Black Music

by Amiri Baraka

Overview

The long-awaited reissue of the sequel to Amiri Baraka’s seminal work, Blues People, and latest selection in the AkashiClassics Renegade Reprint Series. This collection of essays by Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones includes a new introduction by the author and Q&A by Calvin Reid.

“Baraka writes with the passion and lyricism that can only come from a jazz critic who is uncompromisingly invested in the social and aesthetic dimensions of the music.” —WBGO (Newark Public Radio)

In 2007, Akashic Books ushered Amiri Baraka back into the forefront of America’s literary consciousness with the short story collection Tales of the Out & the Gone. Now, this reissue of Black Music—long out of print—features a highly provocative and profoundly insightful collection of essays on jazz criticism, the creative process, and the development of a new way forward for black artists.

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. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, musical analyses, and personal impressions from 1959–1967.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933354934
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	01/01/2010
Series:	AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

"[Jones writes] with an excitement and empathy and terrific knack for the true colloquial phrase, the right feeling." —Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

...[S]till has an immediacy from the fact that its author was listening to the "new music" in clubs and talking to the musicians.
— JazzTimes

Stanley Dance

"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."

on Tales of the Out & the Gone New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

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

Nat Hentoff