"This is a long overdue book, and there is no-one else who could have written it. It is an astonishing achievement, and a highly readable and enjoyable one too." - International Times
"Any discussion of free improvisation, as an essential (anti?)-discipline of creative music, is an amusing balance between considering an unruly child and a sacred cow. History has come into a wild favor towards a genre that perpetually defies definition and prediction. David Toop, with a critical facility informed by over forty years of activity on and off the bandstand, sets his ruminations in the service of the music. Essaying on free improvisation in the mode of composition can result in didactic chin scratch. Thankfully Toop engages the readers interest with a sentient breath of prose charged by academic insight where poetic space becomes the page. It's only the beginning." -
Thurston Moore "David Toop has dived into the Maelstrom that is the genesis of improvised music and come up with a string of pearls. There is so much here that will be new to even those of us who thought we knew the subject. A remarkable piece of real scholarship that relies on painstaking research with a refreshing absence of jargon." -
Evan Parker "Into the Maelstrom gives an astonishing, vivid history of improvised music across the 20th century– before 1970, tracing its transnational criss-crossings, trans-arts contagions, the folds between Cream and AMM, 'musicking' and John Stevens' Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Nuova Consonanza and For a Few Dollars More. David Toop's panoramic account makes obvious how urgently we have needed this alternative history, attuned to musical sounds as they resonate with artistic, cultural and political currents. A landmark book, Into the Maelstrom re-centres those vast and auspicious margins deserted by previous music histories." - Georgina Born, Professor of Music and Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK