This scintillating collection by Amiri Imamu Baraka, published in 1968 under his birth name Leroi Jones, covers a wide range of jazz writings from 1959 to 1967. Baraka's engaging and prophetic portraits of Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Bradford, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Roy Haynes, Don Cherry, and John Coltrane (whom he called "the heaviest spirit") beam with an electric and fluid language that mirrors those artists' speed-of-light improvisations. In "Jazz and the White Critic," which blasts white critics who judge jazz by European, rather than African American, standards, Jones wrote, "As Western people, the sociocultural thinking of 18th-century Europe comes to us as history and legacy that is a continuous and organic part of the 20th-century West. The sociocultural philosophy of the Negro in America ... is no less specific and no less important for any intelligent critical speculation about the music that came out of it." His analysis of the burgeoning avant-garde scene in "Apple Cores #1-6," "New York Loft and Coffee Shop Jazz," and "The Jazz Avant-Garde" accurately depicts the artistic promise and peril of that period in the words of a literary genius who was there and helped create it. --Eugene Holley Jr.

Black Music

Arts & Photography

Baraka, Imamu Amiri

Music

Praeger

"The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at. And I make my analogy through the slave citizen's music -- through the music that is most closely associated with him: blues and a later, but parallel development, jazz... [If] the Negro represents, or is symbolic of, something in and about the nature of American culture, this certainly should be revealed by his characteristic music."
So says Amiri Baraka in the Introduction to Blues People, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, musical, economic, and cultural history. From the music of African slaves in the United States through the music scene of the 1960's, Baraka traces the influence of what he calls "negro music" on white America -- not only in the context of music and pop culture but also in terms of the values and perspectives passed on through the music. In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America

UNREAD, crisp, fresh, copy. Tight uncreased spine. All pages crisp, fresh, square, Clean square, edges and corners.Bright fresh wrappers. 14th printing 1978. Two minor chips on spine wrapper,( spine bottom chip 1/4" , spine top 1/8"). Otherwise copy is fresh, crisp, and new.

The Baptism and the Toilet

Grove Pr

Raise, Race, Rays, Raze: Essays Since 1965

Random House Trade Paperbacks

Dutchman

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Faber and Faber

Four Black Revolutionary Plays, All Praise to the Black Man

History & Criticism

Macmillan Pub. Co.

A collection of fiction, poems, essays, and short plays explores the life of Black women in American society

Confirmation: Anthology of African American Women

William Morrow & Co.

The Motion of History, and Other Plays

Morrow

The changing ideas of the renowned playwright, poet, and author, also known as LeRoi Jones, are chronicled in a collection of essays

Daggers and Javelins: Essays, 1974-1979

Essays & Correspondence

William Morrow Company

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Books by Baraka, Imamu Amiri