avant-garde

In narrowly focusing on Leonard Bernstein’s tortured personal life, "Maestro" fails to explore his tortured artistic life.

The saxophonist Albert Ayler revolutionized the avant-garde jazz scene, drastically altering notions of what noises qualified as music.

Before she met John Lennon, she was a significant figure in avant-garde circles and had created masterpieces. Did celebrity deprive her of her due as an artist?

The New Yorker critic's new book is a sequel of sorts to "The Metaphysical Club."

Coleman’s approach to improvisation shook twentieth-century jazz. It was a revolutionary idea that sounded like a folk song.

In the late 1960s, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, jazz legends were playing the best music you’ve never heard.

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.

In the documentary "Fire Music," the hostile reaction that met the unusual genre soon turns into deep appreciation and a lasting influence.

The number of MoMA-CIA crossovers is highly suspicious, to say the least.

American art and the Cold War.

A history of techno.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.

George Balanchine and Martha Graham trade places.

He moved to California during the Nazi era, and his music—which ranged from the lushly melodic to the rigorously atonal—caught the ears of everyone.

When Miles Davis went electric in the late 1960s, he overhauled his thinking about songs, genres, and what it meant to lead a band.

Cecil Brown wants to digitally revive the enslaved antebellum poet George Moses Horton. Can digital technology help reconnect us to the tradition he embodied?

A search for the memory of R.E.M. in Athens, Georgia.

And the origins of the term “Kafkaesque.”

As AI drum machines embrace humanising imperfections, what does this mean for ‘real’ drummers and the soul of music?

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

Man Ray made art that looked like the future. How did he become a minor figure?

In the 1960s and 1970s, photographer Leni Sinclair stood at the center of a local scene where political and cultural ferment merged.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation of American artists began to think of advertising and commercial imagery as the new avant-garde.

Five men sat together on a hillside in the late afternoon, imagining a world in which they did not have to hide.

Sixty years ago, a pathbreaking jazz album fused politics and art in the fight for Black liberation. Black artists are taking similar strides today.

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.