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John Coltrane and Amiri Baraka Discuss Revolution at Birdland
There is a photo of John Coltrane and Amiri Baraka, then known as LeRoi Jones, at Birdland in October 1963. Baraka is eagerly showing Coltrane something in a journal. He is speaking and Coltrane is rolling his lips inward, looking at the text Baraka holds open. This is the only image I’ve seen of these two men together.
(from Anderson 2007)
Only the word “Africa” and the letters “Rev” are visible on the journal’s cover, but that was enough for Italian jazz scholar Francesco Martinelli and Cootie Williams biographer Steve Bowie to both identify it as the radical magazine Revolution: Africa, Latin America, Asia (Porter 2025; Bowie 2021).
In 1963 Baraka was a rising literary star living in Greenwich Village. He was the only Black writer in Donald Allen’s crucial 1960 anthology The New American Poetry and published his first book of poetry: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. In nonfiction Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a crucial contribution to American Cultural Studies, appeared in 1963, and he had written most of the texts collected in Home: Social Essays, including “Tokenism: 300 Years for Five Cents,” which coined the term, “The Myth of a ‘Negro Literature’,” an Oedipal takedown of his predecessors from Wheatley to Baldwin, and “Cuba Libre,” which challenged the “art-for-art’s sake” anti-politics of his bohemian peers. The theatrical triumph of Dutchman was a year away.
Baraka’s music writing increasingly presented the new jazz of Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor as connecting musical and political liberation, and many of the next generation of free jazz musicians identified with varieties of Black revolutionary politics. Coltrane’s own ideology has been a matter of speculation, projection, and contestation. What does this picture add?
Revolution began publication as African Revolution in May 1963. Its editorial offices were in Algeria, its business offices in Switzerland. Editor-in-chief Zohra Drif had been a leader of the Algerian revolution. In 1957 the French had sentenced her to twenty years of hard labor for planning the Milk Bar bombing, later dramatized in The Battle of Algiers, then Prime Minister Charles DeGaulle pardoned her after Algeria achieved independence in 1962. She went on to serve in the legislature and as Vice President. Her husband Rabah Bitat was interim President in the 1970s.
African Revolution included articles on anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Angola, Congo, Guinea, Mali, Morocco, South Africa, and Swaziland, as well as reports from Borneo, Cuba, Vietnam, and Yemen, coverage of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference held in Tanganyika, and stories on the situations of Algerians in Paris and African and Afro-Caribbean people in London.
There was also substantial African-American content: an excerpt from Robert F. Williams’ memoir of organizing armed resistance to the Ku Klux Klan Negroes with Guns, Philippe Koechlin’s “Jazz: Renaissance or Decline?” which cited African-themed pieces by Art Blakey, Cannonball Adderley, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach, as well as Coltrane’s Africa/Brass, to argue that jazz continues to be a “living art” because it is conscious of its “social context,” and Baraka’s early survey “Jazz: The Avant Garde,” which had appeared in the September 1961 issue of Metronome and was reprinted in 1967’s Black Music.
After two issues African Revolution became Revolution, better reflecting its global scope. Revolution’s place in a global anti-colonial network committed to direct action and unafraid of Marxist and Communist connections was shown by the letters of support in the early issues from groups including the African National Congress, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and Workers World, as well as by advertisements from Monthly Review, New Left Review, and Foreign Languages Press, a multilingual Chinese Communist publisher.
The third monthly issue was followed by a double-issue dated August/September 1963. This is the one Baraka held at Birdland.
The cover photo is of a student protestor being arrested in Alabama. It was taken by Leroy McLucas and provided by CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality). The issue included a section on “the Afro-American Struggle” with several pages of photos and three texts. Harold Cruse’s “Negro Nationalism and the Left” is excerpted from a longer version published in Studies on the Left and contains the kernel of his 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: a Black nationalist critique of alliances with white Marxists as another form of integration, concluding: “There is no longer room for the ‘revolutionary paternalism’ that has been the hallmark of such organizations as the US Communist Party. This is what the ‘New Left’ must clearly understand in its future relations with Negro movements that are indigenous to the Negro community.” (Cruse 1963: 34).
Julian Mayfield’s “Uncle Tom Goes to Africa” briefly describes the suspicious behavior of some of his fellow African-American expatriates, and journalist William Worthy’s “You Can’t Come Home Any More” is an account of having his passport revoked after he had joined Baraka, Cruse, Mayfield, Robert Williams, and others on a 1960 trip to Cuba organized by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and documented in Baraka’s “Cuba Libre.”
