Here are 100 books that The Freedom Principle fans have personally recommended if you like
The Freedom Principle.
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As a scholar as well as performer of the African American creative improvised music usually called jazz, my attunement to this art form resonates with its historico-cultural matrix as much as with the sounds themselves. These books distinguish themselves for being well-researched and rigorous. They are the real deal, doing justice to the heart as well as the intellect of this art form.
This book is remarkable for Lewis’s unique profile, which combines status as a major contributor to, as well as a critic of, creative improvised African-American music. It tells of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM), an organization focused on freely improvised music, which is unique for having wedded aesthetic innovation with the struggle for social justice.
Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall's kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, "A Power Stronger Than Itself" uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
New Musical Figurations is a profile of AACM composer Anthony Braxton. One of the best-known AACM musicians, Braxton is also one of the most influential: while writing hundreds of compositions and touring the world with his many ensembles, he has also found time to teach some of the best composers and improvisers of the twenty-first century, including Taylor Ho Bynum, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, and Tyshawn Sorey. Braxton continues to compose and perform today, and New Musical Figurations explores the ideas and philosophies that motivate his creative practices and draw new generations of listeners to his music.
By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton. Born in 1945, Braxton is not only a virtuoso jazz saxophonist but an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental art music. His refusal to conform to the conventions of official musical culture has helped unhinge the very ideologies on which definitions of "jazz", "black music," "popular…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
In The Freedom Principle, Chicago music critic John Litweiler examines the AACM’s connections to the experimental styles of jazz that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Figures such as Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane were important early influences on the AACM, and Litweiler shows how their work became the foundation for the even more radical advances of AACM composers and improvisers. The Freedom Principle is also replete with wonderful stories from the AACM’s first two decades, including Henry Threadgill’s account of how he created the hubkaphone, a percussion instrument made from salvaged hubcaps.
}Ornette Coleman's discovery some thirty years ago that his band's music was indeed a "free thing" marked the beginning of a revolution in jazz. From the early free-form experiments, Coleman's dancing blues, and John Coltrane's saxophone cries and sheets of sound, to the brittle, melancholy modes of Miles Davis, vibrant, sophisticated new jazz idioms proliferated. In this critical and historical survey of today's jazz, noted critic John Litweiler traces the evolution of the new music through such artists as Coleman, Coltrane, Davis, Cecil Taylor, Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Anthony Braxton, and others. He also addresses questions such as:…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I am a musician and an author. Many of my mentors and collaborators are members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a collective organization of African American composers and performers founded on the South Side of Chicago in 1965. Their farthest-reaching innovation, a form known as “creative music,” transformed the fields of jazz and experimental music by breaking down the barriers that—prior to the advent of the AACM—had separated the disciplines of composition and improvisation. My book Sound Experimentsand the other books on the list give readers new insights into the members of the AACM and their groundbreaking music.
AACM member Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s The Mandorla Letters is a companion to her series of Mandorla Awakening compositions, which use music and text to imagine new societies that “embrace dualities” and empower people to live in harmony with one another—and with the natural world. “Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella,” The Mandorla Letters is an extraordinary work by the figure who best embodies the AACM’s philosophy of creativity as a way of life.
Afrofuturist memoir on jazz, collaboration, and the search for collective well-being
Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers toward an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers who have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt…
As a teenager, I found the layered poetry of Sylvia Plath as riveting as an impasto-layered canvas by Vincent Van Gogh. A love for the rhythm of words and paint, as well as the power of art to tell stories and critique history led me to study art history. Influential college professors opened my eyes to the systematic exclusion of women from art and history. Today, I’m a professor at the University of San Francisco, where I specialize in modern, contemporary, and African art, with an emphasis upon issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. I’m particularly interested in women artists and artists who cross cultural boundaries.
If you want to learn about the history of African American women artists from the era of slavery to the 21st century, this is the book to read. Lisa E. Farrington astutely analyzes this fraught history with a style of writing that’s available to both scholars and non-scholars alike. It’s for anyone who has an interest in how images of Black women have evolved over time from racist stereotypes in art and popular culture to empowering images created by Black women artists who “contested society’s insistence on their subservience and vulgarity.” Farrington’s groundbreaking book, which was published in 2005, makes it clear that when Black women artists control their own images, it changes the trajectory of both art history and popular culture.
Hailed as "a captivating and thorough study of a long-ignored aspect of America's art history" (CHOICE), Creating Their Own Image offers the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, spanning from slavery to the Harlem Renaissance and the tumultuous civil rights era, right up to the present day. Lavishly illustrated throughout with color illustrations, this magnificent volume richly details hundreds of important works-including some images never before published-to present a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, and periods, Lisa Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have…
I have always been interested in family stories, the history of women’s lives, and history in general. Discovering new (at least it was at the time!) work in social and women’s history at university in the 1980s opened up new vistas for me and showed me it was possible to do academic work in the discipline in creative and challenging ways. These books were crucial to my development as a historian, both because of their subject matter and because they are so beautifully written. They brought the past “to life” for me and showed that historians could care about their subjects without sacrificing academic rigor.
I knew about the history of enslaved people and the institution of slavery in the Americas. Still, until I read Jones’ book, I did not appreciate how slavery affected African-American women’s lives in so many different ways, even after the institution itself formally ended.
I also gained a new understanding of their bravery, ingenuity, persistence, and contributions to their communities and American society more generally. Jones tells their stories with empathy and great wisdom, shattering stereotypes and insisting that we pay attention to these women and their lives.
