Experimental Music and Academe

By PETER MONAGHAN

George E. Lewis believes that an opportunity for a fresh understanding of jazz-related experimentalism emerged in the 1990s, with a new kind of writing about music that took its lead from cultural and literary studies: That writing, says the Columbia University professor and author of a new history of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a celebrated avant-garde collective that began in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago in the 1960s, discussed music rigorously and did