New Musical Figurations exemplifies a dramatically new way of configuring jazz music and history.By relating biography to the cultural and musical contours of contemporary American life, Ronald M. Radano observes jazz practice as part of the complex interweaving of postmodern culture - a culture that has eroded conventional categories defining jazz and the jazz musician. Radano accomplishes all this by analyzing the creative life of Anthony Braxton, one of the most emblematic figures of this cultural crisis.

A virtuoso saxophonist and an innovative theoretician and composer of experimental music, Anthony Braxton repeatedly challenges the conventions of official musical culture and its definitions of "jazz," "black music," "popular music," and "art music." The neglect of radical, challenging figures like Braxton in standard histories of jazz, Radano argues, mutes the innovative voice of the African-American musical tradition. Refreshingly free of technical jargon, New Musical Figurations is more than just another variation on the same jazz theme. Rather it is an exploratory work as rich in theoretical vision as it is in historical detail.

CONTENTS:
Introduction: A New Musical Balance
Chicago As Aesthetic Center
Musical Assertions of Black Identity
New Musical Convergences: Paris and New York
Defining Black Vanguard Aesthetic
Black Experimentalism As Spectacle
Epilogue: Jazz Recast
Appendix A: Picture Titles of Compositions Cited
Appenix B: Recordings Cited / Anthony Braxton On Record

RONALD M. RADANO is Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and Music at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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