This show features “Big Bands” of improvisers from across the boundaries of genre, time, and place; including the Taj Mahal Travelers, the Promenade Theatre Orchestra, Horace Tapscott and the Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Sun Ra, AMM, and more.

Leaving aside tracing influence in composed music, which is its own can of worms, this episode is a meditation on influence in improvised music, with Cecil Taylor, John Oswald, Anthony Braxton, Naked City, Sun Ra, John Fahey, Bill Frisell,more.

A sampling of the influential cross-cultural current of avant-garde music in Japan in the early 70s, when it erupted, with tracks by Toshi Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi, Masayuki "Jojo" Takayanagi, Keiji Haino, Kaoru Abe, Yamataka Eye, and may others.

This episode looks at the collision/fusion/embrace between American Jazz and the established musical traditions of India and Africa. We’ll hear from Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Kadri Gopalnath, Shankar Jaikishan, Archie Shepp and more!

This episode focuses on American jazz in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when established musicians branched out and new voices expanded the jazz spectrum, from Pharoah Sanders to Ornette Coleman to John Cale & Terry Riley and more.