In 1991, Greenwood Press published the sturdy black hardcover book titled Fire Music: A Bibliography Of The New Jazz, 1959–1990. The work of independent researcher John Gray, the book presented – after a Val Wilmer foreword – the most exhaustive picture ever assembled of the print coverage of free jazz since its inception. The bibliography’s more than 7000 entries referenced books, magazines and indexes of ephemeral literature covering musicians ranging from Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman to Chris McGregor, Evan Parker, Frank Wright and hundreds of other players with less visible profiles.

The product of systematic research, Fire Music was not intended for mainstream distribution but for the library market. It has nevertheless acquired a particular status among students of avant garde jazz history. By bringing together such a large amount of heterogeneous material, Gray has provided future writers on the music with a reliable guide to existing documentation and studies of the music. Three decades after the original publication of Fire Music, Gray produced its companion volume: Creative Improvised Music: An International Bibliography Of The Jazz Avant-Garde, 1959–Present. Its publisher, scholarly imprint African Diaspora Press, has also been the outlet for Gray’s research on other major genres in black music, from reggae to hiphop.

Pierre Crépon: I’d be interested in getting a sense of the work involved in putting together these books.

John Gray: This requires a bit of historical context. When I started college in 1980 I had only the vaguest notion of what I wanted to do. However, as time passed, several passions began to emerge, most notably my fascination with the 1960s and its cultural aspects, my love of Black expressive culture – especially its musical forms – and my strong affinity for pure research. In fact, my junior field was a history of the New York avant gardes in jazz, dance and theatre during the 1960s, and my senior project a history of black music from West Africa to the jazz of the 1980s. Following graduation though, I found there was little call for such an odd assortment of interests. But one thing kept jumping out at me, namely the dearth of resources available for students and scholars of these topics.

Indeed.

I kept wondering why there were no reference tools on black expressive culture equivalent to those available for canonical western figures such as Bach, Beethoven or Shakespeare. It is also important to note that this was the Reagan era, a period of intense conservatism, not unlike our own, in which culture wars were raging over issues such as multiculturalism and whether or not Africa and its diaspora had contributed anything of value to global culture. Thus, in response, I began a mini research project aimed at documenting the presence of blacks in classical music, based largely on a survey of the small number of books then available as well as standard indexes such as Reader’s Guide To Periodical Literature. When I felt I had exhausted all of these sources I submitted this preliminary work to Black Music Research Journal. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, it was rejected with the comment that it needed to be expanded.

OK, this must be what led to your first book Blacks In Classical Music?

Yes. So, soon after this I decided that I needed to move beyond the basic resources of my local library and begin to mine the much more exhaustive holdings of the New York Public Library and its myriad research libraries. This would prove to be the turning point in my long and winding career as a researcher. Every week or so I would hop on a bus to New York and, armed with a print out of artists names and subject keywords, I’d systematically work my way through all of the sources that I thought might be relevant for a given subject. This being the pre-internet era meant that I would have to jot down any citations I discovered on a piece of paper and print, rather than download, any records I found in library databases. Then I would have to type all of this material into the computer. Between 1988 and 1993 this would be the process that yielded not only Blacks In Classical Music, but also the six other bibliographies I compiled for Greenwood Press, most of them focused on the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora.

How do you plan works with this kind of scope?

The method for compiling the books varies by project, but usually follows a pretty standard script. First, I have to define what the parameters for a project will be. In the case of an original work, like Hip-Hop Studies, this means that I have to start by addressing issues such as the time span the book will cover, the types of materials, topics and artists to be included, and the periodicals that have to be indexed. For a work like Creative Improvised Music, which is meant to supplement the coverage found in Fire Music, the process is somewhat different as I am trying to carry forward the story of the free jazz/improv movements documented in Fire Music by focusing on literature and developments which have emerged since the book’s publication. There is already a base from which I can start. However, the research process remains an exceedingly time-consuming one, which, like a Coltrane solo, involves pursuing all of the permutations I can think of relating to the subject and its hundreds of contributors.