The issue also contained news from Cuba, Egypt, Guinea, Iraq, South Africa, Vietnam, and the African Summit Conference where the Organization of African Unity was established. However, what brought it to Birdland was the last piece, Baraka’s survey of Coltrane’s career up to My Favorite Things, first published in the December 1961 Metronome as “A Coltrane Trilogy” and later reprinted in Black Music as “A Jazz Great: John Coltrane.” The Francophone editors of Revolution slightly garbled the title:
Baraka reviews the LPs Giant Steps, Coltrane Jazz, and My Favorite Things. While Coltrane recorded seven albums during his two years on Atlantic Records, these were the only three released as of mid-1961, when he switched to Impulse. The others emerged over the next five years, competing with new material on Impulse and with Prestige Records’ repackagings of its own older Coltrane catalog. Baraka discusses Coltrane’s 1950s work with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Cecil Taylor, plus highlights of his pre-Atlantic solo records, concluding that My Favorite Things marks his development “from sideman to innovator.”
Baraka and his circle made several more significant contributions to Revolution. His essay “Jazz and the White Critic” was published in the October 1963 issue under the title: “White Critics, Black Musicians, New Music.” It had appeared in August’s Downbeat and September’s Negro Digest and would be placed first in Baraka’s collection Black Music. It shared space with a farewell message from W. E. B. DuBois, who had died in August, a tribute to DuBois by Julian Mayfield, an essay by Che Guevara, A. B. Spellman’s commentary on the March on Washington, and other texts.
The November 1963 issue included “Mr. Rockefeller’s Museum of Primitive Art,” by Marion Brown. Brown had provided Baraka some ethnomusicological background for Blues People, often played alto saxophone in Archie Shepp’s groups, and appeared on Coltrane’s Ascension in 1965 (Thomas 1995: 262; Gennari 2006: 273). Here he reads the New York museum, which opened in 1957 and became part of the Met in 1975, as a showcase of colonial plunder.
For the January 1964 issue Baraka edited a section on “Young Afro-American Poets” with poems by Lorenzo Thomas, Sonia Sanchez, Joe Johnson, Spellman, and himself, and contributed a profile of Don Cherry, previously published in the November 1963 Downbeat and later collected in Black Music.
Coltrane was at Birdland October 6-13 of 1963. Selections recorded on the 8th were released by Impulse in January of 1964 as Live at Birdland. This was a return to form for the classic quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. It followed a series of more accessible projects: Duke Ellington and John Coltrane and Ballads (both released in January 1963) and John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman (released in the summer), which were motivated by record company pressure and Coltrane’s mouthpiece issues, and it was Jones’ first recording with the group after three months in the Federal Lexington Narcotics Rehabilitation Center (DeVito et al 277-278).
It also included the piece “Alabama,” recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on November 18. On September 15 white supremacist terrorists had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, reacting against the integration of the city’s public schools at the start of the month, one result of a year-long campaign by CORE and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Opposition had been violent, but there were no deaths until the church bombing killed four young girls.
Baraka may have had these murders in mind when writing his liner notes for Live at Birdland, which are a masterpiece of the form and a high point of his music writing. He begins: “One of the most baffling things about America is that, despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here” and describes the degradation of taking the subway (“full of all the things any man should expect to find in something’s bowels”) to Birdland, a temple of commerce and a tomb for art, full of “drunks and clowns,” to hear Coltrane “destroy all of it, completely, like Sodom, with just the first few notes from his horn” and affirm life. For Baraka, Coltrane’s music is “one of the reasons why suicide seems so boring” (Jones 1970: 63-67).
“Alabama’s” connection to the church bombing is deflected in these notes. Baraka reports Impulse Records head Bob Thiele asking Coltrane if the title “had any significance to today’s problems,” and adding “I suppose he meant ‘literally.'” Knowing Baraka’s other work, it is easy to read into this that a rich white man, even a progressive one like Thiele, might need to have this spelled out, but that it should be obvious. Baraka quoted Coltrane’s reply: “It represents, musically, something I saw down there translated into music from inside me,” then described the piece’s “introspective” saxophone and thundercloud drums and offered a prayer or curse for the destruction of Alabama to be this beautiful.
McCoy Tyner was more direct. He told Ashley Khan the piece was based on a Martin Luther King speech Coltrane had read in a newspaper. However, he and Elvin Jones also both told Frances Davis they were not given the piece’s title before recording it, much less its inspiration (Porter 2024).
“Alabama’s” siblings are “Spiritual” from 1961’s Live at the Village Vanguard, and “Psalm,” the concluding movement of A Love Supreme (recorded in December of 1964 and released a month later). Each is a solemn rubato theme in C minor, and the first two end with similar gestures: an emphatic descending quarter note arpeggio going from C minor 7 to Ab major, and the melodic line Eb Bb C over an Ab to G to C minor cadence:
“Spiritual:”
“Alabama:”
(Coltrane 1991: 9, 103)
Each also has an associated text, identified by Lewis Porter. “Spiritual” is adapted from a version of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” found in James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of Negro Spirituals, which Coltrane owned, while “Psalm” is a setting of the poem Coltrane wrote for the liner notes to A Love Supreme. Porter has matched its words precisely to the music (Porter 1998: 206-208, 244-248). “Alabama” has been more of a mystery, with no equivalent MLK speech. Porter solved this by focusing on the detail in Tyner’s account that Coltrane had read a newspaper story on King’s eulogy for the four girls killed in the church bombing. He did not have access to the full text or a broadcast. The excerpts included in the Associated Press’ report fit convincingly well. Here’s my attempt to marry the opening to the first phrases of the published score:
(Coltrane 1991: 8; Porter 2024).
