In Search of a Sound: Dreams of a New Black Music
Jun 2027 · Sold by FSG Originals
Ebook
544
Pages
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infoThis book will become available on June 8, 2027. You will not be charged until it is released.
About this ebook
An engrossing history of the experimental artists who escaped the "Tin Pan Alley penitentiary" of conventional pop and jazz, and created America’s most successful avant-garde.
When the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman arrived in New York City in 1959, he was intent on joining a revolution and advancing it further. Soon, he would make his intentions known with album titles such as The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century. The words were not hyperbole. The writer and critic Adam Shatz’s In Search of a Sound offers the defining portrait of America’s most vital avant-garde as it emerged out of Coleman’s blues lyricism, the saxophonist John Coltrane’s ardent questing, and the pianist Cecil Taylor’s vaulting pyrotechnics.
In a series of gripping portraits, Shatz shows how these musicians and their legatees struggled with themselves and their times. Confronting the Civil Rights revolution, Black Power, the Vietnam War, decolonization and the rise of the Third World, and women’s liberation, they dreamed not only of new sounds but of alternative forms of experience and a society in which those sounds might find a home and a future. Drawing on his highly regarded work for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, Shatz explores the electric experiments of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, the restless inventions of Julius Hemphill and Henry Threadgill, the radical vocal work of Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln, and the more contemporary innovations of Craig Taborn and Tyshawn Sorey, along with much else. Approaching the artists and their music, he draws us thrillingly close to what the saxophonist Oliver Lake has called “the point at which creation begins.”
When the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman arrived in New York City in 1959, he was intent on joining a revolution and advancing it further. Soon, he would make his intentions known with album titles such as The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century. The words were not hyperbole. The writer and critic Adam Shatz’s In Search of a Sound offers the defining portrait of America’s most vital avant-garde as it emerged out of Coleman’s blues lyricism, the saxophonist John Coltrane’s ardent questing, and the pianist Cecil Taylor’s vaulting pyrotechnics.
In a series of gripping portraits, Shatz shows how these musicians and their legatees struggled with themselves and their times. Confronting the Civil Rights revolution, Black Power, the Vietnam War, decolonization and the rise of the Third World, and women’s liberation, they dreamed not only of new sounds but of alternative forms of experience and a society in which those sounds might find a home and a future. Drawing on his highly regarded work for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, Shatz explores the electric experiments of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, the restless inventions of Julius Hemphill and Henry Threadgill, the radical vocal work of Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln, and the more contemporary innovations of Craig Taborn and Tyshawn Sorey, along with much else. Approaching the artists and their music, he draws us thrillingly close to what the saxophonist Oliver Lake has called “the point at which creation begins.”
An engrossing history of the experimental artists who escaped the "Tin Pan Alley penitentiary" of conventional pop and jazz, and created America’s most successful avant-garde.
When the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman arrived in New York City in 1959, he was intent on joining a revolution and ad...
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About the author
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon won the American Library in Paris’s prize for best book on a French subject in 2024. He is also the author of Rebels and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination and editor of Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel. His liner notes for Anouar Brahem’s album "After the Last Sky" were nominated for a Grammy Award in 2025. In 2022 he was designated a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture.
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books, and a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His book The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon won the American Library in Paris’s prize for best book on a French subject in 2024. He is also the author of ...
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