In the 1960s, a musical revolution took place in the industrial landscapes of Cleveland and Detroit. Cisco Bradley’s I Hear Freedom offers a deeply researched and expansive rethinking of free jazz as a cultural, political, and historical phenomenon rooted in Black life and collective memory. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of musicians, Bradley situates free jazz within the musical traditions carried north during the Great Migration and the social conditions of postwar urban change, and he connects sound to place, history to memory, and artistic innovation to social transformation. In this Q&A, Bradley discusses what drew him to free jazz, how oral history anchors the book, and why the Great Migration and Black freedom movements are essential to understanding the music.

Q: What led you to write I Hear Freedom?

Cisco Bradley: I came to this book through the music. Well over twenty years ago, I began listening to the saxophonist Albert Ayler who is one of the most innovative and powerful American musical artists of the twentieth century. He has a fantastically original sound, and I think everyone who hears him faces that in his sound. And I was also struck by other musicians of his generation, such as Charles Tyler, Frank Wright, Bobby Few, Charles Moore, Faruq Z. Bey, Jaribu Shahid, Hasan Shahid, Abdul Wadud, and numerous others, and how purely original they were as musicians, composers, and conceptualists. Free jazz represented a genius wave of ideas, so this book looks at one key part of that history with chapters on different figures within the broader movement.

Plus, a considerable amount of writing has appeared in recent years on free jazz, such as George Lewis’s definitive, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Steve Isoardi, The Dark Tree: Jazz and Community Arts in Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2006); Kwami Coleman, Change: The New Thing and Modern Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2025); Michael Heller, Loft Jazz: Improvising New York in the 1970s (University of California Press, 2016); and my previous book, Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker (Duke University Press, 2021), to name but a few. This body of literature has begun to really dig into the history of free jazz and give it context. I was struck by how the scenes in Cleveland and Detroit, which produced some incredibly important musicians, had been left out. So I began spending time in those cities and interviewing some of the key musicians involved. Interviews with Mutawaf Shaheed (formerly the bassist Clyde Shy), Hasan Shahid (of the Black Unity Trio), and the bassist Jaribu Shahid really sparked the entire project. I am eternally grateful for their openness.

Q: What role does oral history play in I Hear Freedom?

Bradley: Since 2013, I have conducted over 500 oral history interviews with jazz artists. Around 2018, I began to focus on the elders of the community, in particular, to preserve their vital perspectives on this profound American artform. So I knew from the start that oral history would be at the center of the book and that the goal would be to weave those voices into a narrative. It’s important that the history of the music be told in the voices of those who made it.

Q: Why did you decide to frame I Hear Freedom with the Great Migration?

Bradley: In many ways, the book began with a question: Where did Albert Ayler come from? I wanted to understand his origins more deeply, and I wanted to think about his generation. I noticed that a number of Black critics from the 1960s recognized the aesthetic of field shouts in his sound, and I wondered how he inherited or developed from that if he had never heard them directly? So I began to think about the ancestors of free jazz musicians, in particular the journey between emancipation and reconstruction after the Civil War through the Great Migration to northern cities. What was carried with them as they moved? How were they affected by successive waves of social change such as unionization, relocation, and ghettoization? Ultimately this led me to consider Black families as the repository of music and memory, and I argue quite explicitly that Black families were the deepest reservoir for the creation and sustenance of Black/American music throughout the century between emancipation and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

They weren’t the only repository, but they were the most powerful and dynamic one. I think it is critically important to recognize the social processes that allowed for not only free jazz but also nearly every genre of American music from blues to hip-hop, which were rooted in generations of Black families who tapped into the reservoir and kept coming up with something new. It also helps get us away from the allure of the “great man” explanation and to start thinking about music not just as the genius of individuals but rather as the collective product of an entire community. Creedance needs to be given to the people who made the Black musical renaissance of the twentieth century possible, a cultural monument no less profound than the Italian renaissance of the early modern period or the German classical tradition. The entire country and, in many ways, the world have been transformed by the cultural phenomenon of Black music.

Q: How was the free jazz movement of the 1960s and 1970s connected to broader Black freedom movements?

Bradley: Oral histories led me to this connection. Nearly every person I talked to openly discussed how there was no separation between free jazz and the Black freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the musicians were actively involved in various organizations such as SNCC, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panthers, and the Republic of New Afrika or supported the causes that they represented, which focused on Black autonomy, political power, and social uplift. And one must not forget that in 1967, Detroit was the site of the largest domestic uprising since the Civil War. It would be unnatural to separate freedom in music and the social movements that were operating at the same time. This was constantly reinforced through the oral histories.

But considering the social context and the Great Migration , we get out of the trap of thinking of free jazz as merely a reaction to the artistic restrictions that had manifested in bebop by the late 1950s. Most jazz journalists placed free jazz in that quagmire, and it has largely remained there in public discourse. But what musicians imparted to me through the oral histories is that free jazz had come out of a longer freedom struggle, one that had roots long before the Civil Rights Movement, that had in many ways manifested in the Underground Railroad and had evolved through reconstruction, migration, unionization, and so forth. Free jazz was, in one sense, the sonic embodiment of the cry for freedom, and so I wanted to stretch that out and push for a new understanding of the music.

Q: How are you building from I Hear Freedom in your future research?

Bradley: In 2023, I founded the Music and Migration Lab. Its primary focus is to trace the oral transmission of African music in the United States by researching the ancestral origins of blues and jazz musicians of African descent. The study includes approximately 3,500 musicians, cataloguing every known ancestral movement as far back as can be traced. So I’ve taken what I started with I Hear Freedom, and expanded it beyond free jazz to look at the roots of Black music across the spectrum. Currently, I am working on book and film projects related to this body of research.