With Crossing Bar Lines, pianist, composer, and transdisciplinary music scholar James Gordon Williams argues convincingly that Black musical invention is a form of sonic, social, affective, physical, and onto-epistemic cartography. An elegant and theoretically rich book steeped in jazz performance praxis, contemporary musicological research, and Black feminist geography, Crossing Bar Lines highlights how Black lived experience, music-making, and politicized Black place-building have long been entwined in the broader U.S. cultural field. These issues are not only immediately relevant to the practice of contemporary jazz study—from the development of new historical and analytical methods to the unsettling of the very epistemologies the term “jazz” rests upon—but are also crucial today, amid protracted pandemic catastrophes, mounting class inequalities, looming climate crises, platform capitalist constrictions, and, crucially, defiantly, Black joys and brilliances, responses to the present conjuncture.
Blending a variety of methodologies and rhetorical modes—personal interviews, political critique, biographical portraiture, personal reflection,...
