I Hear Freedom & Change: Cisco Bradley and Kwami Coleman, in conversation with Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn

This program was originally scheduled for August 6, 2026, and has been rescheduled to November 19, 2026. All reservations made prior to the postponement have been transferred to the new date.

Join us on for a joint celebration of two new histories of free jazz: Cisco Bradley's I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power (Columbia University Press, 2026) and Kwami Coleman's Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2025).

Bradley's book traces the free jazz movement that took shape in Cleveland and Detroit in the 1960s. Drawing on interviews with dozens of musicians, he shows 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.

Coleman's Change offers a parallel history, tracing the stylistic genealogy of the twentieth-century music that came to be known as free jazz, or the "new thing," as it was called in the early 1960s. Coleman examines how and why artists created this work, its cultural significance, and its often contentious reception in the music press of the era, offering readers new ways to listen to and understand this innovative and disruptive music.

For this shared launch, Bradley and Coleman will be in conversation with Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, who wrote the foreword to I Hear Freedom. Vanlandingham-Dunn will play selections from vinyl records as part of the conversation, bringing the sounds discussed in both books into the room.

Image: Sonic landscapes of Cleveland. Cartography by Alice Viggiani.

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