Raymond Horricks on Eric Dolphy, including 20 illustrations, 3 transcriptions of solos and a comprehensive discography by Tony Middleton.  "There's so much to learn, and so much to try and get out. I keep hearing something else beyond what I've done. There's always something else to strive for. The more I grow in my music, the more possibilities of new things I hear. It's like I'll never stop finding sounds I hadn't thought existed." Eric Dolphy.     Part of the Jazz Avant-Garde series Second Hand, Good condition Softcover, 95pp Costello, 1989

Issue #15 of TALKER is a conversation with Anne Bean. Anne has been working with performance since childhood. Hers is a practice of vital, embodied authenticity at the very vanguard of performance art in Britain. An inveterate collaborator, she has worked with Paul McCarthy, Rod Melvin, Franklin Aalders, Poshya Kaki, Carlyle Reedy, Stephen Cripps, and the Kipper Kids among countless others. With Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson, she was a member of Bow Gamelan Ensemble. Her work has featured in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s A Short History of Performance (resisting their request for an ‘iconic’ piece) and was included in Tate Britain’s vast survey, Women in Revolt!, Art and Acti vism in the UK 1970-1990. She was a 2007 fellow at Franklyn Furnace and worked with Zambian artist Serah Chule at the 2024 Venice Biennale. This interview examines a body of creative work that spans many decades and continues furiously.Saddle Stitched, Riso Printed, 20pp Giles Bailey, Talker #15, 2025

The exhibition „rack it!“ opened at No Tax in Paris on October 15th and was on show throughout October 27th 2024. Through scans and images, this book compiles the works presented in the exhibition. Through drawings, sculptures, and a video piece, the British Artist and Musician Klein delves into the complex legal and social dynamics of the YSL RICO trial (the longest criminal trial in Georgia‘s history), exploring its intersection with free speech, free will, and systemic bias within the justice system. She examines the lives of key figures involved, the surprising plot twists in the case, and the larger implications for artistic expression and personal freedom. As a case study in bias, the exhibition questions the narratives of criminality, highlighting how culture, race, and public perception shape legal outcomes in America and lead further governance across other countries.Softcover, 308mm × 234mm, 116 pp No Tax, Paris, 2025

