Music of the Black Radical Tradition

Black artists are often written out of the history of musical experimentalism. John Cage’s place in the canon is secure, but what of Cecil Taylor’s? Or Anthony Braxton’s? Or Matana Roberts’s? Labels like “jazz” or “free jazz” segregate these artists from white experimentalists, suggesting that their music is best understood within a narrowly racialized genre category, rather than as part of the experimental mainstream, with its assumed whiteness, institutional support, and inbuilt prestige. This course redresses this imbalance by centering the music of Black radical composers in the latter half of the twentieth century. We will study the music of a wide range of composers, including many associated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), one of the most venerable musical collectives of the twentieth century, rooted right here in Chicago’s South Side. The course will tack between studies of the music’s sounds and its historical, political, and ideological contexts. We will develop critical and analytical language for engaging the often-bracing sound worlds of those composers while building out a contextual understanding of their work as at once capaciously experimental and situated in a political context of resistance.