John F. Kennedy was alive when “Alabama” was recorded. Over the course of 1963 his administration had grown more sympathetic to the Civil Rights Movement, moved by the brutal treatment of nonviolent protestors in Birmingham in the spring, an intense meeting Robert Kennedy had with James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, and others in May, Alabama Governor George Wallace’s defiance of Federal orders to integrate the University of Alabama in June, and the massive success of the March on Washington in August. JFK had proposed the Civil Rights Act in June and, after his assassination, Lyndon Johnson led the bill to passage as his legacy.
This is the context in which, between the mid-November 1963 recording of “Alabama” and the January 9, 1964 release of Live at Birdland, John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Thiele chose to leave some ambiguity around this piece, accommodating less progressive fans while flattering allies that they didn’t need to spell it out for them.
James Smethurst cites Baraka’s notes as a foundational text of the Black Arts Movement, highlighting the radical gesture of opening a text whose central purpose is to sell records to Americans by calling the United States “vile” (Smethurst 2021: 128-129). However, Allen Ginsberg had published “America” in 1956, with the still-shocking line: “America, go fuck yourself with your atom bomb,” and there was a thriving popular critical literature on postwar consumer culture by 1964, such as William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd (1960), and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). Taking a similarly strong position on the Civil Rights Movement may have been riskier, even among jazz fans.
“Alabama” was an apex of Coltrane’s political work on record. His only other similarly dedicated piece: “Reverend King,” was released in July 1968, after the deaths of its creator and its subject.
The other key Coltrane political text is an interview conducted August 18, 1966 by Frank Kofsky (Kofsky 1998: 432-456). Kofsky began by telling Coltrane a friend had been surprised to find him sitting next to her at a Malcolm X speech.
According to David Tegnell, cited in The John Coltrane Reference, this happened on April 8, 1964, at the Militant Labor Forum in Manhattan, six months after the Live at Birdland recording. The quartet was on a two week break between three weeks at the Half Note in New York and a week at the Showboat in Philadelphia, after which they played a CORE benefit at the Five Spot on the 26th and recorded Crescent on the 27th (DeVito et al 2008: 301-302, 703). Malcolm had been out of the Nation of Islam for a month and would leave for his pilgrimage to Mecca a week after the speech.
Malcolm X was killed in February of 1965 and his autobiography, which ends with his conversion to Sunni Islam, appeared that November from Grove Press. The autobiography, like Spike Lee’s Malcolm X film, shows Malcolm moving from a life of crime to the Nation of Islam to an unclear and unrealized independent future. Malcolm X Speaks, which was also published in 1965, documents the anticolonial and Marxist aspects of that final phase, which are not in the more popular accounts.
The Militant Labor Forum was organized by the Socialist Workers Party, which was formed as the Communist League of America in 1928 when the Communist Party of the United States aligned with Stalin and expelled its Trotskyite members. SWP published a weekly called The Militant and runs Pathfinder Press, which published both Malcolm X Speaks and Frank Kofsky’s 1970 Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music, based on his University of Pittsburgh history dissertation and including his Coltrane interview.
Here’s an ad for the speech from the March 23 issue of The Militant:
and the only image I could find of the event itself:
The text was published as “The Black Revolution” in Malcolm X Speaks and an audio recording is online (X 1965: 45-57). The editor of Malcolm X Speaks comments that his audience was “around three quarters white” and “responded favorably” although the question period was dominated by defensive white liberals.
Malcolm begins by comparing the global situation to a fire, and notes that he is not the one who set it, he is only sounding the alarm. He connects the African-American liberation struggle to that of people of color worldwide, observing that they are a growing majority and that the media panic about the population explosion is based in racial anxiety. This January 11, 1960 Time Magazine cover illustrates his point. Notice that the blonde white woman, despite her material advantages, is being literally marginalized in the growing world population.
Switching flammable metaphors, he explains that although the Black nationalist movement in the US is small, it will be the fuse that lights the powder-keg of revolution, and that African-Americans are increasingly seeing themselves as part of Pan-African and Third World communities. He predicts 1964 will see the “Negro revolt” become part of the “world-wide black revolution” against colonialism. While he criticizes the Civil Rights Movement for asking their oppressors for accommodations, he also moves away from the essentialist separatism of his Nation of Islam era, explaining that both integration and separation are strategies for gaining “freedom, justice, equality, and respect.”
