This volume constitutes an early and signal contribution to the growing corpus of scholarship and commentary on the music of the composer and singer Julius Eastman. The individual essays confront the several challenges Eastman's life and work pose to canonical narratives of American experimental music. This book is the result of the combined tenacity of its two coeditors. First, there is Renee Levine Packer, a chronicler of late twentieth -century American experimental music who knew Eastman since his early days as a Creative Associate at the University at Buffalo. The other driving force behind this book is the composer Mary Jane Leach, a central figure in Downtown experimentalism, whose relentless musicological sleuthing has been crucial to unearthing new knowledge about Eastman's life and work.

Leach's experiences while researching Eastman included unusual dreams and inexplicably malfunctioning software that did not allow her to read e-mails associated with the project. “I began to wonder,” Leach recalls, “if Eastman's spirit was trying to sabotage the dissemination of his music.” In a lecture I attended at a Harlem theater in 2009, historian Robin D. G. Kelley recounted a similar story about his extraordinary book, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Strange things began to happen to Kelley as he pursued knowledge about Monk, culminating in a hit-and-run car accident that lefthim with severely reduced mobility for months. Kelley told a friend that he was wondering if Monk were somehow involved in what was happening to him. The friend responded, “Did you ask Thelonious's permission to write the book?” Kelley decided to create an atmosphere that would allow him to make that request, and somehow, the strange occurrences came to an end. The possibility that Eastman could be similarly contacted through spiritual methodologies seems less odd when we consider the extent to which, as this book shows, a kind of pan-religious spirituality and ethics often permeated encounters with Eastman and his work.

Most of the contributors to this book, including me, actually met Eastman at some point in his turbulent career.