Robert Ashley, a member of the electronic music movement of Ann Arbor in Michigan, was hired in 1969 by the Mills College to head the newly established Center for Contemporary Music. There he composed his "operas", which are really just combinations of spoken texts and sparse and subdued electronic sounds. Paul Demarinis improvised music on a synthesizer over Ashley's reading of a poem for "In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men and Women " (1972) whereas Ashley was both the speaker and the synth improviser for "Automatic Writing" (1979). His television opera "Perfect Lives" (1977-83) was developed in collaboration with keyboardist Blue Gene Tyranny (born Robert Sheff), another Ann Arbor defector who had been hired at Mills in 1971.

John Adams, a Bostonian who moved to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury in 1971, embraced Terry Riley's and Steve Reich's minimalism but hijacked it with "maximalist" orchestrations in pieces such as "Phrygian Gates" (1977), "Shaker Loops" (1978), "Harmonium" (1981), "Grand Pianola Music" (1982), "Harmonielehre" (1985), etc.

New York's baritone Thomas Buckner (a grandson of IBM's founder Thomas Watson), who moved to Berkeley in 1967, was an important promoter of the avantgarde via the 1750 Arch Concerts that he started in 1972 and the 1750 Arch label that he founded in 1974, a mission that he continued when he moved back to New York in 1982. For example, the compilation album "New Music For Electronic And Recorded Media" (1977) was entirely devoted to women composers of electronic music (such as Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Laurie Spiegel and Ruth Anderson).

William Ackerman, a Stanford student who was a fan of Berkeley's master of the steel guitar Robbie Basho, became the founding father of "New Age music" when he opened the record label Windham Hill (in 1975 in Palo Alto) to release his mystical solo-guitar improvisations, starting with "In Search Of The Turtle's Navel" (1976). Windham Hill's biggest discovery was a Florida pianist, George Winston, originally an organist, who had moved to Santa Cruz in 1971 and, inspired by jazz pianists, had switched to the piano. Seattle's master of the acoustic guitar, John Fahey, had already released his "Piano Solos" (1972) for his Takoma label, but it was the album "Autumn" (1980) for Windham Hill that became a sensation. His sentimental piano solos became the epitome of New Age music, as much as Ackerman's contemplative guitar solos. his genre of gentle, spiritual instrumental music became the soundtrack of the "New Age movement" that simply updated Esalen's "Human Potential movement" and the spiritual element of the hippie generation for the new "yuppies" (young urban professionals), thereby creating a subculture interested in Buddhist meditation, astrological investigation, extra-sensorial powers, crystal healing, holistic medicine, and so on.

At the same time, the jazz trumpeter Steven Halpern, who had moved from New York to the Bay Area in 1969 and had converted to Eastern spirituality, opened the Spectrum Research Institute and started releasing contemplative albums such as "Spectrum Suite" (1975) per solo electric piano.

At about the same time, Stephen Hill's program "Music From the Hearts of Space", which had been airing out of nearby Berkeley since 1973, began promoting a similar kind of music, although his favorite musicians employed electronic keyboards rather than acoustic instruments. Hill formed his own record label, Hearts of Space.

Georgia Kelly, raised in Big Sur during the hippie years but then based north of San Francisco, classically trained on both piano and harp, turned the harp into another quintessential New Age instrument, starting with "Seapeace" (1978) and peaking with "The Sound Of The Spirit" (1981)

Classical violinist Daniel Kobialka of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and composed chamber suites such as "Echoes Of Secret Silence" (1972) and "Labyrinth Within" (1979).

Jon Bernoff and Marcus Allen started the label Rising Sun in 1979 in Mill Valley (north of San Francisco), to release the music of their collective: Marcus Allen's own "Petals" (1981), with Teja Bell on guitar, Dallas Smith on Lyricon wind synthesizer (the first electronic wind instrument) and Jon Bernoff on vibraphone; Teja Bell's "Summer Suite" (1983), performed with Smith and Bernoff; Dallas Smith's "Stellar Voyage" (1984) for Lyricon and acoustic instruments; and Suzan Mazer's "The Fire In The Rose" (1985) for harp and synth.

The term "new age" was a reference to the spiritual mood that had taken hold of the hippie generation. As they grew up, the former hippies became more and more interested in Eastern practices for meditation and relaxation. These became an essential part of their lifestyles, and soon created a market for both literature and music. The New Age movement was a continuation or an extension of the hippie movement: the hippies discovered different ways than LSD to expand one's consciousness and achieve higher states of understanding. This music was sold not so much by record stores as by alternative bookshops like the East West Bookshop of Menlo Park.

Afro-futurism was born in April 1971 when jazz legend Sun Ra taught a class at UC Berkeley titled “The Black Man in the Cosmos.”

White pianist Art Lande, who had moved from New York to San Francisco in 1969 and started a jazz school in Berkeley in 1973, explored chamber jazz with his distinctive, calm and bucolic style, notably in the albums recorded in Scandinavia in 1976-77 by a quartet with Mark Isham on trumpet.

White pianist and psychiatrist Denny Zeitlin, who had relocated from Chicago in 1964 to teach psychology at UC San Francisco, and had experimented with the format of the piano trio with Charlie Haden on bass, pioneered a fusion of jazz, rock, classical and electronic music on "Expansion" (1973) and "Syzygy" (1977).

The other great jazz pianist of San Francisco was White pianist Jessica Williams who moved from Baltimore in 1977 and recorded many albums of solo piano improvisations such as the double-LP "Portraits" (1977).

The Rova Saxophone Quartet was formed in 1977 by four White musicians as the alternative, experimental alter-ego of the more famous World Saxophone Quartet. Their cerebral albums "Cinema Rovate" (1978), "The Removal of Secrecy" (1979), "Invisible Frames" (1981) and "As Was" (1981) straddled the border between free jazz and avantgarde chamber music, a kind of chaotic and cacophonous expressionist art. One of the founders, Jon Raskin, had worked with composer John Adams and directed a dance company.

Boston's bluegrass mandolinist David Grisman moved to San Francisco in 1970, recorded an album in 1973 with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead on banjo and bluegrass veteran Vassar Clements on fiddle, and "Muleskinner" (1974), featuring bluegrass guitarist Peter Rowan (who had played with Grisman in Boston) and Los Angeles-born bluegrass violinist Richard Greene. In 1975 he formed a quintet with Darol Anger to play an acoustic folk-jazz that was dubbed "jazzgrass", his most relevant legacy.