An black Iraq war veteran and an Iraqi-American Muslim teenager form an unlikely friendship through their shared love of John Coltrane. A supreme coming-of-age story of friendship, forgiveness - and jazz. Tariq is is a young Iraqi-American Muslim man, beset by danger on the streets and conflict at home. Music is his only consolation. When he forms a friendship with the volatile but intriguing record-store owner and Iraq war veteran, Jamal, Tariq discovers the world of jazz - and the man he could become. Jamal is exciting, eloquent, and troubled. He suffers from PTSD, is always on edge. Tariq wants to learn from Jamal's knowledge of music, but can he afford to get close to this volatile veteran? When violence that has long threatened finally erupts, things suddenly clarify for Tariq. He takes the ultimate risk - not on behalf of his friend but his enemy - and the disparate worlds of modern America and traditional Islam come together in an unexpected and gripping resolution.

The contributors to Negotiated Moments explore how subjectivity is formed and expressed through musical improvisation, tracing the ways the transmission and reception of sound occur within and between bodies in real and virtual time and across memory, history, and space. They place the gendered, sexed, raced, classed, disabled, and technologized body at the center of critical improvisation studies and move beyond the field's tendency toward celebrating improvisation's utopian and democratic ideals by highlighting the improvisation of marginalized subjects. Rejecting a singular theory of improvisational agency, the contributors show how improvisation helps people gain hard-won and highly contingent agency. Essays include analyses of the role of the body and technology in performance, improvisation's ability to disrupt power relations, Pauline Oliveros's ideas about listening, flautist Nicole Mitchell's compositions based on Octavia Butler's science fiction, and an interview with Judith Butler about the relationship between her work and improvisation. The contributors' close attention to improvisation provides a touchstone for examining subjectivities and offers ways to hear the full spectrum of ideas that sound out from and resonate within and across bodies. Contributors. George Blake, David Borgo, Judith Butler, Rebecca Caines, Louise Campbell, Illa Carrillo Rodriguez, Berenice Corti, Andrew Raffo Dewar, Nina Eidsheim, Tomie Hahn, Jaclyn Heyen, Christine Sun Kim, Catherine Lee, Andra McCartney, Tracy McMullen, Kevin McNeilly, Leaf Miller, Jovana Milovic, Francois Mouillot, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Robinson, Neil Rolnick, Simon Rose, Gillian Siddall, Julie Dawn Smith, Jesse Stewart, Clara Tomaz, Sherrie Tucker, Lindsay Vogt, Zachary Wallmark, Ellen Waterman, David Whalen, Pete Williams, Deborah Wong, Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Original Music composed by Antonio Ciacca for the Chocolate Festival Event, pairing Richart chocolate with live jazz.

For the first time in English, the classic volume that developed a radical new understanding of free jazz and African American culture. 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli cowrote Free Jazz/Black Power, a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression. This analysis critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment. The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz/ Black Power remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists.

"Black Pearls" is an anthology of black women singers who made major contributions to American music. The word anthology derives from the Greek language meaning "gathering of flowers." In this collection, Josephine Qualls has described the evolution of Jazz music and its' related musical forms as embodied in the careers of these women ranging from Bessie Smith through Ma Rainey, Memphis Minnie, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Waters, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson (mother of pearls) and many others. Also included are descriptions of several early venues in which black women developed their talents. The musical art forms of Jazz, Blues, Gospel, Ragtime and Dixieland highlights the descriptions of the births, early years and lifelong careers of these African/American women. Spanning the years from 1895 to the present, this is an engaging and informative book leaving the reader fascinated by the amazing variety in this "collection of flowers." "Black Pearls" belongs in the library of any fan or historian of African/American music.

At the close of the Second World War, waves of African American musicians migrated to Paris, eager to thrive in its reinvigorated jazz scene. Jazz Diasporas challenges the notion that Paris was a color-blind paradise for African Americans. On the contrary, musicians adopted a variety of strategies to cope with the cultural and social assumptions that confronted them throughout their careers in Paris, particularly as France became embroiled in struggles over race and identity when colonial conflicts like the Algerian War escalated. Using case studies of prominent musicians and thoughtful analysis of interviews, music, film, and literature, Rashida K. Braggs investigates the impact of this postwar musical migration. She examines key figures including musicians Sidney Bechet, Inez Cavanaugh, and Kenny Clarke and writer and social critic James Baldwin to show how they performed both as artists and as African Americans. Their collaborations with French musicians and critics complicated racial and cultural understandings of who could represent "authentic" jazz and created spaces for shifting racial and national identities-what Braggs terms "jazz diasporas."

Microgroove continues John Corbett's exploration of diverse musics, with essays, interviews, and musician profiles that focus on jazz, improvised music, contemporary classical, rock, folk, blues, post-punk, and cartoon music. Corbett's approach to writing is as polymorphous as the music, ranging from oral history and journalistic portraiture to deeply engaged cultural critique. Corbett advocates for the relevance of "little" music, which despite its smaller audience is of enormous cultural significance. He writes on musicians as varied as Sun Ra, PJ Harvey, Koko Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Helmut Lachenmann. Among other topics, he discusses recording formats; the relationship between music and visual art, dance, and poetry; and, with Terri Kapsalis, the role of female orgasm sounds in contemporary popular music. Above all, Corbett privileges the importance of improvisation; he insists on the need to pay close attention to "other" music and celebrates its ability to open up pathways to new ideas, fresh modes of expression, and unforeseen ways of knowing.