In The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politicisation (1970), Alfred Willener defined the uprisings of 1968 as a “process” that unites jazz musicians, poets, painters and political dissenters, each expressing “a revolutionary desire for social emancipation … the emancipation of the non-formal.” This chapter takes off from Willener’s observations to explore how propositions emerging across mid-century American avant-gardes might potentialize new models of community. It focuses upon Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz (1960), as a means of framing performativity as the subject of study and its means, standing as both metaphor and enactment. Such aesthetic experimentation implicitly swarms outward to underscore the techniques of the 1968 uprisings, which are removed from established Third International forms of resistance. Its participants, as a consequence, are positioned on the edge of becoming otherwise, threatening the stability of given social codes and producing vital new modes of sociability and encounter.

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

To speak of institutions is usually to invoke an idea of brick-and-mortar establishments, and the organizations that inhabit and sustain them. However, an institution is as much an idea as it is a thing: the institutionalization of a musical genre is, above all else, the formalization of a narrative about the genre, and of the value system that the narrative embodies. The present chapter touches upon three instances of the institutionalization of jazz in the United States since the Second World War, including the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed at Rutgers University in New Jersey; the SF Jazz Center in San Francisco; and the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at the Berklee College of Music. I seek here to discern what their supporting narratives can tell us about shifting conceptions of jazz institutionalism, and its reflection of broader ideas about the music’s role in American and global musical culture.

A comprehensive look at the events of the 2020 election, Trump’s loss, his efforts to reverse the results of the election, the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and Trump’s second impeachment for incitement of insurrection. Addresses the reasons for the second acquittal and their implications.