My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 44

— The Music: Reflections on Jazz and
Blues (William Morrow, 1987)

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

“We take for granted the
social and cultural milieu and
philosophy that produced
Mozart. As Western people
the socio-cultural thinking of
eighteenth-century Europe
comes to us as a historical
legacy that is a continuous
and organic part of the
twentieth-century West.
The socio-cultural philosophy
of the Negro in America
(as a continuous historical
phenomenon) is no less
specific and no less important
for any critical speculation
about the music that came
out of it…this is not a plea
for narrow sociological analysis
of Jazz, but rather that this
music cannot be completely
understood (in critical terms)
without some attention to the
attitudes which produced it. It
is the philosophy of Negro music
that is most important, and
this philosophy is only partially
the result of the sociological
disposition of Negroes in
America. There is, of course,
much more to it than that.”
(Italics mine)

The long awaited arrival of Amiri’s
third full volume of music criticism in
1987 published some twenty years
after Black Music and twenty-five years
after Blues People was not only well
worth the wait but added still more
brilliant wrinkles to his long-term
critique of the music, its artists, and
the larger social, economic, and
political contexts in which it exis ted
and persisted. Both a dynamic
synthesis and extension of previous
writing about its historical identity as
well as a celebratory examination of its
contemporary expressions, The Music
is divided between a series of poems
that center on Jazz and the blues by
both Amiri and his wife, Amina Baraka,
which takes up a third of the text, an
extraordinary political play entitled
The Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear
Musical by Amiri that uses both
“avant-garde” as well as more traditional
Jazz and blues elements, techniques,
and styles in an updated and innovative
operatic context. Most of the actors
in the production are the musicians
themselves who both play and sing
their parts. Such important and highly
accomplished ‘avant’ Jazz musicians
of the post-1970 era as the tenor
saxophonist David Murray, drummer
and percussionist Steve McCall,
violinist Leroy Jenkins, and the pianist/
organist Amina Claudine Myers acted
and played in this production.

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Dedicated to “John Coltrane, the
heaviest spirit” Baraka’s Black Music
posed a tremendous intellectual and
artistic challenge to a entire generation
of artists, critics, and cultural/political
activists (and I might add is still doing
so some two generations and 45 years
later!) to begin to seriously address and
attempt to resolve many of the major
structural and institutional problems
and crises facing not only our creative
artists in the realms of music, literature,
dance, filmmaking, visual and media
art, etc. but our larger communities as
well. Toward that end, the book provides
an important ongoing sub-textual
narrative about the insidious political
economy of the music business. He
shows the direct and indirect effects
on the musicianswho not only have to
withstand and tragically negotiate the
oppressive and exploitive impositions
of white supremacy/racism in all its
guises but the even more comprehensive
venality of corporate capitalism in the
studios, clubs, theatres and general
commercial venues where the music
was being recorded and/or performed
for various live audiences during an era
when Jazz especially, despite its growing
richness and vitality in a creative sense,
was suffering economically as a result
of its clearly limited reception and
appreciation in larger society. This
unfortunately also included the growing
commercial interest in and support for
pop, rhythm and blues, and rock musics
(resulting in the increasing exclusion
and marginalization of Jazz and blues)
in the national black community. 

Finally, the flagship essay of Black
music that opens the volume contains
one of the most prescient, eloquent,
historically significant, and intellectually
honest essays ever written about the
“Modern Jazz” dimension of African
American music. Entitled “Jazz and the
White Critic,” the piece had originally
appeared in Downbeat the largest
national ‘mainstream’ Jazz magazine in
the country in August, 1963 just before
the appearance of his first book on the
music Blues People later that year. What
remains essential about this prophetic
essay is its analytical insistence that the
philosophical and cultural aspects of
African American music, like that of all
major aesthetic traditions throughout
the world is key to acquiring a genuine
knowledge, understanding and
appreciation of the art. As he states in
his concluding paragraph: