This edited collection belongs to Duke University Press's Improvisation, Community and Social Practice series that stems from a University of Guelph (Canada) based ‘large-scale multi-institutional collaborative project [that] focuses on the social implications of improvised music’ (p. ix). Ajay Heble is known for his contribution to jazz scholarship – in particular Landing on the Wrong Note (Reference Heble2000) – and teaches at Guelph. The book draws much of its inspiration from – and several chapters directly from – the Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, and this connection provides a thread for the contributions, with the benefits but also some of the disadvantages of such a volume. The title is, of course, a reference to Curtis Mayfield; more specifically, bassist William Parker's tribute to Mayfield's songs that demonstrates the connections between traditions of African American music and that ‘cause[s] us to reflect on the continuing relevance of both musical forms and the social conditions from which they sprang’ (p. 1). The social and political aspects, particularly as they relate to improvised music since 1965 (generally implying ‘avant-garde’ or ‘free’ as opposed to ‘straight-ahead’ or ‘mainstream’ jazz) are discussed in a largely North American, post-civil rights, context.

The collection is divided into four parts, the third being a selection of telling images taken by photographer Thomas King of musicians in various non-performance situations at the Guelph Jazz Festival. The first section, titled ‘Beyond categories: histories and mysteries’, brings together essays on seemingly diverse artists such as Cecil Taylor and Duke Ellington and, in one chapter, genres that are not usually considered to have much in common, free jazz and punk rock. The Ellington piece may initially appear to have little to do with avant-garde jazz, given that Ellington's music was essentially tonal and did not feature free improvisation but, as author John Szwed argues, having anticipated future developments and influenced many experimental musicians with his music and orchestra, ‘Who could be more avant-garde than this?’ (p. 44). Furthermore, Szwed suggests that Ellington may have considered free jazz, with its speech-like articulation, collective improvisation and call-and-response, to be returning to the approaches of early jazz and that ‘avant-garde’ was old hat (hence the chapter's title, ‘The antiquity of the avant-garde’). Rob Wallace makes a similar point about cross-genre connections in his chapter, in this case ‘the D.I.Y. attitude [and] the diverse forms of musical and social alliances’ (p. 122) that punk and free jazz share, including the cross-influences of Sun Ra on the MC5 and hardcore punk on John Zorn.

Of particular interest to this reviewer is the second part, entitled ‘Crisis in new music? Vanishing venues and the future of experimentalism’, which opens with a short but rather polemical piece about the closure of established downtown New York clubs and the forced relocation of the experimental music scene to Brooklyn, by guitarist Marc Ribot (based on an article he wrote for the All about Jazz website in 2007). This is followed by three direct responses to Ribot and an essay by Alan Stanbridge on the contemporary music scene in Toronto. As well as being connected in terms of their content, Ribot and his respondents (Tamar Barzel, John Brackett and Scott Thomson) were all on the same panel at Guelph in 2007, and Stanbridge also makes reference to Ribot's original 2007 article. These short chapters offer differing viewpoints on the way in which experimental music should be presented and paid for, and the roles of the market and government subsidy, and speak to a wider debate about small venues and niche music scenes. The problem here – which is an issue with the publishing process of such collections – is that the authors discuss a situation as it was in 2007, and while their contributions have been updated to an extent (to 2010 in Ribot's case) it would be useful to discover their views on the scenes in New York and Toronto closer to the book's publication date of 2013.

The difficulty with staying up to date is similarly reflected in parts of the final section (‘Get ready: jazz futures’) such as the chapter ‘Improvising digital culture’, which is a transcription of a discussion at the 2008 Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium between practitioners Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky) and Vijay Iyer. The concept of ‘community’ in a virtual context is frequently referenced, but in the file-sharing and digital streaming sense rather than the use of social media, which since 2008 has become just as, if not more, prevalent. While many of their points about remixing and mash-ups as forms of improvisation may remain relevant, the ways in which people use online media have developed rather rapidly.

There is another chapter consisting of an excerpted transcription of a Guelph panel discussion (this time from 2005) on Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; apart from this and the Miller and Iyer chapter the authors’ contributions to this collection are all well written and the volume thoughtfully structured by the editors. Having said this, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the roundtable transcriptions have been included (albeit with introductory sections) to bolster the content of that part of the book. Also, there is some repetition of factual information in the section based around Ribot's piece and although this largely occurs in the endnotes it does seem unnecessary and is a little annoying. The writing ranges from opinion pieces to what the editors describe as ‘Buddhist philosophy and poststructural theory – and humor – in Tracy McMullen's “People, don't get ready: improvisation, democracy, and hope”’ (p. 26), and Heble and Wallace have dealt with this diversity well. However, there is hardly any reference to jazz outside North America, and this would have been welcome if only by way of comparison.