George Lewis is a composer of contemporary classical music, an avant-garde jazz trombonist, an electronic sound artist, an essayist, and the author of A Power Stronger than Itself, the definitive history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a black composers’ collective based in Chicago, where he grew up. A dazzling polymath, he moves between the worlds of new music, jazz, academia, computer science, philosophy and visual art with extraordinary ease and humility. In our conversation, George talked about his working-class Chicago roots, his experiences at Yale and in Europe, his views on “cultural appropriation,” his ambivalence about being seen as a trombonist, why he thinks about John Coltrane more than John Cage, and why he’s proud to be considered an Afro-futurist.

A Power Stronger Than Itself

The Recombinant Trilogy

Rainbow Family

The Will to Adorn

Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives

Jessica Ekomane

Seth Parker Woods

Dana Reason - The Myth of Absence

Margo Jefferson won the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 1995, and the 2015 National Book Critics Circle award in autobiography for her memoir, Negroland, about growing up in an upper-middle class black family in Chicago. During her years at the New York Times, she wrote brilliantly about literature, music, dance, and the way racial politics seeps into culture: what the late Stanley Crouch called the “all-American skin game.” In our conversation, Margo spoke about her childhood in Chicago, her early experiences in radical theater at Brandeis University, her relationship to the feminist and Black Power movements, her emergence as a writer, and her battles with melancholia.

Negroland

On Michael Jackson

Ripping Off Black Music - Harper’s Magazine

Some American Feminists

Vivian Gornick is a writer of essays, criticism, and literary nonfiction, a fierce feminist, and a proud New Yorker. Her 1987 book about her relationship with her mother, Fierce Attachments, was recently chosen by the book critics of the New York Times as the finest memoir of the last 50 years. In our conversation, Vivian reflected on growing up among working-class Jews in the Bronx, her struggles with her mother, her journey through the women’s liberation movement, and her relationship to desire, love, and work.

Fierce Attachments

The Odd Woman and the City

The Press of Freedom: An Ofay’s Indirect Address to LeRoi Jones

Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s - Tom Wolfe