Almost without exception, histories of experimental music have implicitly defined the field as White. But in parallel with the now canonic mid-20th-century innovations of John Cage and company, many Black musicians were undertaking their own radical explorations of sonic and social organization. Proudly rooted in the Black American vernacular, their music also embraced a pluralistic array of stylistic reference points as they devised new forms of collective playing, developed expressive extensions of instrumental technique, and issued provocative artistic, spiritual, and political statements.

In spite of a prolific record of music-making and related cultural activities, the musicians at the center of what George Lewis has called "Black experimentalism" have been largely excluded from histories of 20th-century music. Jazz critics dismissed the movement for deviating from essentialist notions of "swing" that supposedly circumscribed the borders of the genre, while (White) historians of classical and experimental music, largely ignorant of the history of Black music, refused to believe that improvisation could be the source of genuinely new music.

In these two essays, George Lewis-- trombonist, composer, writer, professor at Columbia University, and member of the foundational Chicago collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)-- provides a theoretical and historical introduction to the music of Black experimentalism and sets out a framework for understanding how racist categories have narrowed our vision of what experimental music was, is, and could be.

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