Max Jefferson

This project limits its purview exclusively to the United States and to one cultural formation of Black nationalism that coalesced in New York City with a collective move to Harlem in 1965. No longer in the racially heterogeneous milieu of downtown music making, the cohort of what “Sound as Black Situation” terms Black Nationalist Music built a space in which their Blackness was prerequisite. This project recovers the distinct Black musical practice of this cohort and its co-constitutive Black music criticism, parsing Black Nationalist Music from its scholarly and broader generic classification as “experimental jazz.” The method of this recovery explores the spatial and ideological transition uptown and the synthesis of a Black tradition foundational to pursuant social, political, and mythic Black world-building in the United States.