Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space

An elegant and theoretically rich book steeped in jazz performance praxis, contemporary musicological research, and Black feminist geography, Crossing Bar Lines highlights how Black lived experience, music-making, and politicized Black place-building have long been entwined in the broader U.S. cultural field . . . . Williams's book will undoubtedly serve as a rich guide for listeners, musicians, scholars, and critics seeking the space in which to live, to make, and to breathe. Jonathon Leal, Jazz and Culture

This book is well written, and the musical analyses that are used to bolster the arguments are thorough. At a time when many librarians are actively trying to develop collections to reflect more diverse populations, Crossing Bar Lines is a worthwhile addition to any academic library and is a well suited acquisition for public libraries as well. Joel Roberts, Music Reference Services Quarterly

The book is itself a courageous, thoughtful, sometimes profound scholarly improvisation. Williams is well versed in jazz and jazz scholarship. F. J. Hay, CHOICE

Crossing Bar Lines is an excellent and timely addition to the literature of jazz studies, critical improvisation studies, and Black studies. With his insightful combination of cultural theory and music analysis, along with his engagement with urgent contemporary issues of race and gender, Williams has provided an especially illuminating look at Black musicians as improvisers and as theorists of politics and culture. Steven Lewis, Journal for the Society of American Music

In Crossing Bar Lines,James Gordon Williams explores and explains the unifying elements, intentions, concerns, and concepts that permeate musical creations by Terence Blanchard, Billy Higgins, Terri Lyne Carrington, Ambrose Akinmusire, and Andrew Hill. Deftly blending sophisticated music theory with grounded social critique, Williams reveals how Black musical space serves as a rich repository of figures, devices, and practices that affirm and construct a powerful and mutually affirming collective social life in defiance of the social death intended by white supremacy. George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

How does the atonal, pantonal, autonomist Black musical study that keeps bursting through ?this thing called jazz? not only bear the personal expressions and critical interventions of musicians but also the practice of alternative social space from which they and their sound emerges? This is the question James Gordon Williams brilliantly asks and answers in Crossing Bar Lines. His sensitive concern with the other worlds that Black music holds in trust illuminates the ways of that holding. Williams extends to the music and what it bears his own devoted, transformative protection. Fred Moten, 2020 MacArthur Fellow, author of The Universal Machine (consent not to be a single being), and professor of performance studies at New York University

In Crossing Bar Lines, scholar and musician James Gordon Williams investigates the ?space-making performances? of five contemporary Black improvising musicians, showing the distinct ways they envoice and engage Black humanity in their art. His close attention to the aesthetics of these artists? politically engaged music will be indispensable to cultural historians interested in the Black radical tradition. At the same time, Williams uses music to produce a valuable framework for thinking about the possibilities of Black radical expression outside of the politics of (racial) representation. Gayle Wald, professor of American studies at George Washington University and author of It's Been Beautiful: “Soul!” and Black Power Television