A Power Stronger Than Itself - Alejandrocasales.com

xviii : : Acknowledgments
work was completed. The support of my colleagues in both institutions,
as well as the resources of the Edwin H. Case Chair in American Music at
Columbia, was critical in allowing me to complete the project.
I’d like to thank Wolfram Knauer, Arndt Weidler, and the Jazz- Institut
Darmstadt for their tremendous support in allowing me to create an extensive
photocopy library of contemporaneous reviews from German
and French journals; Mary Lui, for access to the Larayne Black Archive
at the Chicago Historical Society; and Deborah Gillaspie, the curator of
the Chicago Jazz Archive at the University of Chicago, for access to the Jamil
B. Figi Collection. Special thanks are also due to Columbia’s Jazz Study
Group at the Center for Jazz Studies, to whom many of these ideas were exposed
as they crystallized, and particularly to Farah Jasmine Griffi n, Robert
O’Meally, and Brent Hayes Edwards for supporting my eff orts; and to Mark
Burford, then editor of Current Musicology, and Quincy Troupe, then editor
of Black Renaissance Noire, who published early versions of some chapters. I
thank the Center for Black Music Research for their ongoing support of my
eff orts, as well as the scholars associated with the École des Hautes Études
en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris—in particular, Patrick Williams, Jean
Jamin, and their many fi ne students, such as Alexandre Pierrepont, whose
set of AACM interviews in the journal Improjazz constitutes an important
source for future work.
I completed the initial transcriptions and overall structure of the project
at a residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy, and I am
grateful to the foundation, and to Chinary Ung for placing me in touch with
them. The University of California Humanities Research Institute, and its
director, David Theo Goldberg, provided important research support during
my 2002 residency there, and the members of the residency were invaluable
in allowing me to bounce ideas off them: Renee Coulombe, Susan Leigh
Foster, Anthea Kraut, Jason Stanyek, Eric Porter, Simon Penny, Georgina
Born, Adriene Jenik, and Antoinette LaFarge. I owe immeasurable debts to
three people whose early encouragement and support were crucial in forging
my career as a scholar: my former colleagues, Jann Pasler of UCSD’s
program in Critical Studies/Experimental Practices, and Peter Gena, chair
of the Time Arts Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and
Samuel Floyd, founder of the Center for Black Music Research.
Substantial portions of two earlier articles of mine appear in this book.
Text from my “Experimental Music in Black and White: The AACM in New
York, 1970–1985,” from Current Musicology 71–73 (Spring 2001–Spring 2002),
100–157 was apportioned across chapters 4, 9, and 11; and chapter 7 is an