Trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith describes what he makes as creative music, an expansive description of the process, rather than jazz, a limiting and genre-specific term; the at-times chamber feel of his music alongside the broad range of tonal coloration in his compositions, and the instrumental complexity of his ensembles, clearly evidence why. Ankhrasmation is Smith’s solution for merging improvisation and composing. The word is a combination of “Ankh,” the Egyptian symbol for life, “Ras,” the Ethiopian word for leader, and “Ma,” a term for mother.

Mike Kelley took the 19th-century German notion of Gesamtkuntswerk and made it flourish in the Rust Belt soil of late 20th-century America. His phantasmagorical performances and multifarious installations were subversive, scholarly, and ingenious, deploying a set of compositional strategies that can be understood as an epic iteration of Kelley's reliance on multiple authorial voices.