In many ways, this Episode is our attempt to engage with Fred’s incredible writing: with his proposal that all black performance (culture, politics, sexuality, identity, and blackness itself) is improvisation.
Our favourite Lancashire-born autodictact asks what’s political about the tension between the individual and the collective in free jazz.
What might Carter and Parker’s collaboration tell us about our own performances of responsibility and liberty, whether individual, social or musical?
African American history, avant-garde jazz riffs and activism intertwine in experimental verse of extraordinary and affecting beauty that has to be heard.
A conversation between Philip and Moten: how do we read NourbeSe’s anti-narrative poetic lament in Glasgow today, given the city’s role in the history of slavery?
Do art forms like black radical poetry, free jazz and improvisation create a space for the performance of freedom? Did they ever? And can they still do so now?
A dismantled, performed film, where a narrator pieces together the sounds, images and storytelling of a documentary about Hurricane Katrina before a live audience.