The swirling synthesizer intro to The Who's Baba O'Riley is a direct tribute to Terry Riley, the American composer born in Colfax, California in 1935 who helped found musical minimalism. This episode traces how a student of rigorous European composition at San Francisco State, the San Francisco Conservatory and UC Berkeley was simultaneously absorbing John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Bill Evans and paying rent by pounding barrelhouse piano in European bars. Out of that cross-pollination came a view of classical music as an open, improvisational framework rather than a rigid blueprint.

We break down the time-lag accumulator he built in Paris in 1963 with Chet Baker, stretching tape between two reel-to-reel machines so physical distance controlled the delay, and the 1964 landmark In C, with its 53 modules, pulsing piano, and open instrumentatio ...