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Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz tells the story of the twentieth-century abstract music now referred to as free jazz, or jazz's new thing as it was known in the early 1960s. By making connections between how and why artists created this work, its cultural significances, and its complicated reception in the music press of the 1960s, author Kwami Coleman provides readers with ways to listen to and understand this innovative and disruptive music.
List of contents
- Preface
- Opening: "Free" Jazz
- Chapter 1: Shapes of Jazz to Come
- Chapter 2: Free to Not Make Sense
- Chapter 3: Interlude--Points of Departure
- Chapter 4: Sound And Fury
- Chapter 5: Anti Jazz. Anti Music.
- Closing: Black Power
- Acknowledgements
- Selected Discography
- Appendix
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
About the author
Kwami Coleman is a composer, producer, and musicologist specializing in improvised music. He is an Associate Professor of Music at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University and has published scholarly work on topics in experimental and black music history, music aesthetics, technology, and vernacular music cultures. His first album,
Local Music (2017), contains original compositions interpolated with original field recordings capturing the streets of Harlem, New York City--his childhood neighborhood. Coleman has also had works commissioned for the Studio Museum of Harlem (2023), March on Washington Film Festival (2020), and appears in rapper Common's "Black America Again" (2016).
