Free Jazz New York Jazz: Catalog #18
New York: Boo-Hooray, 2023. In wraps. 132 pp. 8 x 10 1/2 in. New. Item #6835
The limited-edition print version of Boo-Hooray's 18th catalog, dedicated to the New Black Music of the 1960s, more widely known as “free jazz.”
Usually defined by its improvisatory mode or amelodic form, the New Black Music actually troubles the opposition between improvisation and composition, taking, instead, improvisation as the rigorous deconstruction of composition and melody, as traditionally understood. During the late-1950s, and throughout the 1960s, the transformations in (free) jazz reflected Black life and politics: musicians and writers such as Milford Graves and Amiri Baraka posited jazz as a distinctly African art form, bringing into opposition the dominant Western musical stricture, its key terms and orientations (i.e. tone, melody, tempo), finding through and beyond them energy, movement, thought, timbre, texture, rhythms, overtones and microtones, multiphonics, tone clusters—the musicians’ sound released into a new limitation.
Tracing the material history of New Black Music, the catalog includes flyers from Slugs, ESP Disk publications, and much more rare jazz history including ephemera, test prints, posters, LPs, and periodicals related to Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Charles Mingus, Cecil Taylor, Thelonius Monk, and more.
Printed in an edition of 200 in March 2023.
Price: $25.00