Adam Shatz

Adam Shatz is working on a book of interlinked essays about the history of black avant-garde music in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Most of these essays are portraits of key figures in the history of “black creative music,” including exponents of populist modernism such as Nina Simone and Jimi Hendrix; self-conscious modernists such as Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman; composers/performers of “classical new music,” like Julius Eastman; and pioneers of “world music,” such as Don Cherry. While these essays will offer critical appraisals of the music, they will also explore subjects of larger social concern, such as racism, discrimination, and the experience of exile. It is Adam Shatz's view that the postwar black avant-garde, which cannot be confined to any single genre of musical expression, constitutes one of the great modern cultural movements. In its efforts to overcome the constraints imposed by the musical establishment, and by wider society, black creative music has given expression to what the trumpeter Lee Morgan called the “search for the new land”: a land of emancipated citizens, and freedom in sound.

Adam Shatz is writing a book about the life, work, and after-lives of the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The work will not be so much a biography as an extended essay about Fanon's impact on our understanding of the psychological dynamics of racism, colonial and anti-colonial violence, and, above all, the meaning of human freedom in a racialized world.