Wellfleet Public Library

Kwami Coleman is a pianist, composer, and musicologist specializing in improvised, experimental, and Afro-diasporic music. His first album, Local Music (2017), contains original compositions interpolated with original field recordings capturing the streets of Harlem, New York City-his childhood neighborhood, and has also created commissioned works for the Studio Museum of Harlem (2023), March on Washington Film Festival (2020). His book, Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz, on the emergence of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2025. He is an associate professor of music the Gallatin School of Individualized Study. This talk, based on the book, will explore what made free jazz so "free" by exploring the sound and context of what music critics of the 1960s called the "new thing" in jazz. We will listen to examples from key recordings and survey some of the innovative-and misunderstood-design elements in this presumably formless music. To anchor that, Coleman will also present a sketch of the contentious debate happening on the music's merit in literary and popular culture. With no promise of easy listening, this talk will focus on the stakes and goals of music experimentalism in a time of revolution in the United States.