Black Music (AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series) - Softcover

Jones (Amiri Baraka), LeRoi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1933354933 ISBN 13: 9781933354934

Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd., 2010

Synopsis

"Jones has learned—and this has been very rare in jazz criticism—to write about music as an artist."—Nat Hentoff ks

Black Music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others. It is composed of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967. Also includes Amiri Baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities. His most recent book, Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books, 2007), was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He lives in Newark, New Jersey.

About this title

Review:

This scintillating collection by Amiri Imamu Baraka, published in 1968 under his birth name Leroi Jones, covers a wide range of jazz writings from 1959 to 1967. Baraka's engaging and prophetic portraits of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Bradford, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Roy Haynes, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane (whom he called "the heaviest spirit") beam with an electric and fluid language that mirrors those artists' speed-of-light improvisations. In "Jazz and the White Critic," which blasts white critics who judge jazz by European, rather than African American, standards, Jones wrote, "As Western people, the sociocultural thinking of 18th-century Europe comes to us as history and legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the 20th-century West. The sociocultural philosophy of the Negro in America ... is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it." His analysis of the burgeoning avant-garde scene in "Apple Cores #1-6," "New York Loft and Coffee Shop Jazz," and "The Jazz Avant-Garde" accurately depicts the artistic promise and peril of that period in the words of a literary genius who was there and helped create it. --Eugene Holley Jr.

From the Publisher:

[This collection of pieces] written in the 1960's provides a clear picture of where one segment of the modern Negro community stands musically--and socially. . . . It is a valuable statement by a frequently angry, sometimes eloquent and always important writer.

About this edition

• Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1933354933
• ISBN 13: 9781933354934
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240