existential, political and musical. One might say that there was/is a creative tension in the given and the remembered. African-Americans had to take from the American environment what was needed for living, and to blend it with what was remembered [and re-remembered] of the old (463).Linking life (movement) and music, Small argues that the beauty of music is in the performance, the act, not the score (71). African-American culture must be prepared to reinvent itself without being tied to a static structure or a musical score (240). Through the work of Albert Murray, Small argues that African-American culture works with different metaphysical conceptions of change, time, continuity, and permanence (243).This has implications for issues of the oral tradition in African societies. The idea of not relying on the (static) written word is a deliberate epistemological and aesthetic choice. Drawing from the work of Dennis Duerden, Small maintains, To them [Africans and African-Americans] it is the creative process that is alive, while created objects are a dangerous legacy which for later generations can stand in the way of self-realization (66). This raises the issue of improvisation.Small notes that John Coltrane once said that when Thelonious Monk taught him his tunes that Monk would rather a guy would learn without reading because you feel it better and quicker that way (231). Protean. Always something new. Paralogical spaces. Creating on the spot. This is the way in which the work of creation is kept on the move (231). Although African-American improvisational musicking involves freedom, spontaneity, and instantaneity, this does not mean that improvisation is total uncontrolled invention (290). There are always background assumptions--though always subject to change--at play (290-91). We should keep in mind that both Coltrane and Thelonious Monk were, of course, perfectly capable of reading and writing music when it was of use to them (233). As Small notes, however, notation-independent musicking gives the performer the power not only of interpretation ... but also original creation within the framework of the idiom and of the given material (234). Small also notes that in a solo concerto from the time of Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven that it was custom of those masters ... to leave a space where the soloist was expected to show his or her own inventiveness ... by improvising an extended passage, known as a cadenza (282). But Small quickly adds that today no [classical] soloist ventures to do such a thing (282). With regard to contemporary classical music, Performers are imbued from childhood with the notion that their task is to realize a written musical text ... as faithfully as is in their power (281). Indeed, for Small, there is also the recognition, unlike in a Jazz performance, that the musical score was created by a higher order of musicality than their own (281).If musicking is a celebration of human relationships (128), what does this say about classical music with its stress on lack of bodily movement, the separation of musicking from everyday life, centralized power structure (the conductor), and so on? Small maintains that it says something about how