In Search of a Sound: Dreams of a New Black Music

An engrossing history of the experimental artists who escaped the "Tin Pan Alley penitentiary" of conventional pop and jazz, and created America’s most successful avant-garde.

When the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman arrived in New York City in 1959, he was intent on joining a revolution and advancing it further. Soon, he would make his intentions known with album titles such as The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century. The words were not hyperbole. The writer and critic Adam Shatz’s In Search of a Sound offers the defining portrait of America’s most vital avant-garde as it emerged out of Coleman’s blues lyricism, the saxophonist John Coltrane’s ardent questing, and the pianist Cecil Taylor’s vaulting pyrotechnics.

In a series of gripping portraits, Shatz shows how these musicians and their legatees struggled with themselves and their times. Confronting the Civil Rights revolution, Black Power, the Vietnam War, decolonization and the rise of the Third World, and women’s liberation, they dreamed not only of new sounds but of alternative forms of experience and a society in which those sounds might find a home and a future. Drawing on his highly regarded work for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Magazine, Shatz explores the electric experiments of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix, the restless inventions of Julius Hemphill and Henry Threadgill, the radical vocal work of Nina Simone and Abbey Lincoln, and the more contemporary innovations of Craig Taborn and Tyshawn Sorey, along with much else. Approaching the artists and their music, he draws us thrillingly close to what the saxophonist Oliver Lake has called “the point at which creation begins.”