Join us for a joint celebration of two new histories of free jazz: Cisco Bradley's I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power (Columbia University Press, 2026) and Kwami Coleman's Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Bradley's book traces the free jazz movement that took shape in Cleveland and Detroit in the 1960s. Drawing on interviews with dozens of musicians, he shows how artists broke from the constraints of bebop to develop a new musical language, pulling from figures like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane, as well as African and Middle Eastern musical traditions, avant-garde art movements, and the politics of Black Power. The book locates this Midwestern scene within a longer arc, showing how the musical and cultural inheritance carried north by the Great Migration shaped its sound and sensibility.