the organization. Ernest Dawkins and Mwata Bowden of the Chicago Chapter of the AACM were particularly instrumental in making the AACM archives available to me, and I thank the many musicians who opened their homes, donated their time to our interviews, and provided me with memorabilia, photographs, articles, scores, and other important refer- ence materials. Others, such as Ewart, Iqua and Adegoke Colson, Leroy Jenkins, Nicole Mitchell, and Maia, read the manuscript carefully, correct- ing errors and adding ameliorations. xx : : Acknowledgments

Special thanks are due to the staff of the University of Chicago Press, including senior editor Carol Fisher Saller, whose sharp eye and ear for language nudged the text toward greater readability; Tim McGovern for his excellent work with the images; and Rob Hunt, whose marketing acu- men worked to ensure that the book would be known as far and wide as possible. I was particularly grateful when, in September 2001, I was notifi ed that I was to join my AACM colleague and friend Anthony Braxton as a Mac- Arthur Fellow. At the same time, the truly extraordinary resources—half a million dollars over a fi ve-year period (not to mention the moniker of “genius,” which pleased my father and sister greatly) came with a set of implications for my creative life that I am still working out at this writing. Paradoxically, rather than speeding up the work, the fellowship slowed down the pace, as I felt empowered to dig more deeply into areas that I had previously thought were beyond the scope of the book. Those readers who would be quick to insist that in the case of jazz or jazz-related practices, many major innovations took place with nothing like the level of infrastruc- ture I used to write this book, might want to ask themselves the question that so many musicians ask—namely, what those innovations might have looked like given additional support. Even if we lend particular credence to the old African American saying “We’ve done so much with so little, now we can do anything with nothing,” at the very least, one wonders what, for example, Charlie Parker’s orchestral music might have sounded like had he managed to live long enough to pursue his plans to study and collaborate with Edgard Varese:

cp: Well, seriously speaking I mean I’m going to try to go to Europe to study. I had the pleasure to meet one Edgar Varese in New York City. He’s a classical composer from Europe. He’s a Frenchman, very nice fellow and he wants to teach me. In fact he wants to write for me be- cause he thinks I’m more for . . . more or less on a serious basis you know, and if he takes me over . . . I mean after he’s fi nished with me I might have the chance to go to the Academy of Musicalle [sic] out in Paris itself and study, you know. My prime interest still is learning to play music, you know. pd: Would you study playing or composition? cp: I would study both. I never want to lose my horn. pd: No, you never should. That would be a catastrophy [sic]. cp: I don’t want to do that. That wouldn’t work.4 Acknowledgments : : xxi

Where some might see self-denial in Parker’s responses to the inter- viewer, I detect an antiessentialist project at work. Clearly, Parker and Varese are simply seeking to expand their musical horizons, challenging the preconceptions of U.S. society regarding the identity and possibilities of American music along the way. After all, if Charlie Parker was not an “American maverick” (in Michael Broyles’s phrase),5 the concept has no meaning beyond simplistic ethnic cheerleading. If Parker saw both compos- ing and improvising as part of his “prime interest in learning to play music,” do we take him at his word, or do we scoff at his supposed delusions and/ or pretensions, imposing a romantic discourse that, even posthumously, de- nies Bird both agency and mobility? In the end, these were the kinds of issues that animated the creation of the AACM. As Muhal Richard Abrams told me in one of our many interviews, “Don’t give me a name. I’m not taking it. I’m Muhal Richard Abrams, and I’m playing music.”6 In the end, I see this book as a tribute to the four founders of the AACM—Muhal Richard Abrams, Jodie Christian, Steve McCall, and Phil Cohran—for their extraordinary achievement. Mu- hal Richard Abrams, Peggy Abrams, and Richarda Abrams have been there for me throughout, and their familial support over the course of my life has been crucial. I thank Muhal for his support and that of the New York Chap- ter of the AACM throughout the project; for being the most critical reader that one could possibly imagine; for unstinting access to his materials, his ideas, and his amazing memory; and for daring to be “a man with an idea.”