Malcolm contrasts civil rights activists, who identify as Americans and demand the rights promised with that status, although people of color are a minority in the US, with human rights activists, who identify as colonized people of color, part of a global majority. Seeking justice in the American legal system, created and run by and for white people, is futile. He instead proposes reviving the “We Charge Genocide” petition presented to the United Nations on behalf of African-Americans a decade before by the Civil Rights Congress, a radical organization parallel to the NAACP which included W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson and was friendly with the Communist Party USA. Malcolm is uncharacteristically optimistic that the institutions of the rules-based postwar international order can deliver what he calls a “bloodless revolution” in the US by endorsing African-American liberation, because they represent the worldwide majority of colonized people of color, even though they were created by the US.
Coltrane told Frank Kofsky he had been impressed by seeing Malcolm X deliver this speech. Kofsky followed up: “Some musicians have said there’s a relationship between some of Malcolm’s ideas and the music, especially the new music. Do you think there’s anything in that?” Coltrane chose to say no more about Malcolm, instead responding: “Well, I think that music, being an expression of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is happening. I feel it expresses the whole thing – the whole of human experience at the particular time that it is being expressed.” (Kofsky 1998: 433). Kofsky similarly asked whether Black musicians had made most of the major contributions to jazz, whether Black and white audiences responded differently to the music, which audience Coltrane preferred, if the music expressed social views, and if it was specifically opposed to poverty or the Vietnam War. Kofsky framed most of these topics as opinions he had heard from other musicians. Coltrane agreed that the music’s pioneers had mostly been African-American and confirmed that he put all his thoughts into his music, including his hopes for a world without hunger and violence. He evaded the audience-related questions. Kofsky didn’t challenge Coltrane’s evasions and generalities and did not attempt to push him into more radical or definitive statements.
However, this modest introduction of politics has led to this interview being scorned by many fans who think Kofsky bullied Coltrane, distorted his words, or otherwise imposed his beliefs on him. This demonstrates the persistence of red-baiting in the US and many white jazz fans’ investment in a color-blind and apolitical story of the music. Consider these comments from the Organissimo online jazz forums:
Adam Shatz, a biographer of Franz Fanon as well as an astute jazz critic, called the interview a “grilling” in the New York Review of Books, Bret Primack, on his Substack Coltrane Code, describes Kofsky as “aggressive,” and John Gennari, in his generally excellent book Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics, compared it to “a Moscow show trial.” (Shatz 2021; Gennari 2006: 263).
Kofsky allowed the progressive Pacifica radio network to broadcast his tape of the interview. It appeared on KPFK in 1973, they sold cassette copies, and it can easily be streamed online. To my ears Kofsky sounds nervous and awestruck to have one of the greatest living artists sitting in his car. He talks a little too quickly and high-pitched, and sometimes cuts Coltrane off, but quickly apologizes and gets out of his way. In contrast, there are few recordings of Coltrane speaking, and it is remarkable how relaxed and down-to-earth he is, how different his personality is from his music.
Kofsky’s voice is also stereotypically New York, Jewish, and of its time. American Jews played essential and controversial roles in the jazz business, the Civil Rights Movement, and left-wing politics, circles that intersect in the Coltrane/Baraka photo: Alfred Lion, Frances Wolff, Bob Weinstock, Leonard Feather, Nat Hentoff, Gary Giddens, Ira Gitler, Abraham Heschel, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Max Schactman, Dorothy Healey, etc. Note also that, until just a few weeks before his “Black Revolution” speech, Malcolm X had been a leading representative of the Nation of Islam and its antisemitic doctrine.
Kofsky was far more respectful to Coltrane than Downbeat editor Gitler had been to Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach in 1961. In his review of her Straight Ahead album Gitler had called Lincoln “a professional Negro” for making work about civil rights and defended this to her face when the magazine held a roundtable on the controversy (“Racial…” pts. I & II).
Gitler’s version of “shut up and sing” was within the norms of his time. In contrast, Kofsky’s Black nationalist and Communist connections eventually cost him platforms for his music writing at Downbeat and the Journal of Jazz Studies, Cal State Sacramento canceled the African-American music course he had created there, and he was pressured to develop less controversial research areas (Kofsky 1998: 9-13, 162-163). His second book was on Lenny Bruce, his third on Harry Truman.
Revolution’s international Communist affiliations, along with the Socialist Workers Party presenting the Malcolm X speech Coltrane heard and their Pathfinder Press publishing Malcolm X Speaks and Kofsky’s book, show that openly Communist organizations played crucial and under-recognized roles in twentieth-century culture and activism, as Mike Davis and Jon Weiner documented in a different context in their brilliant Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.
Baraka bringing Revolution to Birdland helps illuminate that the African-American Downtown community Baraka, Coltrane, Brown, Shepp, Spellman, Lincoln, Roach, Sanchez, and their cohort moved in was saturated with Martin, Medgar, and Malcolm, Trotsky, DuBois, Fanon, Che, and Lumumba, as seen in the 2023 film Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. These proto-Black Arts Movement artists and intellectuals were thinking about Vietnam before the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964, much less the Tet Offensive in 1968, and about apartheid decades before the Soweto Uprising and the UN cultural boycott. Coltrane might never have directly said there were politics in his music, but there is no question that his music was in politics.
