I Hear Freedom Book Launch with Cisco Bradley, Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, and Kwami Coleman
Thursday 6th August, 19:00
Join us on Thursday, August 6 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Cisco Bradley's new book I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power(Columbia University Press, 2026), a history of the free jazz movement that took shape in Cleveland and Detroit in the 1960s. Drawing on interviews with dozens of musicians, Bradley traces how artists broke from the constraints of bebop to develop a new musical language, pulling from figures like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane, as well as African and Middle Eastern musical traditions, avant-garde art movements, and the politics of Black Power.
The book locates this Midwestern scene within a longer arc, showing how the musical and cultural inheritance carried north by the Great Migration shaped its sound and sensibility. For the launch, Bradley will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, who wrote the book's foreword, and Kwami Coleman, whose own recent scholarship traces a parallel history of the free jazz era. Vanlandingham-Dunn will play selections from vinyl records as part of the conversation, bringing the sounds discussed in the book into the room.
Sonic landscapes of Cleveland. Cartography by Alice Viggiani.
The book locates this Midwestern scene within a longer arc, showing how the musical and cultural inheritance carried north by the Great Migration shaped its sound and sensibility. For the launch, Bradley will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, who wrote the book's foreword, and Kwami Coleman, whose own recent scholarship traces a parallel history of the free jazz era. Vanlandingham-Dunn will play selections from vinyl records as part of the conversation, bringing the sounds discussed in the book into the room.
Sonic landscapes of Cleveland. Cartography by Alice Viggiani.