The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes. In labour of Love, labour of Sorrow , historian Jacqueline Jones offers a powerful account of the changing role of black women, lending a voice to an unsung struggle from…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
Several months before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the world as we knew it, my life was turned upside-down by reports of suicide rates and attempted suicides doubling for Black children. In fact, during late Fall 2019, Congress established an Emergency Task Force on Youth Suicide and Mental Health. I’d already been reading accounts of Black children ending their lives on social media, and as a writer, decided to leave a legacy of books that helped armor Black children with love as they navigated spaces that would not always welcome their brilliance and beauty. I wanted to help encourage them to embrace life’s joys and to love themselves, always.
Kwame Alexander is a creative force of nature, an award-winning author of poetry and children’s fiction, such as Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets, Becoming Muhammad Ali, co-authored with James Patterson, andThe Crossover, soon to be a Disney+ television series. InThe Undefeated, Alexander displays masterful lyrical language skills, and by telling us what we are not, shows us what we are: resilient, strong, and brave. Read this book to Black children and bask in the love.
Originally performed for ESPN's The Undefeated, this poem is a love letter to black life in the United States. It highlights the unspeakable trauma of slavery, the faith and fire of the civil rights movement, and the grit, passion, and perseverance of some of the world's greatest heroes. The text is also peppered with references to the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others, offering deeper insights into the accomplishments of the past, while bringing stark attention to the endurance and spirit of those surviving and thriving in the present.
I am a White person who grew up in a primarily Black DC neighborhood in the 1980s. Growing up in a Black community in DC at a time when the city was experiencing a cascade of crises – from the spread of crack to an AIDS epidemic to a failing school system – has fundamentally shaped my life and my view of the world. When I returned in the early twenty-first century to my city to find it had significantly changed and that many of my Black neighbors had been pushed out, I was compelled to learn more about DC before gentrification and to understand the path the city I love had taken.
Chocolate City covers the last few centuries of history in DC.
This tome provides an in-depth overview of the history of race in Washington, DC from its founding to the present. It traces the history of race and democracy in the nation’s capital – from its days as a trading post for enslaved persons to its emergence as a booming metropolis.
By putting racial dynamics, tensions, and demographics at the center of the narrative, the authors develop a cohesive narrative that helps us to understand the multiple and consistent ways that Black DC residents have been disenfranchised and dispossessed.
Monumental in scope and vividly detailed, Chocolate City tells the tumultuous, four-century story of race and democracy in our nation's capital. Emblematic of the ongoing tensions between America's expansive democratic promises and its enduring racial realities, Washington often has served as a national battleground for contentious issues, including slavery, segregation, civil rights, the drug war, and gentrification. But D.C. is more than just a seat of government, and authors Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove also highlight the city's rich history of local activism as Washingtonians of all races have struggled to make their voices heard in an undemocratic…
I identify as agender and grew up in Oklahoma, one of the worst places to be trans or LGBTQ because of the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ legislation that’s flying through the Oklahoma state legislature. Writing Ugliest, a book about teen activists fighting these laws, reminded me how important standing up for what’s right is and what powerful activists teens can be when they get together. This list has other books celebrating the strength of teens protesting and pushing against societal wrongs. Although some terrible things happen in these books—just like in the real world—reading them reminds us that fighting back is worth it.
I loved Ayo, this book’s fourteen-year-old main character. She’s burnt out on activism, having been raised by a famous activist mom fighting for Black rights in America. All Ayo wants is to take a break and live a normal teen life. This makes so much sense to me—why do people who are at a disadvantage have to spend their time fighting for basic rights—what if they just want to spend their time making art or writing books like selfish white dudes are free to do?
But when something terrible happens at a big march, Ayo skipped, all the education and activist spirit her mom drilled into her no longer feels like a burden. I loved how she figured out she wanted to fight and really came into her own.
"A love letter to Harlem and hope. I Rise is smart and funny and full of heart.*"
Fourteen-year-old Ayo who has to decide whether to take on her mother's activist role when her mom is shot by police. As she tries to find answers, Ayo looks to the wisdom of her ancestors and her Harlem community for guidance.
Ayo's mother founded the biggest civil rights movement to hit New York City in decades. It's called 'See Us' and it tackles police brutality and racial profiling in Harlem. Ayo has spent her entire life being an activist and now, she wants…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
As a feminist lesbian, I am always looking for legacies of lesbian leaders before me. I learned about coalitional organizing from groups like the Lavender Menace and the importance of lesbian leadership in the Combahee River Collective. I started to learn more about the movement to include women in peacebuilding. This work was formalized in 2000 with the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and the nine related resolutions that followed, in what is now known as the Women, Peace, and Security agenda. I knew lesbians were certainly part of that movement. My book is about celebrating queer and trans leaders within transnational women’s movements, including the movement for women’s participation and leadership in peacebuilding.
This book is a foundational text in Black women’s studies and includes the statement by the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective, which just celebrated 50 years. In the statement, they write, "We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race."
I appreciate the book because it shows the rich history of Black women’s writing and movement building, including the important role of Black lesbian feminist sisterhood. It was so exciting to read the letter written by Lorraine Hansberry to the lesbian periodical The Ladder in 1957, in which she links homophobia to the sexual oppression experienced by all women. I can’t help but scribble in the margins: see, lesbians have always been here!
Although queer organizing is so often presented as something that is new or emerging, this book challenges…
Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism.
Featuring writing from eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Bravechallenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women's studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences.
As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as…