Curated by Neil P. Quigley An A5, 50 page book which documents the history and origins of each composer, and for the first time the full score to Packie Bolger's "Piece for Recorder Quartet and Two Synchronised Delay Lines...." written for the opening of the 1989 Teletext Conference in Kilkenny.This edition also comes with a pull-out A3 poster of a Kilkenny Tribune front page on one side and Kenny Phelan's Psychogeographic map/score for 'the Nore' on the other.Printed in the UK. Very Limited. Also comes with a special thank you letter from the Label Director.Includes unlimited streaming of Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory Anthology Vol. 1 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.   "The Kilkenny Electroacoustic Research Laboratory was informally set up in late 1965 by Jacinta Delaney (1937 -) and Eoghan Comerford (1935 -). They were inspired by Groupe de Recherches Musicales after Comerford visited the RTF in Paris in ’64.They also found encouragement for the project from the San Francisco Tape Music Center and Manhattan Research, both of whom Delaney had correspondences with. The initial idea of the lab was to create a regional centre for sound studies, focusing on early years studies, linguistic research, and sound technologies.The lab was more formally set up with the introduction of Helga Hölzel (1940 -) in ‘67 and with a county council premises grant, which was approved after word spread about Comerford repairing Phil Coulter’s Tape Echo Machine. Through the late 60’s and early 70’s most of the Lab’s money was generated through local and national grants, and an electronic instrument repair service which they ran. They quickly gained a reputation for high quality electronic instrument repair, which included repairing Phil Lynott's flanger, Big Tom’s Echoplex and Ronnie Drew’s homebrew Ondes-Martenot.T.V. Delaney (1939 - 1999) and Oisín Creegan (1928 -) joined in ‘73 and ‘74, respectively. Delaney was primarily a composer of acoustic chamber music but, inspired by Stockhausen's recent work, joined the lab as a full-time member to avail of the Lab’s equipment. He was well known locally as the man who only ever wore O’Neills’ shorts, even in the depths of winter. He left K.E.R.L. after an intensive year of involvement, during which he developed a crippling paranoia about the singularity.Creegan, on the other hand, worked both in real estate and as an advisor for the regional council. When I interviewed him for this anthology, he suggested that he only joined the lab to benefit from artist tax exemption status.Despite him disavowing his musical work during this period, I have included two of his tracks in Vol. 1 as they are the most commercially successful works to come out of K.E.R.L. and are a historically important part of the development of the organisation.Soon after the introduction of these new members, Hölzel moved back to mainland Europe and joined the RAF due to issues which arose between her and Creegan, who she described when I interviewed her at Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, as “blueshirt scum” and suggested that he undermined the integrity of the research done at the Lab while also commodifying and capitalising on actual composer’s work.Packie Bolger (1939 -) joined in ‘80 after returning from New York where he worked in construction.15 years prior to joining K.E.R.L., while completing his inter cert at the C.B.S. secondary school, he first met Comerford. He spent the next fourteen years in the US without a proper visa and was then deported after being arrested for “urinating on a Robert Indiana sculpture whilst inebriated.” He describes himself as being “adjacent” to the minimalist scene in New York while living there and he suggested that this is where he gained an interest in Eastern and “Native” Spiritualism. In my research for this anthology, I could find no reference to him in any music scene in New York during this period.The track tuvahompi, included on this anthology, was the first use of the newly acquired PPG Wave 2 at K.E.R.L. At the time of composition Bolger believed the title came from the Hopi for unity/togetherness, but later discovered that it translates to washing machine.Kenny Phelan (1951 - 2014) Joined in ‘84. He was the premier youth Elvis impersonator in the Southeast throughout the 60’s. Later in life he would routinely fly a confederate flag at half-mast above his house when Kilkenny would lose at the hurling. During the 80’s and 90’s, Phelan became fanatical about water dowsing and what he described as “the philosophy of regional spiritualism”.The James Stephens String Trio, who appear here on the track Meascán, were plagued by controversies throughout the ensemble’s history. The most widely spread of the controversies is the story about the ensemble’s original cellist. In the late 80’s the cellist was pictured with his daughter in the local paper, cutting a birthday cake with a picture of Adolf Hitler printed on it. While interviewed about the cake on KCR, the cellist said he “is not a Nazi, but, to be fair, the other European superpowers were trying to destabilise the Deutsch mark.” This garnered widespread media coverage and drew unwanted attention to both the ensemble and K.E.R.L. and resulted in significant public funding cuts and the eventual demise of the organisation.The purpose of this collection is an introduction to a selection of works by key characters in the development of K.E.R.L. The structure of the collection gives a general outline of the development of the works throughout the history of the Lab, but it is no way comprehensive."----- Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.------A5, 50pp, contains poster  Miúin, Kilkenny, 2025

An extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of work, Shake Loose My Skin is a stunning testament to the literary, sensual, and political powers of the award-winning Sonia Sanchez.Softcover, 155pp Beacon Press, Boston, 1999

by Raschka using ‘watercolour, ink and torn paper’ it’s a playful book that’s lovely to hold, read and admire. The book examines 29 poetic forms, explaining their rules, giving examples and sometimes breaking the rules. Each page also includes a wonderful little pictorial explanation that aids the understanding of some of the more obscure forms. As well as examining the forms, the book introduces young readers to a wide collection of mainly contemporary US poets and should whet their appetite to explore new writers and to look more closely at poems in a fun way.Illustrated by Chris Raschka   Softcover, 61pp Candlewick Press, 2005

