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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, and numerous types of musical analysis—Williams listens with and theorizes alongside five different musical practitioners, each of whom approach the practices and politics of Black musical space-making in their own ways: trumpeter Terence Blanchard, the late drummer Billy Higgins, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, and the late pianist Andrew Hill. These chapter-length case studies not only advance the extant scholarship on these five figures and their works, but also contribute to a larger, variegated history of Black improvisatory excellence and daring. As Williams argues throughout: The practice of Black musical place-making is about creating a sense of place that reflects the interiority of the Black radical imagination and the interfacing with physical spaces. This improvised musical place-making represents not only how spatial domination affects Black people's lives but also how they create alternative spaces of affirmation in response to the historical relegation of Black people to placelessness. That placelessness, which is built up by the structure and logic of racism and shaped by the history of dehumanization, colonialism, and geographical displacement, informs what a “black sense of place” is. (8)To make this case, Williams turns to the concept-metaphor of “crossing bar lines”—a phrase traditionally used to name the act of extending a musical figure beyond the mathematical time frame of any given measure in many European-derived systems of musical sound organization—in order to name “the phenomenological relationship between African American improvisers’ use of unconventional and experimental music strategies and their need to articulate Black humanity through improvisation” (106). Where the bar line literally marks a limit point, an arbitrary temporal boundary, an index of a larger system of musical order, here, scaled up and allegorized, the bar line evokes temporal, spatial, physical, and social classifications and boundaries arbitrarily imposed and brutally enforced. Where “crossing bar lines” as a musician literally involves performing musical phrases that stretch across measures, here, writ large, crossing bar lines involves creating onto-epistemic space for oneself and others—taking and making the breathing room necessary to accommodate the complexities of a people, the richness of an experience. As Williams explains: “I use ‘crossing bar lines’ as a metaphor for Black performative insurgency in sound for the purpose of expressing Black humanity. I remix the term past its traditional, purely notational meaning to redefine it within Black musical space, where Black music explodes hegemonic theoretical constraints and opens up new interdisciplinary pathways and types of alternative knowledge that elucidate African American improvisatory and musical practices” (17).Williams links this expanded, allegorical notion of “crossing bar lines” with another key phrase of the book, “Black musical space,” or the embodied act of musical improvisation, which he describes as “the practice of cartography in real time.” Drawing upon the work of Katherine McKittrick, Williams argues that Black improvising musicians are “cartographers of alternative musical maps that demonstrate musical and ontological place-making. This musical place-making is necessary because the ‘structural workings of racism kept Black cultures in place and tagged them as placeless.’ Colonial logic, which forms the philosophical basis for plantocracy and defines humanity within terms of owning Black people as property, has never fully accorded Black people the sign of the human” (6). Working across critical-theoretical discourses on race, musicking, space-making, and affective geography, Williams contends that “musical space as an aesthetic idea, like the discipline of geography, has [historically] been perceived as invisibly and universally white. That invisible whiteness has shaped how we understand music, and musical space in general” (15). Black improvisatory musicking, however, offers a corrective, “contest[ing] and disrupt[ing] the marginalization that buttresses the falsely imagined neutral and transparent spaces we share” (6). To improvise Black musical space, to sound and theorize across the bar lines, is thus to refute an obliterative cosmology, to invent out of a harrowing set of histories, to create new room to breathe.Through his five case studies, Williams explores this space-making and breathing room patiently, unfolding and layering an argument that cuts across historical periods and locations in order to emphasize a unity-in-difference among U.S.-based Black improvisers. In the first chapter, Williams analyzes trumpeter Terence Blanchard's Breathless (2015) to unpack the composition's musical evocations of breathlessness, linking the piece's contours to three distinguishable conversations: a condemnation of the 2014 police murder of Eric Garner, a discussion about Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and an ongoing engagement with a tradition of “past African American improvisors who have historically created a sense of place through musical practices” (21). In his second chapter, Williams follows this up with an unconventional, methodologically surprising engagement with the recorded work of drummer Billy Higgins. In this chapter, Williams listens for breath not only formally, through interpretations of melodic, harmonic, timbral, and other musical elements, but also literally, via the sounds of Higgins's own “breathing as he improvised.” As Williams argues compellingly: “I view Higgins's breathing as a form of spiritual, improvised respatialization, and argue that his breathing strategies were a way to enhance and inspire his risk-taking in improvisation” (22). Focusing not only on “the grand list of performance practices to which musicians and musicologists pay attention,” but also on “the repertoire of physicality,” on “sounds that are not deliberately amplified but still come out in the mix,” Williams contends that “these sounds are as integral to the improvisor's