Works Cited
Anderson, Iain. This is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture. Philadelphia: U of PA P, 2007.
Bowie, Steve. Facebook comment Mar. 26, 2021. <https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1959732207514830&set=p.1959732207514830&tn=%2CO*F>
Coltrane, John. The Music of John Coltrane. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1991.
DeVito, Chris, Yashiro Fujoka, Wolf Schmaler, and David Wild. The John Coltrane Reference. ed. Lewis Porter. New York: Routledge, 2008.
Gennari, John. Blowin’ Hot and Cool: Jazz and its Critics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006.
Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). Black Music. New York: Morrow, 1970.
Kofsky, Frank. John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s. New York: Pathfinder, 1998. expanded second edition of Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. New York: Pathfinder, 1970.
Porter, Lewis. “Amiri Baraka Talks With Me & Grad Students About Jazz, Dr. King, Malcolm X, & More, 1 of 2.” Playback with Lewis Porter. SubStack post. Jan. 19, 2025. <https://lewisporter.substack.com/p/amiri-baraka-talks-with-me-and-my>.
—. “For Dr. King: Coltrane, Hidden Texts, and ‘Alabama,’ 2—Coltrane’s Text.” Playback with Lewis Porter. SubStack post. Jan. 20, 2024. <https://lewisporter.substack.com/p/for-dr-king-coltrane-hidden-texts>.
—. John Coltrane: His Life and Music. Ann Arbor: U of MI P, 1998.
Primack, Bret. “The Kofsky-Coltrane Interview.” Coltrane Code. SubStack post. Sept. 12, 2025. <https://coltranecode.substack.com/p/the-kofsky-coltrane-interview>.
“Racial Prejudice in Jazz, Part I.” Down Beat. Mar. 15, 1962: 20-26.
“Racial Prejudice in Jazz, Part II.” Down Beat. Mar. 22, 1962: 22-25.
Shatz, Adam. “Coltrane’s New Love Supreme.” New York Review of Books. Oct. 7, 2021.
Smethurst, James. “‘A Marching Song for Some Strange Uncharted Country:’ The Black Nation, Black Revolution, and Amiri Baraka’s Liner Notes.” in Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka. ed. Jean-Philippe Marcoux. Columbus, OH: OH State UP, 2021: 121-133.
Thomas, Lorenzo. “Ascension: Music and the Black Arts Movement.” Jazz Among the Discourses. ed. Krin Gabbard. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995. 256-274.
X, Malcolm. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. ed. George Breitman. New York: Pathfinder P, 1965.
Thanks to Karen Raines at UC Riverside Special Collections, Vincent Pelote at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Tatiana Stewart at Chuck Stewart Photography for research assistance and to all the scholars whose work I have relied on.
September 2026
Hi everyone,
There’s a little bit of a back-to-school vibe this month with orchestra season staring up. Lots of other action too…
August ends with a fresh combination of amazing people: Alicia Byer has organized an improvising quartet with herself, gamin, William Roper, and me. Sunspace, 8PM. Also appearing: Cassia Streb and Tim Feeney.
On Sept. 12 MESTO, the Multi-Ethnic STar Orchestra, led by Nabil Azzam, plays at the Broad Stage. This is a very special group that only comes together every year or so. Click the poster for tickets.
The Soundwaves concert series continues on the 15th, with two bands including Garth Powell and led by people whose initials are “BB.”
- Barnett/Wood Band: Bonnie Barnett (voice), Richard Wood (reeds), Dan Clucas (cornet etc), Hal Onserud (bass), Garth Powell (drums)
- CuZn’s: Bobby Bradford (cornet), William Roper (tuba etc), Brian Walsh (reeds), Garth Powell (drums)
I’m looking forward to presenting these folks! Click below for more.
Friday Sept. 18 is the third Friday of the month, which means my jazz band the Soapbox is at the Industry Cafe & Jazz in Culver City. We’ll play three sets of John Coltrane’s music in honor of his centennial. The lineup includes Joyce Pan (violin), Alicia Byer (clarinet), Charles Sharp (reeds), Kristian Aspelin (guitar), Toni Vang (keyboard), Matthew Miller (drums), and maybe one or two more cats, although that’s a lot of folks to fit on that stage… No tickets, no cover, just drop in.
That’s going to be a wild weekend, because the next day I’m playing the Central Avenue Jazz Festival with the World Stage Big Band (details TBD, click the image for where they’ll eventually show up).
and that night is the start of the Santa Monica Symphony season, with Sibelius, Shostakovich, and Dvorak. Click below to RSVP, which does not guarantee a seat, so get there early, RSVP or not.
Anna Homler’s Breadwoman project is on the cover of the September Artforum. She recently performed it at the Dripping Festival, which I could not participate in, but hopefully this amazing press will lead to more opportunities…
Finally, an album Charles Sharp made with me, Anthony Shadduck, Michael Intrerie, Rich West, and Andrew Lessman in 2012 has shown up on Bandcamp. I haven’t listened to it since then, but I bet it’s interesting!
