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Black Music (Akashi Classics: Renegade Reprint Series) Kindle Edition

by LeRoi Jones (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.8 69 ratings

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The essential collection of jazz writing by the celebrated poet and author of Blues People—reissued with a new introduction by the author.

In the 1960s, LeRoi Jones—who would later be known as Amiri Baraka—was a pioneering jazz critic, articulating in real time the incredible transformations of the form taking place in the clubs and coffee houses of New York City. In Black Music, he sheds light on the brilliant young jazz musicians of the day: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others.

Combining firsthand immediacy with wide-ranging erudition, Black Music articulates the complexities of modern jazz while also sharing insights on the nature of jazz criticism, the creative process, and the development of a new way forward for black artists. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967.

“In Black Music, Baraka wrote with ecstasy—highly informed and intricate—about ecstatically complex music.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

Review

"In his prose as in his poetry, Baraka is at his best a lyrical prophet of despair who transfigures his contentious racial and political views into a transcendent, ‘outtelligent’ clarity."
― New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice), on Tales of the Out & the Gone

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

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B008SBH9VG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Akashic Books; Reissue edition (January 1, 2010)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 1, 2010
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2444 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 220 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #815,384 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #195 in Jazz Music (Kindle Store)
- #635 in Music History & Criticism (Kindle Store)
- #1,048 in Popular Culture

Customer Reviews:
4.8 69 ratings

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LeRoi Jones
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Imamu Amiri Baraka
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AMIRI BARAKA/LEROI JONES (1934–2014) was the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He was named poet laureate of New Jersey by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, from 2002–2004. His short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone (Akashic Books) was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and won a 2008 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He is also the author of Home: Social Essays, Black Music, The System of Dante’s Hell, and Tales, among other works.
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Dr. Kwame J. Lawson

"Dancing About Architecture"

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2024

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An important survey of some of the most important early-to-mid-60s avant-garde black American jazz musicians and the milieu that brought them into being. This is a curious read because the author is a militant poet of the period, not a musician, and so his language is more often than not informed by politics rather than deep musical experience. I have rarely read a book about music that utilizes so little musical language. It occasionally brings to mind the quote often attributed to Frank Zappa about music journalism ("Talking about music is like dancing about architecture."), yet I found the book remarkably compelling, an entertaining read and the piece is a goldmine for its sources alone, including some great references to articles of the period and a brilliant introductory discography to the world of so-called 'free' jazz and its many avant tributaries.

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Tecolote

Still informative reading

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2023

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This was one of my textbooks in college (musicology: jazz). Years later (a lot of years later!) it’s still one of my go-to references on the subject.

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2018

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Amazing... a fly on the wall reporting as history is being made in the jazz clubs of NYC in the late 50s to mid 60s... highly recommend

Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2016

My father loved it!

OK but why all the hype?

Reviewed in the United States on May 9, 2000

After hearing Leroi Jones on Sunny Murray and the NYAQ's records, and reading little excerpts of some of his reviews in books on free jazz, I thought I'd pick this up and check it out. I did; it was OK; but not much more than OK. I felt like most of the information available here is readily found elsewhere, and that any new perspective he brings to the issues (meaning basically a black nationalist/radical one) is easily enough visible in other places--better to read Fanon or Malcolm X than to let that music play in the background in a jazz book like this one. If that's your taste you might be better off with John Szwed's book on Sun Ra. This book is OK though, and if you haven't already read a number of jazz books you might find it fresh and interesting--I simply didn't. Well written though.

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