performance as is the cardiopulmonary system that sustains him or her in the process of making music” (46). Addressing these sounds via Billy Higgins's work, Williams unsettles the Cartesian epistemologies informing much musicological analysis on jazz, emphasizing the corporeality and mind-body breath work of Black musical space-making in a world on fire.As the book unfolds, the chapters converge into a complex map-history of Black musical space-making, a record of others’ vital, specific, dynamic, and inexhaustible practices. Williams's chapters on Blanchard and Higgins contribute to this in conjunction with his chapter on Ambrose Akinmusire's “spiritual relationship with ancestral masters of improvisation,” “deep understanding of his complex positionality in the world from the nexus of Oakland culture,” and “commitment to bringing attention to the murder of Black men and women by members of police departments in communities across the United States” (105–106). Williams's chapter on pianist-composer Andrew Hill also adds to this larger effect, placing Hill's improvisational nuances in relation to “the political and social context that formed his musical practices” (150) (as well as making new sense of Hill's own “reticence toward retrospection” [145], obfuscations of his life story, and “disavow[als of] his placement in the teleological discursive formations called jazz history” [150]).Yet of all this book's illuminating chapters, Williams's extended piece on Terri Lyne Carrington stands apart for its detail, thoroughness, and variety. Tracing the long arc of Carrington's storied career as a producer, drummer, arranger, and composer, Williams draws sustained attention to persistent gender inequities within and beyond jazz scenes, joining a varied chorus in arguing that any study of improvisatory musicking, no matter how seemingly robust, is incomplete if it does not attend in some way to “how power is spatially distributed through violence, oppression, racism, and sexism in our society” (72–73). For Williams, Carrington's work at the level of musical performance, experimental composition, and brick-and-mortar institution building serves as an example of a possible corrective (short, of course, of a systemwide reckoning with jazz patriarchy and the revolutionary creation of a new culture). The chapter on Carrington's life and work arguably serves as one of the book's clearest bridges between Black sonic, social, and physical place-making.Throughout the book, Williams presents a rich set of theoretical insights that draw not only on his previous scholarly work, but also on his own years of experience as a professional jazz pianist and a celebrated composer-improviser. This nuance comes through via his book's inviting, lucid descriptions of musical structure, as well as through the industry-based reflections he offers to contextualize his arguments further. As he states at one moment, movingly: “I have witnessed, through the lens of Black sound, what makes the music radical: the love of humanity as politics, even with full knowledge of the systemic perpetuation of historical crimes that continue to shape Black people's experience in the world. Though the ability to listen is crucial, being a masterful improviser is not the foundation of Black humanity but the product of being Black and human in the world” (69). Yet while Williams's own experience as a practitioner is crucial to his analyses, as he follows his five subjects, he takes special care to “privilege the improvisers’ voices through interviews in th[e] text when possible” (5). That is: Williams does not impose an overbearing analytical or narrative order on the musicians and recordings he engages, as that would run contrary to his project. Instead, he provides platforms, stages, avenues, assuming the roles of interlocutor and critical guide for reader-listeners and in effect modeling an ethic of unity-in-difference. In these pages, Williams leaves room for disagreement and debate, allowing each musician's own voice and perspective to cut through.With all of this in mind, and particularly in the context of the 2020s, Crossing Bar Lines reads as a timely response to an especially unnerving historical conjuncture. As Robin D. G. Kelley puts it in his generative foreword, Crossing Bar Lines “was written during a particular historical moment characterized by a wave of state-sanctioned and vigilante murders of Black people, resulting in a wave of opposition from groups such as Hands Up United, Lost Voices, Organization for Black Struggle, the Dream Defenders, We Charge Genocide, the Black Youth Project 100, the Community Rights Campaign, and the Movement for Black Lives” (viii). Completing this book under these circumstances meant holding fast, as the text signals, to the fact that the ways “African American improviser-philosophers approach improvisation by creating their own musical and political space is as important now in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1960s and generations before” (4).With clarity and urgency, in this book, Williams performs what he describes, creating his own theoretical space and inspiring new lines of critical inquiry. Reading the text, and looking ahead, we might feel encouraged to ask: in what ways is Black musical space-making always already transnational, beyond the strictures and “bar lines” of the United States and the very concept of the nation-state? In what ways does Black musical space exceed the sounds and styles historically (and contemporarily) coded as “jazz”? What does the creation of Black musical space look and sound like online, for musicians and listeners active in the contemporary audiovisual markets of TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter? How might crossing bar lines create new breathing room amid the veiled enclosures of platform capitalism and the growing shadow of climate disaster? Whatever the answers may be to these and other spinoff questions, Williams's book will undoubtedly serve as a rich guide for listeners, musicians, scholars, and critics seeking the space in which to live, to make, and to breathe.
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