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you soon.
August 2026
August 1st I am playing Beethoven’s septet at my old workplace along with a new companion piece by Alicia Byer, who is on bassoon for this gig. Free!
Beethoven wrote the septet when he was 30, the same year as his first symphony. So it’s pretty fluffy in the Classical style and, as he developed his heavier mature voice, the septet became his equivalent of an old hit single that audiences wanted instead of new material.
The “miniature orchestra” thing is because the instrumentation is one from every section: one violin, one viola, one cello, one bass, one single reed (clarinet), one double reed (bassoon), and one brass (French horn). Sorry flutes and percussion!
The 3rd and 4th I get to share the stage with Oakland icon Lisa Mezzacappa. On the 3rd it will be sequentially: I’ll be with Charles Sharp’s All-Stars (also including Alicia Byer, Kristian Aspelin, and Matthew Miller) splitting the bill with the even more all-star lineup of Lisa, Vinny Golia, Kris Tiner, and Max Jaffe at the Vernacular New Music series at SunSpace. On the 4th it will be simultaneously, as represented below.
On the 18th Andrea Centazzo, Ellen Burr, and I will play compositions by Andrea and Steve Lacy to mark the 50th anniversary of Clangs, Andrea’s classic duo record with Lacy which was the first release on the Ictus label. We’re sharing the bill with Matt Crane’s improvising trio with Joe Baiza and Mike Watt. Historic! Click the poster for more.
On the 21st my jazz band the Soapbox will be at the Industry Cafe & Jazz in Culver City from 6:30-10PM. No cover. We’ve played everything from Louis Armstrong to John Zorn, and often focus on adventurous-but-melodic compositions by folks like Carla Bley, Karl Berger, David Murray, etc.
Finally, it’s back to Vernacular/SunSpace on the 31st for a set by a new Alicia Byer band with gamin (Korean reeds), William Roper (tuba etc), and myself.
Bonus local news content: I appear very briefly with the World Stage Big Band in this video.
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you soon.
July 2026
Here’s what I’m doing in July, plus a publication.
On the 11th and 18th I am in Carole Kim’s new piece SQRM, which is part of the Daredevil Arts Festival at the Electric Lodge in Venice. Includes dance, music, and video art.
On the 17th my jazz band the Soapbox has our monthly night at the Industry Cafe & Jazz in Culver City. No cover, so why not drop in?
July 21 is the next installment of the Soundwaves new music series, which I run with Richard An and Alicia Byer. Click the flyer for more:
I have a review of Harald Kisiedu’s excellent book European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany 1950-1975 in the new issue of Critical Studies in Improvisation. Open access, click below…
See you soon!
June 2026 pt. 2
On the 16th the Soundwaves new music series teams up with the Dog Star Orchestra Festival to present the Dog Star Community Choir. Click below for info.
Note that Ryan Seward’s piece will be performed outdoors near the venue before showtime. Details at the link.
Dog Star is LA’s main platform for post-Cage/Fluxus/Oliveros/Wandelweiser composition, founded by Michael Pisaro and now in its 22nd year. If any of those references rings a bell, or you are curious about experimental performance, check out their events.
I am helping organize this gig, but will not be on hand.
I will definitely be present to play a jazz double-header on Friday the 19th.
First, at noon in Leimert Park I am sharing the bass chair in the World Stage Big Band with Michael Saucier. It’s a real honor to be part of this band and to celebrate Juneteenth in Leimert Park.
We played on the 4th at a press conference for the LA Jazz Festival. Click the poster to see Dominique DiPrima’s Instagram video with us in the background.
The 19th is not only Juneteenth, it’s also the third Friday, which is the regular night my band the Soapbox is at the Industry Cafe & Jazz in Culver City. This month Joyce Pan (violin), Alicia Byer (clarinet), Charles Sharp (reeds), Kristian Aspelin (guitar), Peter Valsamis (drums), and I will play some tunes associated with Sonny Rollins.
Then on Wednesday the 24th, I’ll be in the Dog Star Orchestra Festival Large Ensemble.
Looking ahead to July, tickets are on sale for the Daredevil Arts Festival in Venice, which includes Carole Kim’s “SQRM,” a multimedia piece whose sonic elements will be provided by Kozue Matsumoto, Eli Rosenkim, M. A. Tiesenga, me, and Carole herself. Performances at 3PM July 11 and 3:30PM July 18.
Last, for today, Next World Sound Volume 5, a split LP with Anna Homler, David Javelosa, and myself on one side and Knox Chandler on the other, is now available through Bandcamp. Get the vinyl, get the download, get them both…
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you soon.
June 2026 Pt. 1
Plus, The World of Cecil Taylor, the first book in the SUNY Press Contemporary Writing in Jazz series I am co-editing with Howard Mandel & Titus Levi, is now available to pre-order.
