My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Seite 43

42

In that light it is important to consider
that, as the great poet Langston
Hughes and many other critics and
commentators pointed out when the
book made its initial appearance, Blues
People was in many ways the intellectual
and critical culmination of a contentious
historical debate raging within Black
America. This debate, playing out in
larger society as well was over the cultural
and thus political and ideological
value and meaning(s) of the African
American experience and the role of its
various artistic f orms. In Baraka’s
analysis, the music serves as both a
crucial narrative record of what black
people have experienced (literally and
on vinyl). Artists’ creative work publicly
represent an ongoing emotional and
psychological register of the impact and
effects that this experience has had
on their spiritual, existential, and
philosophical conception of themselves.
As he puts it in his original introduction
to the book in 1963: 
In other words I am saying
that if the Negro in America,
in all its permutations, is
subjected to a socioanthropological as well as
musical scrutiny, something
about the essential nature
of the Negro’s existence in
this country ought to be
revealed, as well as something
about the essential nature of
this country, i.e. society as a
whole…And the point I want
to make most evident here
is that I cite the beginning
of blues as one beginning
of American Negroes. Or,
let me say, the reaction and
subsequent relation of the
Negro’s experience in this
country in his English is one
beginning of the Negro’s
conscious appearance on
the American scene…When
America became important
enough to the African to be
passed on, in those formal
renditions, to the young,
those renditions were in
some kind of Afro-American
language…

Baraka was also deeply concerned with
how and why these specific musical
traditions, techniques, and innovations
took the various forms and stylistic
identities that they did from the
dialectical standpoint of their creators’
dynamic, and critically informed
engagement with their aesthetic material.
One of Baraka’s major strengths as a
critic is that his emphasis is always on
the process of the creative act in the
course of expressing ideas and emotions
via the integral elements of music
making. This is a major — even central
aspect of Baraka’s writing as a music
critic that he strongly maintained and
greatly enhanced in all future critiques
and celebrations of Jazz, Blues,
and Rhythm and Blues following the
publication of Blues People.
In Black Music (William Morrow, 1968),
his second book devoted to the
extraordinary social history and cultural
identity of this musical art, Baraka
lays out what amounts to a very erudite
and casually elegant book-length
manifesto on the most advanced,
radical, and innovative developments
in modern Jazz during the culturally
and politically tumultuous 1960s.
A trenchant and mesmerizing collection
of many of the finest theoretical essays,
feature articles, and music reviews that
he had written for various national
magazines and journals from 1959-1967,
Baraka not only critically interprets the
revolutionary music of this fascinating
historical period but discusses its myriad
meanings and values from the direct
viewpoint of the individual musicians
themselves. What results is a series of
riveting, complex, and always critically
challenging portraits of these musicians
as dedicated cultural workers and the

often visionary perspectives that these
artists embodied and conveyed to their
audiences. Baraka especially draws the
readers’ attention to the largely black
working class and sometimes even
more economically challenging (i.e.
poor) social and cultural milieu that
so many of these musicians and their
peers and colleagues lived, created, and
performed in. In doing so he reminds
us that many of the most profound,
lasting, and useful modern art \expressions in the United States (and elsewhere) are not merely or exclusively the
products of the academic “Ivory Tower”
and foundation grant institutions
nor are they dependent on the often
fickle largesse of wealthy patrons.
In fact as Baraka amply demonstrates
in his analysis the evidence everywhere
of the deep desire and demand for
aesthetic, economic, and political self
determination among this intrepid
generation of musicians, composers,
and improvisers is one of the major
principles animating their work and
overall vision. One of many brilliant
examples of this analytical focus can
be found in Baraka’s intricate, detailed,
and powerful dissection of the general
aesthetics and cultural values of such
legendary and even iconic musicians,
composers, and improvisors of the
post 1945 modern music era as John
Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Thelonious
Monk, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins,
Don Cherry, Ornette Coleman, Wayne
Shorter, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Archie
Shepp, Marion Brown, Milford Graves,
Don Pullen, Bobby Bradford, and
Roy Haynes, among many others who
emerged as a self consciously radical,
innovative, visionary. and transformative
force in the music since the late 1950s.