Stay away from nothing shines a spotlight on the deep relationship between Paul Thek and Peter Hujar through the artists’ letters and photographs. Beginning in 1956 and spanning two decades, the publication opens a window into their intimate, complex, and beautiful lives, starting with a sequence of images by Hujar that showcases the two of them in innocent moments of pensive and haunting play in Coral Gables and beyond. These early portraits of their budding relationship are followed by several playful postcards from Thek in 1960 and his first letter to Hujar in 1962, written while the artist is in the Philadelphia harbor aboard a containership bound for Europe. In the letter, Thek is brimming with joy and new discoveries and exclaims that the world “seems bigger and more gloriously strange than ever before in my entire life.” The two eventually meet in Rome, where they both begin to evolve into the icons we know them as today, and the remaining letters trace Thek’s travels and adventures, romantic dalliances, work, and financial ups and downs through 1975. More than fifty letters and postcards, along with drawings and other ephemera, are reproduced in Stay away from nothing and their poetic, quotidian, and melancholic tone provide a rare glimpse into Thek and Hujar’s relationship as it wavers with seduction, glamor, tumult, and mischievousness. Throughout this period, Hujar was photographing Thek in his now-iconic style, capturing him in Italy, in various studios, and on the beaches of Fire Island. Included are the artist’s classic images of Thek in the catacombs in Palermo, as well as his studio portraits of the artist creating The Tomb. Among these well-known works are dozens of other photographs, many unpublished until now, including candid portraits of Thek, as well as images of the two artists goofing around or posing for passport photos. Collectively, these images demonstrate not only the complex emotional interiority of Thek but the tender, dark, and hopeful connection between the two artists, lovers, and friends. An afterword is provided by Andrew Durbin, author of A Wonderful World that Almost Was, a biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek.Edited by Francis Schichtel Paperback, 9 x 12 inches, 192 pp Primary Information, 2025   Paul Thek (b. 1933) is among the most legendary and elusive artists of the post-1960s generation. He burst onto the New York scene with his Technological Reliquaries series, then known as “meat pieces,” which challenged Pop and Minimalism with an idiosyncratic approach that merged earnest posthuman embodiment and a critique of contemporary art trends. In Europe in the 1970s, he created new modes of exhibition-making that involved the creation of elaborate, ephemeral installations composed of sand, candles, newspaper, chicken-wire, Polaroids, and discarded furniture. Upon returning to New York in the later years of his career, he produced his deliberately “bad paintings” while continuing his longest-running series of paintings executed on newspaper, works that poignantly underscore his sustained engagement with themes of ephemerality and the passage of time. Thek died of AIDS in 1988. Peter Hujar (b. 1934) died of AIDS in 1987, leaving behind a complex and profound body of photographs. Hujar was a leading figure in the group of artists, musicians, writers, and performers at the forefront of the cultural scene in downtown New York in the 1970s and early 80s, and he was enormously admired for his completely uncompromising attitude towards work and life. He was a consummate technician, and his portraits of people, animals, and landscapes, with their exquisite black-and-white tonalities, were extremely influential. Highly emotional yet stripped of excess, Hujar’s photographs are always beautiful, although rarely in a conventional way. His extraordinary first book, Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, was published in 1976, but his “difficult” personality and refusal to pander to the marketplace ensured that it was one of the last publications during his lifetime.

During the crucifixion Christ is said to have sustained 5 wounds: 1 in each hand and foot from the nails of the cross, and the 5th was formed when the side of Christ was pierced by the sword of Longinus. These 5 wounds became objects of specific veneration in the late Middle Ages and in manuscripts the side wound is usually depicted as a mandorla: an almond/diamond/vulvic shape, generally isolated from Christ's body and oriented vertically on the page. It is the vulvic shape of these images, and their implications, that this publication takes as its focus. Images of the side wound were used as talismans, one could gain magical protections by looking at them, touching, ingesting, or wrapping them around your body, and they are often found on birth girdles: rolls of parchment with magical formulae for easing birth. Mystics of this time speak of drinking from the wound, kissing it, entering it, living within it, and subsequently being birthed from the wound. The vulvic representation of the wound produced a state where Christ was seen as neither fully male, nor fully female, but rather as an unstably sexed figure, asserting a constant fluidity. Through this side wound Christ became a mother, lover, object of erotic desire, and a portal for the whole universe to emerge from. SIDE WOUND: The Female Christ provides an overview of the many ways the side wound has been interpreted historically and includes images and archival information of the numerous manuscripts depicting the side wound.Softcover, Staplebound 128 x 177mm, 36pp Hildegard Press, Canada, 2025

Articles: aja monet by Ayana Contreras, Azymuth by Ben Lee, Henry Threadgill by Bret Sjerven, Sven-Åke Johansson by Magnus Nygren, Anna Webber by Stewart Smith, Rafiq Bhatia by Florent Servia, Talk Show (Steph Richards & Qasim Naqvi) by Andy Cush, Ganavya by Tina Edwards, Cosmic Tones Research Trio by Blake Gillespie, Quincy Jones by Rob Garratt, Devin Daniels by Samuel Lamontagne, album design essay by Alex Coles, Discaholic column by Mats Gustafsson, album reviews, live reviews, photo essay & more. “Weathering” for aja monet Issue 17 / Winter 2025, 128pp We Jazz Magazine

