Black Music

LeRoi Jones

• Publisher: Akashic Books
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9781933354934
• eBook ISBN:
  9781936070725
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Collections

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

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Jazz and the White Critic
• Minton’s
• The Dark Lady of the Sonnets
• Recent Monk
• Three Ways to Play the Saxophone
• A Day With Roy Haynes
• Sonny Rollins (Our Man in Jazz)
• A Jazz Great: John Coltrane
• Coltrane Live at Birdland
• The Jazz Avant-Garde
• Introducing Wayne Shorter
• Introducing Dennis Charles
• New York Loft and Coffee Shop Jazz
• Introducing Bobby Bradford
• Present Perfect (Cecil Taylor)
• Cecil Taylor (The World of Cecil Taylor)
• Apple Cores #1
• Apple Cores #2
• Apple Cores #3
• Apple Cores #4
• Apple Cores #5—The Burton Greene Affair
• Apple Cores #6
• New Tenor Archie Shepp Talking
• Four for Trane (Archie Shepp)
• Don Cherry
• New Black Music: A Concert in Benefit of The Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School Live
• Sonny’s Time Now
• The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)
• A Brief Discography of New Music
• Interview with Amiri Baraka by Calvin Reid (2009)