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Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography of the Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present by John Gray

2020; Music Library Association; Volume: 77; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2020.0113

1534-150X

Jade Kastel,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Reviewed by: Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography of the Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present by John Gray Jade Kastel Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography of the Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present. Compiled by John Gray. (Black Music Reference Series, vol. 9.) New York: African Diaspora Press, 2019. [xv, 639 p. ISBN 9780984413485 (hardcover), $150.] Bibliography and indexes. The sequel is here. Chronicling nearly three decades of American free jazz and European free improvisation, John Gray's latest publication is the ninth volume of a series documenting writings on the expressive culture in Africa and the African diaspora and the companion to his acclaimed Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959–1990 (New York: Greenwood, 1991). Fire Music was written as a bibliographic counterpart to Valerie Wilmer's foundational jazz text As Serious as Your Life (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), in which Wilmer documents the emergence of New York's African American jazz avant-garde. Creative Improvised Music picks up where Fire Music left off, featuring more than 5,500 new entries, most published between the early 1990s and 2018 in the US and abroad, on the history and evolution of free jazz and free improv. The free-jazz/improv movement is known by many names—free jazz, avant-garde jazz, playing outside, the New Thing, the New Black Music, Great Black Music, free improvisation—and has seen increasing coverage in academia and has developed a robust online community since the 1990s. Gray expands his reach in Creative Improvised Music with his coverage of topics underrepresented in Fire Music, such as free jazz's intersection with civil rights and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s; the rise of Asian Improv Arts; the contributions of women with waves of feminism in jazz music; and the impact of politics and spirituality on free jazz. Creative Improvised Music will serve researchers across disciplines and international audiences, enhancing the global narrative and body of scholarly works to include more fully the cultural impacts of the African diaspora as an influence on free jazz/improv and beyond. Creative Improvised Music is intended for library, archival, and research audiences. It is organized into three sections: general works, regional studies, and the most extensive section, biographical and critical studies. Each section organizes citations by bibliographic genre: books, books with sections on the topic, dissertations and theses, electronic resources (including URLs), journals, articles, discographies, special collections, and biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias. Gray interlaces this bibliographic wealth with information about hundreds of improviser–composers, ensembles, collectives, and nonmusicians—record producers, impresarios, and critics—who have been intimately connected with free-jazz/improv traditions. Gray follows two main threads of avantgarde jazz, "the first born out of a deep dissatisfaction with the constraints of the bebop and hard bop idioms and the other from European improvisers' desire to come up with an alternative to the conventions of American free jazz. Both styles have their own distinct trajectories and tributaries" (p. viii). A sampling of improvisation hubs outside the US includes the Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville in Canada, Echtzeitmusik in Berlin, AMM and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in Britain, and the Instant Composers Pool in the Netherlands. Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennick, and Derek Bailey are just a handful of the many noteworthy performers. Gray captures many related disciplines in this bibliography. Researchers across disciplines can dig into the text's intersections within jazz, musicology, black poetics, literature, gender studies, [End Page 313] critical race studies, ethnic studies, LGBTQ studies, and more. The inclusion of Adrienne Rich (2053), James Baldwin (1889), Nina Simone (1917 & 3418), Phillip Glass (3214), Fela Kuti (1232 & 4749), Jayne Cortez (2053), four interviews from NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross (p. 601), and multiple mentions of Amiri Baraka (p. 592) and Jacques Derrida (p. 625) are just a few examples of the ways this bibliography has interdisciplinary appeal. To Gray's credit, Creative Improvised Music contains many more entries of local and regional free-jazz and improv scenes in the US, France, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands than his Fire Music did nearly thirty years ago. Researchers can use the appendixes and indexes to pinpoint their search by topic, geographic location...