You don't have to remember usbut know that we were here -the genius of light that shonethrough the green and purple glassThese poems play out in part against the backdrop of the 1980’s and early 90’s, including glimpses into the hedonistic fashion industry of the time and teenage life in the North of England, where sexualities are challenged and identities forged amongst excursions into club culture, as a means of escape - a rite of passage of sorts.Paperback, 182 mm x 128 mm, 74 ppJoan Publishing, December 2025

Sometimes it’s very uplifting to feel one’s fleshy boundaries dissolve. To not know where one ends and the world begins. To feel someone's breast is your breast too. Total immersion can be very transporting indeed.‘I think Fish Out of Water is about recognition, that extraordinary moment of encountering a work of art that makes you reel because it seems to beckon you, to know what you once did but have had to forget, to lead you back to yourself but as a stranger. It reminds us that we might well arrive in this world too soon, or the wrong way round, and what’s meant to nourish us might choke us, but we were never long for all that, anyway. There’s still chance to recover ourselves and the world as new and totally strange.’   Fish Out of Water was originally published in 2020 by Juxta Press, Milan, as part of their Words for Portraits series. This new edition also contains Self-Portrait with Wings, a response to the text by Chloe Aridjis.Paperback, 182 mm x 128 mm, 45 pp

Issue #14 of TALKER is a conversation with Mayo Thompson. As a member of rock group, the Red Krayola, since its formation in 1966, he has made a body of innovative and radically experimental music. The group has been a vehicle for prolific collaboration with contributions from Jim O’Rourke, David Grubbs, Lora Logic, Gina Birch, Sandy Yang and Albert Oehlen among others. The Red Krayola has worked with conceptual art collective Art & Language to release six albums together to date. In the early 1980s, Mayo was a member of Pere Ubu and provided soundtrack music for Derek Jarman. His celebrated 1970 solo record Corky’s Debt to His Father was re-released by Drag City in 1994 and Mayo T. & The Corky Band continue to perform this music live. He is also a visual artist and has published two novels. This interview discusses performance throughout Mayo’s work, exploring links between happenings and early Red Krayola live shows, formative encounters with performance art as well as the band’s participation in the 2012 Whitney Biennial.Softcover, 20pp, 280 x 180mm, Riso printed Talker, Giles Bailey, 2025

Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as “one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field,” saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the eighties, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and newly separated from his wife and kids. “I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year,” Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin in Better Do It Now Before You Die Later. “I would go to North Beach, and I’d sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out.” The resurrection of Simmons’s career—upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual (Qwest Records) in 1994—has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, embarking on successful European tours, leading new ensembles, and recording a series of twenty-first-century albums that inducted him, by his death at the age of eighty-seven, into the pantheon with the great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure. Here, in the first-ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats: Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane. His testimonies from each time and place add up to a cultural history of the late twentieth century: Simmons saw Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk at the Black Hawk, lived through the Watts riots, stashed guns for the Blank Panther Party, brushed shoulders with Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, and toured Europe amid the multiculturalist boom of the nineties. But it’s his keen memory for the underdogs and up-and-comers that distinguishes Simmons’s voice. He talks plenty of shit on his rivals—Pharoah Sanders and John Handy were, in Simmons’s words, “hip … great players, but I was the cat who was moving.” Meanwhile, Miles Davis was “arrogant and blasé and talking shit,” and Prince Lasha “got scandalous with his lover-man shit.” But Simmons reserves his most ferocious loyalty for names elsewhere unremembered, like the altoist Alfred Franklin, the mononymous Hop, or the Wild Man, Stanley Willis. Of the "brilliant motherfucker" and tenorist Jewel Sterling, as of many others, Simmons declares, “I don't want to forget that brother. I want to resurrect him too.”  Whether he’s writing about his many love affairs; his turbulent romantic and creative partnership with the accomplished jazz trumpeter Barbara Donald; the pain of seeing his friends and heroes laid low by addiction; or the racism he endured in evolving forms across decades and states, Simmons brings the ferocity of style that animated his music to every sentence. And underneath it all remains the electric charge of his artistic passion. “I think all I needed during them terrible periods in darkness and despair was to play,” he writes, of his hardest years in San Francisco. “To be able to express the music in me was like a cleansing ritual.” Like Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog and Art Pepper’s Straight Life, Simmons’s Better Do It Now Before You Die Later delivers an unfiltered, firsthand account of life in the bebop business in all its brilliance and brutality, capturing the devastating lows of addiction, poverty, and obscurity and the ecstatic highs of a life dedicated to The Music.Hardback, 170x240, 560pp Blank Forms, 2025

