Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Disenchanted with the strictures of bebop, musicians forged a new style—free jazz—that took inspiration from a vast range of sources, including figures such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane; African and Middle Eastern music; avant-garde modernism; and the politics and aesthetics of Black Power. How did this radical movement come about, and what explains its creativity and vitality?
Based on interviews with dozens of musicians, I Hear Freedom tells the story of free jazz and its connection to the broader Black experience. Cisco Bradley demonstrates that although this part of the free jazz movement arose in the Midwest, it is deeply rooted in the musical traditions and aesthetics that the Great Migration brought from the South. As postwar urban renewal projects fractured Black communities, musicians drew on this heritage to create new forms of expression. Figures such as Albert Ayler, Donald Ayler, Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, and Faruq Z. Bey developed distinct artistic visions, often influenced by their involvement in Black liberation movements. I Hear Freedom chronicles the Cleveland and Detroit free jazz scenes, and it follows musicians to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and beyond. A revelatory oral history, this book shows that free jazz is a uniquely Black style shaped by mobility, community, and the struggle for freedom.
Cisco Bradley is professor of history at the Pratt Institute. His books include The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) and Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (2021). He is also the director of the documentary Take Me to Fendika (2024).
Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn is a music historian, writer, researcher, and DJ who heads cow: Music and is the creative consultant at Astral Spirits Records.
Foreword: Those Big Trees Over There, by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn
Introduction: Black Geographies, Networks, and Mobilities
Part I: Black Networks and Lineages
1. The Underground Railroad, Free Black Communities, and the Earliest Cultural Spaces in the Greater Ohio Valley
2. Post-Emancipation Mobilities: Reconstruction, Survival, and the Great Migration
3. Urbanization, Labor Struggles, the Blues, and the Great Migration: Industrialization and Cultural Space in the Early Twentieth Century
Part II: Old and New Sounds in the Greater Ohio Valley
4. Cleveland: Jazz, Segregation, and Working-Class Aesthetics
5. Solidarity and Crisis in Detroit: The Detroit Artists’ Workshop and the Forging of Radical Culture
6. “My Mind and My Spirit Were Liberated During the Riot”: Faruq Z. Bey and Griot Galaxy in Detroit
7. Tribe: Collectivity, Self-Determination, and the Detroit Visionaries of the 1970s
Part III: Outward Movements
8. “Don’t Be Scared to Tell Them the Truth”: The Music of Albert Ayler in New York and Europe
9. Midwestern Drifter: Charles Tyler in California, New York, and France
10. Artistic Liberation Abroad: Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Muhammad Ali, and Alan Silva in New York and Paris
Conclusion: Legacies of Freedom in Sound
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index