Writing about Henry Threadgill in the Review’s Holiday Issue, Adam Shatz finds a panoply of words for the music of “one of American music’s great Romantics and a lifelong seeker of the sublime”: “impertinent,” “innovative,” “thrillingly abrasive,” “sacrilegious,” “swaggering,” “provocatively ambiguous,” “wildly expressive,” “lush,” “seductive,” “garish,” “pulpy,” “liberating,” “madcap,” “breathtaking,” “ferocious,” “irreverent,” “whimsical,” “incendiary,” “raw,” “sophisticated,” “exuberant,” “death-haunted.” Put another way, “His sound is a permanent antidote to complacency.”

Below, alongside Shatz’s essay, we have collected six articles from the Review’s archives about avant-garde composers.

Adam Shatz
Ever-New Sound Worlds

Henry Threadgill’s memoir is a spirited account of his lifelong search for imaginative musical improvisation and new systems of composition.

Ted Reichman
A Sketchbook in Sound

Charles Stepney’s avant-garde production fused Chicago’s blues, soul, and R&B traditions with psychedelic pop.

Adam Shatz
Silence Bigger Than a Table

“While most free jazz channeled the coiled energies of the great northern cities, Wadada Leo Smith evoked the vast rural landscapes of the Mississippi Delta where he had grown up. Formally, his music was more radical than fire music, less encumbered by traditional song forms. But his was a pastoral modernism: spacious, serene, and in no hurry to reach its destination.”

Andrew Katzenstein
Alice Coltrane’s Songs of Bliss

“Alice Coltrane’s corpus remains one of the most varied and underappreciated in jazz.”

Seth Colter Walls
Sun Ra: A True Birthday

“Amiri Baraka described Ra’s new record for the ESP label, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, as ‘one of the most beautiful albums I have ever heard.’”

Robert Craft
Two Modern Masters

“Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung [is] perhaps the most radical of all musical creations, as well as, in the opinion of many, the composer’s highest achievement. ‘This quintessential expressionist work,’ as Charles Rosen writes, is a ‘well-attested miracle, inexplicable and incontrovertible.’”

David Levine 2024 Calendar

The 2024 edition of this annual favorite features David Levine classics drawn exclusively for The New York Review of Books, including Zora Neale Hurston, Oscar Wilde, Beatrix Potter, Frederick Douglass, Lewis Carroll and more.

Available exclusively at shop.nybooks.com!

Igor Stravinsky
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

“I have always tried to distinguish between the musical object and the emotion it induces, partly on the grounds that the object is active, the emotion reactive, hence a translation. Not that I ever believed in separations of the sort; or believe now in those fashionable leucotomies of ‘sensibility’ and ‘intellect,’ the so-called ‘new’ and ‘old’ brains. My point was simply that your feelings and my feelings are much less interesting than Beethoven’s art.”

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