What does the day to day work look like now?

During the very long research phase for each project I split my time between online searching and data entry, much of which I can do from home, and visits to the large research libraries of the New York Public Library, Columbia University and NYU. This is where I do the bulk of the research which I can’t do from home: indexing long periodical runs, viewing the wealth of book titles that can only be found in these collections, and accessing digital resources that are only available onsite. These institutions are the backbone of all of my books to date.

How has your methodology evolved over time?

In the case of Fire Music, I was still in what I now think of as my ‘aggregationist’ phase. This meant that I was primarily identifying the sources I was citing via library catalogues, standard periodical indexes such as The Music Index, and/or the bibliographies of others. However, as my research skills improved I tried to add more and more of my own research to the mix, particularly through my indexing of journals not indexed anywhere else. With Fire Music this meant that in addition to scouring all volumes of the Music Index, I also fully indexed as complete runs as I could of Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, and a select number of jazz journals such as Cadence, Coda and The Wire.

As time went on, I began to do more and more of my own indexing and, instead of just providing bare bones citations, I started to add annotations for all works cited. This is the case for all the volumes I’ve done since 2010 for African Diaspora Press’s Black Music Reference Series, including Creative Improvised Music. Here I combine ‘old school’ analytic indexing of more than 80 different music journals, with the results of innumerable searches of databases such as RILM, ProQuest and WorldCat to produce the most comprehensive survey of the literature on free jazz/improv to date.

How does the new volume compare to Fire Music, from a practical standpoint?

It is both a continuation and a reimagined version of that volume. The most obvious differences are in the book’s organisation and the focus of its coverage. I have tried to streamline the book’s structure in order to make it easier to use, and Fire Music had a more pronounced Afrocentric and New York-centric bias than does this volume. I have tried to broaden my lens to better reflect the migration of free jazz and free improv traditions beyond the New York region to enclaves across the US and around the globe. I’ve also added literally hundreds of new figures ranging from impresarios and record producers to the wave of artists who have emerged in recent decades, people like Mary Halvorson, Tyshawn Sorey and Taylor Ho Bynum.

Contrary to what it might seem from the outside, the process of compiling a bibliography is not purely mechanical. It involves a lot of decision making regarding what to include, exclude and how to hierarchise the material. What makes Fire Music the resource it is, I think, is how you treat primary sources and the importance placed on providing access to the musicians’ own voices. Can you talk about your approach to the question?

From the start of my career, I’ve always viewed my work as a form of guerrilla scholarship, a way to challenge conventional narratives surrounding black cultural forms. The bibliographies are my way of doing this. Each book starts from the same premise, that the topic in question, whether it’s the jazz avant garde or hiphop, deserves the same rigorous in-depth scrutiny usually reserved for western art forms. In order to achieve this I try to include as broad a cross-section of the known corpus, both popular and academic, as I can, with particular attention given to historical and critical materials as well as works that privilege the voices of the artists themselves. Just as musicians like to blur the lines between musical styles, I like to range across disciplines to capture materials that I think might be relevant whether they come from Black Studies and Musicology or Gender, Race and Literary Studies. The same applies to the types of materials included, which can encompass everything from writings found in jazz, experimental music and scholarly music journals to newspaper reportage and music documentaries. If I think a work offers details or perspectives that might be useful to a researcher, I cite it.

Since I view the bibliographies as a form of cultural and intellectual history, I am also particularly interested in representing perspectives and subtopics that have been overlooked or marginalised in previous works. Occasionally though this is made impossible due to gaps in the literature. This is particularly true for topics which remain undersourced or artists whose careers, for whatever reason, have been largely ignored by journalists and academics. In these cases only time can fill the void.

