I Hear Freedom Book Launch with Cisco Bradley, Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, and Kwami Coleman

Join us on Thursday, August 6 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Cisco Bradley's new book I Hear Freedom: The Great Migration, Free Jazz, and Black Power (Columbia University Press, 2026), a history of the free jazz movement that took shape in Cleveland and Detroit in the 1960s. Drawing on interviews with dozens of musicians, Bradley traces how artists broke from the constraints of bebop to develop a new musical language, pulling from figures like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane, as well as African and Middle Eastern musical traditions, avant-garde art movements, and the politics of Black Power.

The book locates this Midwestern scene within a longer arc, showing how the musical and cultural inheritance carried north by the Great Migration shaped its sound and sensibility. For the launch, Bradley will be joined in conversation by Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn, who wrote the book's foreword, and Kwami Coleman, whose own recent scholarship traces a parallel history of the free jazz era. Vanlandingham-Dunn will play selections from vinyl records as part of the conversation, bringing the sounds discussed in the book into the room.

Dr. Cisco Bradley is professor of history and director of the Music and Migration Lab at the Pratt Institute, and he is currently the Digital Studies Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. He is an award-winning author, film director, and screenwriter. His work spans the fields of Black studies, music studies, migration studies, oral history, and cultural memory.

Dr. Kwami Coleman is a musicologist, music creator, and an associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University. He researches and writes on improvised and experimental music, American music history, jazz history, music and the African Diaspora, music's political economy, music aesthetics, technology, and culture. He is a pianist and producer who creates solo and collaborative work with electronics, machines, and other human beings.

Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn is a writer, music historian, DJ, independent archivist, and professional listener based in Brooklyn, New York. He runs cow: Music, an independent record label focusing on accessible avant-garde music, and is the Creative Consultant for Astral Spirits Records (Austin, Texas). He has DJ’d in his native Baltimore, Maryland, Philadelphia, PA, and various locations in Brooklyn for over two decades.