One hundred years ago, playwright Berta Lask (1878–1967) was commissioned by the German Communist Party to write a play marking the quatercentenary of the German Peasants’ War. She agreed, staging the reappearance of its leader Thomas Müntzer — who awakens every hundred years to address the present, represented in the prologue as a cast of striking proletarians to whom he tells his story. In the play, Lask poses a basic question: What would Thomas Müntzer see if he woke up today? A list accrues: Climate breakdown, imperialism, gendered oppression, earthquakes, genocide, impending fascism. Capitalism didn’t dig its own grave. Rather, the dead oppressors of previous centuries have been resurrected, planted in new bodies, tooled with new modes of bondage, within uneven spatial domination and temporal disjunction. Thomas Müntzer, with all of its time travel and its modes of resurrection, addresses the present from a past multiplied. For the first time, Lask’s play has been translated for a print edition alongside a set of commentaries and interventions: on everything from the “prolatarian problem play” to rainbows and bundles of twigs; from Albrecht Dürer’s monument to the slain peasants to Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Joe Hill”; from revolutionary violence to tragic commemoration.  Translated by Sam Dolbear with Esther Leslie, Joey Simons and Charlotte Thießen, both volumes are edited by Sam Dolbear. The second, commentaries, volume includes contributions by Caroline Adler, Joseph Albernaz, Hunter Bivens, Shane Boyle, Rebecca Comay, Sam Dolbear, Loren Goldman, Danny Hayward, Disha Karnad Jani, Sam Keogh, Henrike Kohpeiss, Esther Leslie, Huw Lemmey, Peter Linebaugh, Hussein Mitha, Vesa Oittinen, Hannah Proctor, Daniel Reeve, Ashkan Sepahvand, O. L. Silverman, Joey Simmons, Kerstin Stakemeier, virgil b/g taylor, and Alberto Toscano. Download as a printable PDF here. Download as a e-book here. It is our hope that readings or performance of the play take place all over the world, to mark the centenary of the play and the quincentenary of the events it depicts.  In the play, Lask poses a basic question: What would Thomas Müntzer see if he woke up today? A list accrues: Climate breakdown, imperialism, gendered oppression, earthquakes, genocide, impending fascism. Capitalism didn’t dig its own grave. Rather, the dead oppressors of previous centuries have been resurrected, planted in new bodies, tooled with new modes of bondage, within uneven spatial domination and temporal disjunction. Thomas Müntzer, with all of its time travel and its modes of resurrection, addresses the present from a past multiplied.  Softcover, A4, 2 x volumes, 92pp/ 112pp Rab-Rab, Helsinki, November 2025 Designed by Ott Kagovere, the two A4 size volumes are wrapped in a poster by artist Sam Keogh.

Softcover, 96pp Ossian Publications, originally published 1974    The Whistle and Sing! handbooks were designed by the author, Eamon Jordan, with a dual purpose; to offer modern arrangements of the more tuneful songs, airs and dance music of Ireland and to write these down from actual players in a  Songs, airs and dance music from Ireland. A delightful book containing eighteen songs and more than sixty tunes in simple, modern arrangements. Beginners can approach this book with confidence and more experienced players have theopportunity to elaborate. There are specific notes and hints for most traditional instruments. Eamonn Jordan is the son of Brigid McElroy, a traditional folk singer from Lurgan, Co. Armagh and grandson of Thomas McElroy, fiddler and healer.  He has always been fascinated by the richness of the folk tradition in Ulster, a meld of the Scottish. English and native Gaelic traditions. Donegal, that cultural bridge between Scotland and Ireland, is where he has chosen to make his home. Arising from the years spent by Eamonn in teaching traditional music in Ulster. Thomas O'Canainn, lecturer, composer and musician, and author of the influential 'Traditional Music in Ireland' has described Eamonn as 'the teacher of a whole new generation of Irish musicians'.

