Based on interviews from a 1985 tour, this book profiles one of jazz's most important figures. Anthony Braxton discusses the expression of his musical visions and related ethical, political, and spiritual beliefs. "Absolutely essential reading." — The Wire.

First Published in 2001. For three decades, Anthony Braxton has been alternately celebrated, dismissed, and attacked for his musical innovations. His ambitious efforts to reconcile and personalize the historically divergent and often conflicting worldviews and principles of African-American (jazz), American Experimental (post-Ives), and Western European (post-serial) traditions have attracted both loyal supporters and passionate critics. Mike Heffley has followed Braxton's widely varied music from its beginning, and in 1988 began a professional musical relationship with him. His biography of Braxton's music is just that-a look at the music as if it were a living entity, with a traceable ancestry, a describable place in the world, and a history full of drama, intrigue, and passion. The music scholar will find here all the information necessary to understand the contents, contexts, and concepts of Braxton's music, and to further that understanding. The general reader will find the human and trans-human qualities that make the music so compelling to its makers and lovers.

An analysis of the portrayal of African American life, history, and possibility in the work of three important jazz composers.

A groundbreaking study of the trailblazing music of Chicago’s AACM, a leader in the world of jazz and experimental music. Founded on Chicago’s South Side in 1965 and still thriving today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is the most influential collective organization in jazz and experimental music. In Sound Experiments, Paul Steinbeck offers an in-depth historical and musical investigation of the collective, analyzing individual performances and formal innovations in captivating detail. He pays particular attention to compositions by Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell, the Association’s leading figures, as well as Anthony Braxton, George Lewis (and his famous computer-music experiment, Voyager), Wadada Leo Smith, and Henry Threadgill, along with younger AACM members such as Mike Reed, Tomeka Reid, and Nicole Mitchell. Sound Experiments represents a sonic history, spanning six decades, that affords insight not only into the individuals who created this music but also into an astonishing collective aesthetic. This aesthetic was uniquely grounded in nurturing communal ties across generations, as well as a commitment to experimentalism. The AACM’s compositions broke down the barriers between jazz and experimental music and made essential contributions to African American expression more broadly. Steinbeck shows how the creators of these extraordinary pieces pioneered novel approaches to instrumentation, notation, conducting, musical form, and technology, creating new soundscapes in contemporary music.

In Extended Play, one of the country's most innovative music writers conducts a wide-ranging tour through the outer limits of contemporary music. Over the course of more than twenty-five portraits, interviews, and essays, John Corbett engages artists from lands as distant as Sweden, Siberia, and Saturn. With a special emphasis on African American and European improvisers, the book explores the famous and the little known, from John Cage and George Clinton to Anthony Braxton and Sun Ra. Employing approaches as diverse as the music he celebrates, Corbett illuminates the sound and theory of funk and rap, blues and jazz, contemporary classical, free improvisation, rock, and reggae. Using cultural critique and textual theory, Corbett addresses a broad spectrum of issues, such as the status of recorded music in postmodern culture, the politics of self-censorship, experimentation, and alternativism in the music industry, and the use of metaphors of space and madness in the work of African American musicians. He follows these more theoretically oriented essays with a series of extensive profiles and in-depth interviews that offer contrasting and complementary perspectives on some of the world's most creative musicians and their work. Included here are more than twenty original photographs as well as a meticulously annotated discography. The result is one of the most thoughtful, and most entertaining, investigations of contemporary music available today.