Prior to
Avant Slant,
John Benson Brooks had spent many years working as a pianist and arranger. His only two previous albums were
Folk Jazz USA (1956), part of a personal project to adapt
folk music idioms into
modern jazz, and
Alabama Concerto (1958), the hybrid of jazz, folk and
contemporary composition that became his most critically acclaimed work. The resulting performance, named
The Twelves, was the culmination of Brooks' experiments in improvising jazz in the
twelve-tone serial and
chance idioms. In 1966, Brooks conceived the idea of creating "
meta-music", or music as "a play of competing
-isms," which, according to Ford, led the composer "to the idea of embodying those -isms in audio clips and making an album out of them". This resulted in
Avant Slant, based in Brooks' improvised twelve-tone jazz system and the "
pop-art musique concrète" of his "DJology". The record was a collaboration between Brooks and producer
Milt Gabler, who worked as an A&R executive at
Decca Records. Brooks gave Gabler tapes of both
The Twelves and
D.J.-ology. Gabler then created much of the album; he added some of his own recordings and, according to
Ralph J. Gleason, "let them sit for months while he played with them" before finally arriving at the finished album. Ford credits Gabler for finding the majority of the records's
samples, sequencing most of its parts, writing lyrics for five of its six original songs and conceiving the "quick lines and snatches of dialogue read by actors" that also appear. An early problem was managing the costs of
licensing all the intended audio excerpts, which was sometimes averted by Gabler re-recording clips he was unwilling to pay for. ==Composition==