In Fire Music I did my best to represent as comprehensive a picture of the published literature on free jazz and free improv, and the many competing viewpoints on its history and value. However, it was created in a different age, long before the advent of Google, Amazon and the dizzying array of databases which are now standard fare in libraries. Thus it reflects some of the limitations of its time, the much more limited universe of finding tools then available, the paucity of academic writing on the subject, and the virtual absence of any archival collections on avant garde jazz artists.

The landscape has certainly changed deeply in 30 years, not only regarding the tools but also in the nature of the available literature. What are your observations in this regard?

Prior to the 1990s writings on free jazz/improv were limited almost exclusively to the work of critics and fans. In fact, of the 7100 entries included in Fire Music, only a mere 13 were academic theses. In the decades since the situation has changed dramatically as a new generation of musicologists, cultural historians and literary scholars has begun to add their voices to the mix. Now, not only is there a much greater representation of academic perspectives, but also a newly robust online presence reflected for instance in such excellent sites as Cisco Bradley’s Jazz Right Now, which focuses on leading improvisors from the Brooklyn scene, and Ben Remsen’s Now Is Podcast, which covers artists and developments from the Chicago scene.

The focus of Creative Improvised Music is on works published since the early 1990s along with earlier material not included in Fire Music. It also includes much stronger coverage of topics that were only nominally covered in Fire Music: the history of female improvisors in the music, the music’s impact on the new black poetry of the 1960s, 70s and beyond, and key regional scenes based throughout the US and Europe. Once again I have tried to highlight works which trace the genesis, evolution and diffusion of the music, both here in the US and abroad.

Are there recent works you would single out as particularly important?

Yes. For those seeking an introduction to the published literature on the music I would of course recommend both Fire Music and Creative Improvised Music, as well as Jeff Schwartz’s recent Free Jazz, an annotated bibliography published in 2018. For the free jazz/creative improv movement and its history I would suggest Ian Anderson’s This Is Our Music, a scholarly look at the music’s development during the 1960s and George Lewis’s A Power Greater Than Itself, an in-depth portrait of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. For developments of the 1970s, including the New York loft scene, two works stand out: Bill Shoemaker’s Jazz In The 1970s and Michael Heller’s Loft Jazz.

I would supplement these with two early social histories which have recently been reissued, Val Wilmer’s As Serious As Your Life and Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli’s Free Jazz/Black Power, a French Marxist perspective from 1971 now available in English translation. For free improv I would suggest John Corbett’s A Listener’s Guide To Free Improvisation, a primer that offers a non-technical guide to the music’s recorded legacy. Out of the many biographies and memoirs published over the last three decades I would single out three: Lewis Porter’s critical biography John Coltrane: His Life And Music, John Szwed’s Space Is The Place, a masterful portrait of Sun Ra, and Songs Of The Unsung, a rich oral history from Los Angeles pianist and bandleader Horace Tapscott edited by Steven Isoardi.

Are there major areas that you think are still under-researched? Topics for books that have yet to be written?

Absolutely! Since my goal all along has been to push the boundaries of writings on these traditions I would love to see researchers start to dig into the critical mass of materials contained in the more than 12,000 entries included in Fire Music and Creative Improvised Music, most of which have yet to be utilised by either journalists or academics. I’m hoping that someone will draw on this mountain of research to write the first synthetic history of the free jazz and free improv movements from their beginnings to the present. I would also love to see a broad-based history of the jazz collective and its role in the jazz avant garde. On the biographical side I would like to see researchers begin to explore the stories of figures not named Coltrane, Coleman or Sun Ra. For decades these artists have taken the lion’s share of writer’s attention, often obscuring the key roles played by others. It’s about time that some of the music’s other giants – Cecil Taylor, Sam Rivers, Muhal Richard Abrams – got biographies of their own. Lastly, I would especially like to see increased coverage given to local scenes both here in the US and abroad utilising resources that I have only been able to cover intermittently, like foreign newspapers and journals such as France’s Jazz Magazine and Jazz Hot, Germany’s Jazz Podium and Italy’s Musica Jazz. This would fill a major gap in the literature.

Creative Improvised Music is published by African Diaspora Press.