Dirk Ippen Lecture

Tracing the Black Sonic Avant-Garde

W.E.B. Du Bois famously described Black music as the gift that an enslaved people gave to America, a music containing a “singularly spiritual heritage.” This view has become conventional wisdom, particularly with respect to popular genres such as soul, R&B, and hip hop. Seldom, however, is Black art music understood as embodying a sonic avant-garde. In this talk, Adam Shatz challenges this view by tracing this music’s emergence and development, from the early days of Bebop to the birth of Free Jazz, and its relationship to the freedom struggles of the larger Black community in the United States. He touches upon innovators including Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Marion Brown, Jeanne Lee, Julius Hemphill, and Henry Threadgill, and explores the ways in which the Black sonic avant-garde both echoes and diverges from the history of European modernism.