My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 41

The Musical Legacy
of Amiri Baraka:

By

KOFI NATAMBU

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

— Nat Hentoff, Jazz & Pop magazine,
1966

“ … Negro music is essentially the
expression of an attitude, or a collection
of attitudes, about the world, and only
secondarily an attitude about the way
music is made…Usually the critic’s
commitment was first to his appreciation
of the music rather than to his
understanding of the attitude that
produced it. This difference meant that
the potential critic of Jazz had only to
appreciate the music, or what he thought
was the music, and that he did not
need to understand or even be concerned
with the attitudes which produced it…
The major flaw in this approach to Negro
music is that it strips the music too
ingenuously of its social and cultural intent.
It seeks to define Jazz as an art (or a folk
art) that has come out of no intelligent
body of socio-cultural philosophy…”

— Leroi Jones, “Jazz and the White
Critic,” Downbeat Magazine, 1963.
(later reprinted in his book of critical
essays and reviews Black Music
(William Morrow & Co. 1968))

“Jazz and the White Critic” was a challenge
to jazz writers of all backgrounds to
reckon with the lived experience of black
Americans and to consider how this
experience had been embedded in the
notes, tones, and rhythms of the music.” 

40

— John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and
Cool: Jazz and its Critics (University of
Chicago Press, 2006)

This essay is dedicated to the memory and eternal
presence of Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones (1934-2014) who
was not only a great artist, mentor, friend, colleague,
and comrade but also — like he was for so many
others around the world — a towering influence on
my art and life.

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The Modern Jazz Critic As Cultural Historian, Creative Artist,
Social Theorist, And Philosophical Visionary