Julius Eastman is regarded as a brilliant composer as well as a magnetic performer. He was a slender man of medium height and graceful mien. If he wasn't being swish, or doing heavy metal with engineer boots and chains, or in his do-rag, you might think he was just another bookish university intellectual in thick-rimmed glasses and a modified Afro. He changed costume and hairstyles periodically in his quest for identity, appearing toward the end of his life in all white toga-like garb, a tacit proclamation of spiritual endeavor.

As with his dress, Eastman's music moved between styles—from traditionally notated scores, to more open graphic renderings. He used improvisation throughout his composing life, sometimes working in minimalist (or what he called “organic music”) and jazz idioms. While a good deal of his work has been lost, the music that remains is increasingly performed and discussed in the United States and abroad, abetted by a growing audience for Unjust Malaise, the 2005 New World Records three-CD set of his music so ably produced by Mary Jane Leach and Paul Tai.

Julius Eastman should have lived a long life. His mother and his maternal grandmother died in their early nineties, his father, at ninety-seven. Instead, Julius was dead just months short of his fiftieth birthday, an architect of his fate, rather than its victim. What were the forces that shaped him? What happened between the years 1968, when Julius premiered his Piano Pieces I–IV in Buffalo, and 1980, when he presented his newest works Evil Nigger, Gay Guerrilla, and Crazy Nigger for performance at Northwestern University?