ABSTRACT
Turning the face of music historiography toward a relatively frank engagement with issues of race, ethnicity and class has rarely proceeded without discontents. While popular music studies, including jazz history and criticism, have addressed race matters for quite some time, studies that deal specifically with these issues in the self-described “experimental” musics, including improvised music, are rather few in number, evincing a rather stunted discourse. In the foreword to their book, Music and, the Racial Imagination, editors Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman use the term “silence” to describe the historical aporias that accompany this discursive lack (37).
