How Jazz's "New Thing" Represented Creative and Political Change

Pianist, producer, composer, and musicologist Kwami Coleman's recently published book, Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz focuses on the period in the 1960s when musicians, critics, record buyers, and club patrons in New York City agreed that a "new thing" in jazz had arrived. That "new thing" was what we in the twenty-first century call free jazz, and it represented a significant change within and, for some, a dramatic departure from modern jazz and modern music.

Coleman integrates musical analyses of key recordings, musician interviews, periodicals, and rare archival sources to tell a story of jazz's emergent avant-garde that foregrounds the intellectual, cultural, political forces that generated the new sound. He offers, in the book, new ways to listen to and understand this experimental and sonically disruptive music by considering what made modern jazz--and the modern world--so unfree in the first place.

This event will feature Coleman in conversation with Grammy-nominated writer Ben Ratliff and bassist Rashaan Carter.