** Contains sixteen-page plate section featuring original photography from Val Wilmer's archives ** First published in 1977 and now regarded as a classic, As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977 is Val Wilmer’s groundbreaking account of a musical movement that redefined both jazz and the possibilities of Black art. Drawing on years of close contact, interviews and photography, Wilmer documents how musicians such as Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Sun Ra and many others forged new languages of sound in parallel with the civil rights, Black Power and anti‑colonial struggles of their time.

Rather than treating free jazz as an abstract avant‑garde, Wilmer embeds it in the social and economic realities that shaped it: touring conditions, club politics, racism within the music industry, and the precarious lives of artists committed to experimentation in a hostile environment. She shows how innovations in form – collective improvisation, extended techniques, new ensemble structures – were inseparable from a broader insistence on autonomy and self‑definition. Musicians’ own voices are foregrounded, revealing their humour, idealism, frustrations and strategic disagreements, and making clear that “seriousness” here refers as much to survival and dignity as to artistic intent.

Still urgent decades after its first appearance, As Serious As Your Life reads today as both history and ongoing argument. It captures a moment when Black musicians claimed the vanguard of American culture on their own terms, and it traces how their radical rethinking of sound continues to ripple through improvised music, rock, hip‑hop and experimental scenes around the world. This new edition reaffirms Wilmer’s work as essential reading for anyone who wants to understand not just what free jazz sounded like, but why it mattered – and why it still does.