My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 42

Despite its ill-informed detractors Blues
People also firmly established Baraka
as a major intellectual and literary force
to be reckoned with because he was
not afraid of expressing a strong and
independently assertive viewpoint
alongside a persistently sharp critical
analysis of what the music has meant
to black Americans from the standpoint
of not only individual citizens or artists
but also of the mass culture generally.
He insisted on an interpretive pov that
saw class relations as well as “race” in
terms that established a clear hierarchy
and division of attitudes and values
that informed one’s deep affinity for
or relative indifference to the various
forms and expressions of the Blues
as creative/stylistic form and artistic
identity as well as a distinct and thus
substantive and independent sensibility
in the larger society as a whole.
Consequently Baraka declared that the
purveyors of the Blues sensibility and
its primary cultural progenitors were
not only the artists and the intellectual
connoisseurs of the form (i.e. critics,
academicians, and scholars) but the
so-called ‘ordinary citizens’ who loved
and represented and embodied the art
themselves (the actual “Blues People”
of the book’s title). Therein, Baraka
insisted, lay the music’s true power and
ultimate potential as both a creative
and social/philosophical force.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

An essential aspect of Baraka’s critical
writing on Jazz however is also rooted
in a deep consciousness and visceral
understanding and love of the rural and
urban blues/rhythm and blues traditions
not only in formal and aesthetic terms
but as a complex and historically
cumulative social and cultural statement
about the ongoing meaning(s) of the
content of these musics in both their
structural and lyrical dimensions. Thus
an appreciation and respect for the
ideological complexities and contexts
of African American culture as an
important economic, social, and
political reality as well as an essentially
protean artistic force is integral to fully
engaging and grasping what Baraka
is primarily focused on and concerned
with in his writing about the music. 

Thus it is not surprising that Baraka’s
first book about the music, originally
entitled Blues People: Negro Music in
White America became a seminal, widely
acclaimed, and subsequently never out
of print historical text. Published by
the then 28-year-old writer in 1963, the
book was also importantly subtitled in
at least a few of its other many editions
as The Negro Experience in White
America and the Music That Developed
From It. Disdained and even dismissed
in some quarters by some haughty and
self-important highbrow critics, both
white and black, as being too steeped in
what they perceived as a fundamentally
reductive sociological emphasis in
Baraka’s analysis of the Blues as art and
history (a highly inaccurate and
quite dubious line of argument echoed
in a particularly patronizing and
intellectually self-serving manner by
the celebrated African American novelist
and cultural critic Ralph Ellison) Blues
People clearly marked a major new turning
point in not only the history of Jazz
and Blues criticism in the United States
but in its perception and intellectual
appreciation and understanding by
music critics generally. Not surprisingly
this new consciousness was also
beginning to be reflected to some degree
in its public reception by audiences.

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In the name of sheer historical accuracy
and perhaps even ultimately a
triumphant kind of poetic justice the
following emphatic statement bears
repeating as often as possible: For fifty
years from 1963-2013 Amiri Baraka
(also known as Leroi Jones) wrote and
published the most profound, influential,
and strikingly original body of musical
criticism in the United States, as well
as some of the most significant — and
enduring — cultural and social criticism
generally that this country has produced
since 1945. This is especially true of his
stunning and groundbreaking work in
the musical genre of ‘Modern Jazz’ and
his extensive, dynamic, and typically
incisive examination of the music’s
rapid evolution since 1900 in both its
visionary “avant garde” modes as well
as its more traditional vernacular styles
and expressions.