This co-authored work focuses on five performances developed by Blue Pieta, a multidisciplinary artist, director, dramaturg and performer and Bhanu Kapil, a poet, between 2022 and 2025. A public notebook of working scores and performance writing, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A PERFORMANCE contains analytic depictions of shared time experienced during performance, notes on dramaturgy and applause, and thinking towards performance as a mode of inter-generational healing (borderwork). This hybrid collection studies performance as a place both unknown and emergent, the rough sketch that's always incomplete, carried over to the next performance, and always in the company of radical others of many kinds. Both writers also change roles during the course of a performance, a mode of autobiography that most closely resembles mutation. A dramaturg is also an artist, a dancer, the poet of the work. A poet stands up from the table where they are seated to enter the domain of gesture and movement. Pieta and Kapil decompress an interoceptive approach to poetry, memory and ritual awareness: scenes that can't be written, but only staged.Softcover, 123pp The 87 Press, London, November 2025

Staring Into The Sun is the latest ethno-folk cinema classic from Sublime Frequencies. Ethiopia is known to be one of the oldest areas inhabited by humans and presently has over 80 diverse ethnic groups. In 2009, photographer/filmmaker Olivia Wyatt explored 13 different tribes throughout Ethiopia in this visually stunning film on DVD with accompanying 136-page book of Polaroid photographs and audio CD of field recordings. Traveling from the northern highlands to the lower Omo Valley via bush taxi, Isuzu cargo trucks, and by any means possible, Wyatt brings together the worlds of Zar spirit possession, Hamer tribal wedding ceremonies, Borena water well polyphonic singing, wild hyena feedings and bizarre Ethiopian TV segments, presenting an enchanting look at these otherworldly images, stark landscapes and captivating sounds from the horn of Africa. The featured tribes are captured with an unflinching sense of realism and poetic admiration resulting in a visual and aural feast of the senses. 136-page hardcover photography book with one music CD and one film on DVD. 5 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, landscape format. 117 color photographs and liner notes by Olivia Wyatt. Sublime Frequencies' most elaborate package yet. One-time limited edition pressing of 1,000 copies.

This book is a historical and interpretive study of the movement of jazz experimentalism in West and East Germany between the years 1950 and 1975. It complicates the narratives advanced by previous scholars by arguing that engagement with black musical methods, concepts, and practices remained significant for the emergence of the German jazz experimentalism movement. In a seemingly paradoxical fashion, this engagement with black musical knowledge enabled the formation of more self-reliant musical concepts and practices. Rather than viewing the German jazz experimentalism movement in terms of dissociation from their African American spiritual fathers, this book presents the movement as having decisively contributed to the decentering of still prevalent jazz historiographies in which the centrality of the US is usually presupposed. Going beyond both US-centric and Eurocentric perspectives, this study contributes to scholarship that accounts for jazz’s global dimension and the transfer of ideas beyond nationally conceived spaces. "Few studies have understood how improvised music functions as a complex ecosystem, indeed an interlocking one that overlaps and exchanges with other like ecosystems, not just musical ones, but artistic, political, and social ones as well. Perhaps only George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself and Kevin Whitehead’s New Dutch Swing have managed to capture the intricacies of free music – or what Lewis has termed “experimentalism” – in this way, with the depth and feeling that it deserves. "Harald Kisiedu’s magnificent European Echoes: Jazz Experimentalism in Germany, 1950-75 joins the ranks of these groundbreaking books, adding indispensable substance to the current scholarship. Basing his argument on meticulous primary research that includes many unknown or under-discussed details, Kisiedu moves deftly between biography, history and analysis, ultimately depicting improvised music in Germany as part of a continuum with African American jazz, rather than falling into line with received knowledge, which has tended to treat it as a major break – an “emancipation,” to use the problematic language often deployed – from its precursors and contemporaries in the United States. This allows Kisiedu to investigate the complexities of race, in particular, in the emergent new music of both West and East Germany, but also to evaluate the specificity of German improvised music, its relationships to Fluxus and its place in relation to new art and contemporary composed music in Europe, and the political and social contexts of the divided country in which it all emerged. Along the way, Kisiedu provides the most detailed biographical portraits of his principal subjects – Peter Brötzmann, Alex Schlippenbach, Manfred Schoof, and Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky – yet published in English, and the book includes an important trove of newly discovered and previously unpublished photographs.“   John Corbett, Chicago, author of „A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation“ "Harald Kisiedu’s groundbreaking interdisciplinary study trenchantly illuminates how during the Cold War and after, first-generation German and Swiss experimental musicians challenged national, political, conceptual, and racial borders to produce cosmopolitan new forms and practices of free improvisation. Kisiedu brings the study of improvised music together with German studies, critical race theory, and political science to produce a rigorous yet intimate portrait of the musical, cultural, and personal relationships among highly innovative musicians who shaped a new future of music.“  George E. Lewis, author of „A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music“