I have an essay in it, but I am one of the less-famous contributors:
Introduction
Peter Valente
1. The Avant-Gardist Who Came in from the Cold
Gary Giddins
2. On Cecil Taylor’s Conservatory Education
Allan Chase
3. Impressions of Cecil Taylor
Marc Edwards
4. Visceral and Cathartic Joy: An Appreciation of Cecil Taylor
Taylor Ho Bynum
5. My Time with Cecil Taylor
Mark Hundevad
6. Remembering Cecil
John Bruschini
7. Scale as Material in the Music of Cecil Taylor
Damon Smith
8. Cecil Taylor: Storyteller/A Remembrance
Yuko Otomo
9. Excursions on a Wobbly Rail (in Three Parts)
Joel Lewis
10. Notes on Cecil Taylor and the Drummers: A Thought Experiment
Peter Valente
11. Cecil Taylor: My History and FMP Collaboration
Elliott Levin
12. Cecil Taylor in Berlin
Steve Lake
13. My Time with Cecil Taylor
Jackson Krall
14. Mountain High/Cecil Taylor Still Scales the Heights
Ed Hazell
15. Liner Notes to Garden (Hat Hut Records)
Art Lange
16. Thoughts on the Album Looking Ahead
Mathew Shipp
17. Notes for Algonquin (Bridge 9146)
Bill Shoemaker
18. “‘The Scented Parabola’: Occasions of Cecil Taylor’s Poetry”
David Grubbs
19. Cecil Taylor and the Commitment to Poetry
David Grundy
20. Cecil Taylor: A Biblio-Discography
21. Cecil Taylor: Across Living Solar Plasma
Will Alexander
22. Poetry
Joel Lewis
Indent
Anne Waldman
after Garden
(Lisa B) Lisa Bernstein
Cecil Taylor: I Am an Orchestra
Candace Hill Montgomery
Blanklight
Unalive Sparrow Decides on Poetic Powers
Steve Timm
Epicritic (Pertaining to Cutaneous Sensitivity)
Proxumal (Nearest)
Alumo
Elliott Levin
Huan
Clark Coolidge
From Comes Through in the Call Hold (Improvisations on Cecil Taylor)
23. “Mountains” Cecil Taylor (1985) & “Mettle has been tested” Cecil Taylor (1986)
Mark Miller
24. The Influence and Significance of Cecil Taylor’s Alphabet Notation: From the Mills Archives
Jeff Schwartz
25. The Foundation of Taylor’s Music
Matthew Goodheart
26. Notes on the Implications of Cecil Taylor’s Solo Performance of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”
Matthew Landis
27. Repertoire and the Role of Written Material in the Music of the 1978 Cecil Taylor Unit
Alex Ward
28. Reviews: Recordings
Gunther Schuller
29. Cecil Taylor’s Structures and Personal Technique
Kaja Draksler
30. Interview with Cecil Taylor
Robert L. Doerschuk
31. Interviews
Ted Panken
Andrew Cyrille on Cecil Taylor
Tony Oxley on Cecil Taylor
Dan Marmorstein on Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor on Andrew Cyrille
Also looking ahead, my group Intangible (with gamin, Robert Reigle, and Tim Feeney) has been awarded a grant by UCLA to commission a collaborative piece from Ulrich Krieger. Look for a performance at UCLA and a recording with the five of us next February.
Now, looking back, here’s Jonathon Grasse’s Native Plant Society (Sean Sonderegger reeds, Grasse guitar, Matt Crane drums, and me) at Cal State Dominguez Hills April 29:
Anna Homler was not able to do the Bay Area tour we had booked for May, but she did call-in to our scheduled KOWS radio interview with Don Campau and Robin O’Brien. Marc Perez played duo with me for our KFJC appearance:
and our live set at West Oakland Sound. Thanks to Marc and all our hosts for dealing with the last-minute changes.
More news soon!
May Shows
Here’s what’s happening in May.
Saturday the second is the last show of the Santa Monica Symphony’s 2025-26 season and probably my last traditional orchestra one until the fall (I am open to summer pops gigs though. Hit me up!). It’s half video game music and half related pieces from the canon (i.e. “Night on Bald Mountain”). We’re joined by members of UCLA’s Game Music Ensemble (insert John Zorn joke here). Click below for tickets. It’s free, but will sell out.
Then I’m hitting the road for a duo tour with Anna Homler. People use “performance artist” as an insult these days, so I’ll just say that Anna makes sounds with things that are not musical instruments and sings, mostly in languages she has invented. We are doing two radio shows and an in-person performance in the Bay Area. Tell your friends. I am pretty sure the May 6 broadcast is just an interview, but the May 7 one will have a substantial in-studio performance as well as talking and records.
The 15th is the third Friday, which means it’s Soapbox night at the Industry Cafe & Jazz. This month Joyce Pan (violin), Alicia Byer (clarinet), Charles Sharp (reeds), Kristian Aspelin (guitar), Peter Valsamis (drums), and I will play only songs with “you” in the title: “All the Things You Are,” “The Song is You,” and many more.
