Abstract: Improvisation and Social Aesthetics features thirteen chapters on how “art objects and events” engage with “the larger socio-material assemblages within which they are created, circulated, and consumed” (2). Organized in four parts (“The Social and the Aesthetic,” “Genre and Definition,” “Sociality and Identity,” and “Performance”), it draws on a variety of artistic and community-based practices—including music, dance, theater, film, and visual art—with contributions from scholars, educators, and artists whose work explores the interreferentiality of these roles. Calling attention to how improvisational acts are “product[s] of specific aesthetic and social conditions” (11), editors Georgina Born, Eric Lewis, and Will Straw have curated a compelling set of interdisciplinary methodologies, case studies, and background literature, highlighting the relationships between improvisation, aesthetics, and social critique and advocating for “the creation of new modes and spaces of inter- and trans-disciplinary inquiry” (26) in performing arts history and criticism across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.Born's opening chapter critiques analyses that idealize the “microsocialities of improvised practice” without adequate attention to the communities that have created and maintained them. In Chapter 3, Monson likewise warns of applying Western conceptions of improvisation as cultural critique too generously in cross-cultural analyses, using her work with Malian balafonist Neba Solo as a counterexample. Brackett and Eric Lewis both explore genre politics around African American musics sometimes labeled “jazz.” In his analysis of 1940s swing music, Brackett argues for context-specific research into social aesthetics and “a renewed appreciation of [the] fluidity and contingency” of “the shifting allegiances between identifications and categories” (131). Echoing Monson's critique, Lewis explores the “multiple aesthetic vantage points” (141) from which to view the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). Lewis suggests that “Great Black Music . . . is an anti-genre genre designation” that signifies on the normative genre politics that would essentialize the music of AACM members “as if merely mentioning blackness is to take a political radical stance” (156). In addition to referencing Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s work, Lewis's characterization of Great Black Music as “a doubly-voiced text” (157) recalls Graham Lock's analyses of saxophonist Anthony Braxton's work as “a heterogenous creative spirit that cannot be confined within a ‘homogenous order given over to uniform rule’” (1999:158; citing Mackey 1993:244).The theme of “cohesion amid difference”—a wholeness characterized and incorporative of heterogeneity—figures prominently throughout the Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice Series, including several chapters in this volume. Nicholls emphasizes the “need to improvise a diverse and multicultural world” (229), and chapters by Froger, Kozel, and Svendsen explore community making through the social aesthetics of otherness in film, dance, and theatre (respectively). Kozel offers insight into “the variations of touch across distance” and the “phenomenological experience of contact” (269), suggesting that the ontological suturing of “sensory data and physical motion within one dancing body” can foster a heightened sense of community informed by “heterogeneous experiences in dance improvisation” (282). Ambiguity and “slippage” can constitute the “very fabric of the aesthetic experience” (271), inviting new ways of engaging with otherness while “shattering the immediate authority of the sensible, existing modes of being” (283).Following this call for new modes of trans-disciplinary inquiry, how might one interpret the volume improvisationally? What contingent and unexpected understandings emerge from this articulated collection of heterogeneous perspectives? Consider reading Barg's chapter on Billy Strayhorn and Siemerling's on Wayde Compton through Omi Jones's recent work on “theatrical jazz,” which devotes comparable attention to how aesthetics are embedded within social contexts as well as the interrelationships between improvisation and community building (2015:23ff). Interrogating “instances of queer affiliation, affect, and identifications” tied to Strayhorn's work, Barg suggests that “the arranger” occupies a queer space within a big band orchestra and that Strayhorn's queer positionality facilitated his social life as a Black gay man. It follows that Strayhorn's “sonic empathy . . . was profoundly shaped by and through his dissident sexual identity” (208). Siemerling views Compton's practices as “examples of a secondary orality as remix of history” (264). Compton's invocations of Legba as “master of the crossroads,” along with his borrowing of Brathwaite's “tidalectics,” are strategies for reshaping “possibilities of memory that include [B]lack diasporic experience and the remixing of history and storytelling with . . . performative power” (265).These ideas about queerness, time, identity, and African diasporic practice coalesce in Jones's (2015) book, which glosses their intersections through the improvisational, sometimes dissonant, kinships of the ẹgbẹ. Like Compton, Jones invokes Legba's mastery of interstitial space/time, echoing Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s, Graham Lock's, and Nathaniel Mackey's characterizations of the deity's power for “refractive obliquity” (Mackey 1993:254). It is through Legba, along with Jones's work, that kinship between Strayhorn and Compton emerges: “Queer, like jazz, crosses borders, borrows, samples so that the recognizable is seen anew.” In this “multitemporaneous” world, Jones asserts, “beings dance in the intersection with the energy of all the directions coming to bear on that spot” (2015:12).While George Lewis imagines a future in which we “embrace an understanding of improvisation as a fundamental aspect of the human condition,” Kozel reminds us that this condition is “innately intercorporeal” (284). Following the models set forth in Improvisation and Social Aesthetics, we learn that “attention to the ways our art shapes us and the ways we shape our art requires us to consider closely who we are—the differences that distinguish us . . . and the common practices that can bring us together. It requires us to cross borders, to share ideas and strategies for change, and to build a world that has input from, and space for, us all” (229).