My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 45

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The last third of the book features 26
virtuosic and typically incisive essays,
reviews, liner notes, and feature articles
by Baraka written for and published
by various national magazines, journals,
and newspapers in the 1975-1987 period
as well as some new and important
critical essays written specifically for the
book. Covering everyone and everything
from Miles Davis (in a masterful 1985
article for the New York Times) to
the history of Jazz and other African
American musics in Greenwich Village
in nyc to a series of briliant reviews
and recordings about and by such
major musicians as Dizzy Gillespie,
Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Charlie
Parker, Woody Shaw, Cecil McBee, Gil
Scott-Heron, Chico Freeman, Ricky
Ford, and Craig Harris. There are also a
scintillating collection of extremely
informative, lyrically written, and
politically astute theoretical and critical
essays like “Where’s the Music Going
and Why?”, “Jazz Writing: Survival
in the Eighties,” “The Phenomenon
of Soul in African American Music,”
“Masters in Collaboration,” “Blues,
Poetry, and the New Music,” “AfroPop,”
“The Class Struggle in Music” and “The
Great Music Robbery.” There is simply
not enough space in this piece to do
justice to the crackling intellectual
firepower and truly impressive depth
and scope of Baraka’s writing here;
suffice it to say that he (re)proves all
over and once again exactly why he
is the preeminent American music
critic of the past half century by a very
wide margin with virtually no real
contenders in sight. Long out of print
(and criminally never republished in
paperback!) one must track down this
1987 hardcover classic and read what
it says about a massive range of issues
and concerns with respect to the music
in not only aesthetic and ideological
terms but from the equally profound
standpoints of literature (and rhetoric),
social theory, cultural history, and
political analysis and journalism.
One will not come away disappointed.
If only the academic departments of
‘American Studies’ and ‘African American
Studies’ (and all other so-called “ethnic,”
“humanities,” and “cultural studies”
programs generally) had professors,

public intellectuals, and social activists
of Baraka’s caliber and clarity running
them instead of the often pretentious,
biased, and myopic fetishists of
“language and culture” who too often
ride herd in these fields in u.s. colleges
and universities today. We would all be
much better informed about the actual
strength, beauty, and complex reality
of the multi racial and multinational
society that we all in fact inhabit. As
Baraka makes clear in the essay “Blues,
Poetry, and the New Music” from what
is finally a great book:
Each generation adds to
and is a witness to extended
human experience, If it is
honest it must say something
new. But in a society that
glorifies formalism, i.e.
form over content, because
content rooted in realistic
understanding of that society
must minimally be critical
of it — the legitimately
truthfully new is despised.
Surfaces are shuffled , dresses
are lengthened or shortened,
hair is green or blond, but real
change is opposed. The law
keeps the order and the order
is exploitive and oppressive!
The new music reinforces
the most valuable memories
of a people but at the same
time creates new forms, new
modes of expression, to more
precisely reflect contemporary
experience!
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of
American Classical Music (University of
California Press, 2009)

After an astonishing forty five years of
endlessly writing, teaching, and lecturing
about African American music all over
the world it was an absolutely thrilling
and inspiring surprise to find yet
another extraordinary volume of music
criticism by Amiri in the 21st century.
Digging: The Afro-American Soul of
American Classical Music (University of
California Press, 2009) is an epic 411
page text of 84 essays, reviews, liner
notes, articles, and precise literary
portraits of and about musicians and
their art over a fifty year period. Taking
on a huge canvas of critical themes and
musical personalities, Baraka can only
be described as a penultimate triumph
of the art and craft of music criticism
at its highest possible level. In a
stunning display and critical synthesis
that includes an encyclopedic
knowledge of the music, a razor sharp
attention to the historical nuances of
the music and how it has stylistically
evolved and mutated over the years,
and finally a thoroughly independent
theoretical and critical perspective on
the music in aesthetic, historical, and
social/cultural terms, Baraka compiled
and summed up what constitutes a
comprehensive philosophical treatise
on Jazz and Blues music in the u.s. —
and by extension the world — over
the past century.