That’s it for playing in May, but Tuesday the 19th is the second show in the new version of the Soundwaves concert series which I help run. Both artists this month deal with multiple media. First, the amazing pianist Vicki Ray (who you may have seen with the LA Philharmonic, among many other places) plays a set of pieces based on Rilke’s poetry, with some spoken word, then there will be a set by Carole Kim’s improvising group koven4tet (with M.A. Tiesenga, gamin, and Kozue Matsumoto) incorporating video projections that respond to sound. Details below.
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you soon.
March and April Shows
Starting a little behind, then catching up and moving ahead…
Here are videos from the Vicente Chamber Orchestra’s February 22 concert at the Bel Air Church:
Dave Williams and the Means of Production at DiPiazza’s March 5:
and the Passacaglia Chamber Orchestra at St. Paul’s Church March 7:
March 13-15 I was in the pit for “Into the Woods” at New Roads School,
and March 21 I played two sets of free improvisation at Birds of a Feather Jazz Lounge with Vicki Ray (piano) and Ellen Burr (flutes). This band is called Now to Next. Now ask Ellen when we’re playing Next.
That brings us to the present, as of posting, so I can tell you about what’s happening in the future.
March 25 I’m in Dave Williams’ conducted improvisation band called Not Quite Free at 4th St. Vine in Long Beach:
It’s my first time in this particular unit of Dave’s. Joe Dean is the usual bassist.
April 1 Intangible (a post-spectral Pacific Rim free improvisation band with Tim Feeney, gamin, Robert Reigle, and me) will be in the Wonder Valley Experimental Music Festival Virtual Edition. Click below on or after the first.
We’ll also be part of the Sonorities Festival via video. Click below between April 15-18.
Intangible has recently been awarded a UCLA Davise Fund grant for a collaboration with Ulrich Krieger, and we will have a cassette (& download) out in the fall on Searching Records.
The Soundwaves new music series, which I ran for eight years at the Santa Monica Public Library, aided by Daniel Rothman, resumes at a new location: the Westside Music Conservatory, 12424 Wilshire (at Centinela). Daniel and I are now joined by Asoociate Directors Richard An and Alicia Byer.
Soundwaves draws on LA’s history of innovation in classical, jazz, rock, and music beyond genre to develop creative and collaborative programs. Concerts will be on one Tuesday night each month, from 7:30-10PM, usually with sets by two artists. A $20 donation is requested.
The Spring 2026 quarter includes three shows:
April 14 features House on Fire: the piano-centered multi-instrumental trio of Andrew Anderson, Wells Leng, and Richard An, and the Feedback Wave Riders: guitarist Michael Jon Fink‘s improvising group with guitarists Alan S. Tofighi and Primoz Sukic and saxophonists Ulrich Kreiger and Vinny Golia;
May 19 features pianist Vicki Ray‘s Rilke Project: a compilation of works by various composers inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry, and koven: multimedia artist Carole Kim‘s improvising group with saxophonist M. A. Tisenga, Kazoue Matsumoto on koto, and gamin on Korean reed instruments;
and on June 16 Soundwaves will host one night of the Dog Star Orchestra Festival of experimental composition.
Back to playing: on April 17th my jazz band the Soapbox has our monthly night at Industry Cafe & Jazz.
April 23 I’m sharing the bass chair in the World Stage Big Band at Catalina’s. Stoked to be associated with these iconic LA jazz institutions. No comment on the AI poster.
and April 26 I will be part of a collaboration between the Passacaglia Chamber Orchestra and Jazz Hands for Autism at the Westside Music Conservatory.
There’s also a new recording out from a Japanese netlabel of Max Deveraux (guitar), Charles Sharp (alto sax), and me improvising in the corner of a Redondo Beach boba shop. Click below.
See you soon!
Into March 2026
Sunday the 15th, the Soapbox goes to church. Our saxophonist Charles Sharp will lead a version of my jazz band (with Dave Williams, Kristian Aspelin, and Matthew Miller) during the 10AM service at the First Congregational Church of Long Beach. There will be Coltrane.
At 3:30 on Sunday Feb. 22nd I’ll be with the Vicente Chamber Orchestra at the Bel Air Church. Click above for tickets.
On Saturday March 7 I’ll be with the Passacaglia Chamber Orchestra for their annual Bach by Candlelight program at St. Paul’s in Santa Monica. Click here for more information.
and there will be more soon!
ps. you may enjoy this set by Disclaimer: Kristian Aspelin (guitar), Paul Pellegrin (drums), and yours truly:
January 2026
Also, I am pleased to announce that the Soundwaves concert series Daniel Rothman and I ran at the Santa Monica Public Library from 2016-2024 will resume in April at the Westside Music Conservatory. Stay tuned for details…
Jeff Schwartz (bass) 