Black Music

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 221 pages
• Published by: William Morrow & Co June 1980
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0688243444
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0688243449
• Book Dimensions: 8 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Weighs: 8 ounces

Product 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com Author Profile
Read about the author. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Black Music (Paperback) 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. Comment | Permalink | (Report this)