The Fierce Urgency of Now

"The Fierce Urgency of Now is a groundbreaking and, in many instances, breathtaking book. Its focus on the ways that musicians from many backgrounds and genres think about and enact improvisation as linked to issues of human rights, community, and freedom is innovative, and the argument that human rights are expanded and valuably reconceptualized by improvisational practices is even more inventive and generative. This book should be read by scholars and students working on social justice and the political, social, and visionary importance of expressive cultures all over the world." - Tricia Rose, Professor, Brown University, and author of The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop—and Why It Matters

“This is a book which deserves to be widely read.” - Lou Glandfield, TLS

“A rather important book that seeks for the first time—or the first time with quite this level of intellectual rigor—to make clear the defining connections between improvisation and rights, and to suggest that improvisation’s basic heuristic, which is the capacity to discern potentials in any given situation, has a powerful social function.” - Brian Morton, The Wire

“The Fierce Urgency of Now is both a testament to the veracity of the rapidly growing field of improvisation studies, but also an impassioned, far-reaching, interdisciplinary investigation into ways that musical improvisation can activate new perspectives on rights discourses.”  - Jason Robinson, Journal of Popular Music Studies

"[This] collaborative effort offers not just a rigorous articulation of improvised music’s ethical potential but also a manifesto about how that potential’s realization should take place."  - Michael Borshuk, English Studies in Canada

"Much here is provocative and thought-provoking as the apparent disconnect between politics and artistic real-time sonic exploration is disturbed."

  - Alister Spence, Media International Australia

"The Fierce Urgency of Now clearly stands out as a powerful and profoundly inspiring manifesto of great potential interest to ethnomusicologists seeking to engage issues of social justice through their scholarly practice." - A. Scott Currie, Ethnomusicology