Universal Tonality | Live Virtual Book Launch | Recording

Senior Executive Editor Ken Wissoker hosts this panel and Q&A to celebrate the publication of Universal Tonality, a new biography of jazz musician William Parker. Author Cisco Bradley, William Parker, and Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks, participate in this panel and Q&A on Parker's life and music.

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Born 1952 in the Bronx, New York, William Parker is a musician, composer, writer and educator.
He has recorded over 40 albums featuring his own music and concepts, from solo bass to ensembles large and small to symphony orchestra. All of this music incorporates his concept of Universal Tonality. In January 2021 the 10CD box set of all new work entitled, Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World, was published by Centering Music.

Cisco Bradley is associate professor of history at the Pratt Institute where he has taught since 2011. He is a scholar of experimental music and sound employing historical and ethnographic methods. He founded jazzrightnow.com in 2013 and the Free Jazz Oral History Project in 2016, which together have collected and preserved over 220 interviews with artists from New York and around the globe. Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker is his second book. Bradley is also working on two other future book projects, one on the history of the emergence of the experimental music scene in Brooklyn since the 1990s and the other on the historical geography and social history of free jazz in seven site-specific locations across the United States.

About Universal Tonality
Since ascending onto the world stage in the 1990s as one of the premier bassists and composers of his generation, William Parker has perpetually toured around the world and released over forty albums as a leader. He is one of the most influential jazz artists alive today. In Universal Tonality historian and critic Cisco Bradley tells the story of Parker’s life and music. Drawing on interviews with Parker and his collaborators, Bradley traces Parker’s ancestral roots in West Africa via the Carolinas to his childhood in the South Bronx, and illustrates his rise from the 1970s jazz lofts and extended work with pianist Cecil Taylor to the present day. He outlines how Parker’s early influences—Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and writers of the Black Arts Movement—grounded Parker’s aesthetic and musical practice in a commitment to community and the struggle for justice and freedom. Throughout, Bradley foregrounds Parker’s understanding of music, the role of the artist, and the relationship between art, politics, and social transformation. Intimate and capacious, Universal Tonality is the definitive work on Parker’s life and music.