Timeless: LeRoi Jones’ Black Music

In 1967 the celebrated jazz writer published a masterpiece. It's still essential reading, too.

By Steve Pick

It was a time when music fans seriously argued about questions of technique vs. creative content, when musicians had to find tiny holes in the wall and odd venues just to be allowed to play their original material, a time when the future came crashing into the present via a reclaiming of ideas from the past. No, not the New Wave of punk rock and assorted Bowery-based artists of the 1970s, but the New Thing of the ‘60s, the Avant-Garde of jazz which divided the world into those who accepted music outside the previous rules, and those who never would.

LeRoi Jones was probably the jazz writer most in touch with what was happening in this musical revolution (which happened to coincide with what was happening in the cultural revolution of the Civil Rights movement and its varied strains of African-American consciousness). He certainly was the jazz writer most capable of connecting the dots between the musical sounds, the social contexts, and the sense that it was all changing somehow for the better. Sure, players of such historical stature as Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, and others were scrambling to find places to play in front of audiences frequently numbered in the dozens, but Jones captured in prose the sense that this music was full of meaning, and undeniably essential.

Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka and who has since been one of the most controversial political and cultural thinkers of the past 45 years, wrote for Downbeat and the black publication Kulcher, as well as providing liner notes for some LPs. Black Music was actually his second book of jazz writing, but unlike Blues People: Negro Music in White America, which traced the history of music in the African-American community, this time the focus was fully on the sounds of a specific place and time - New York City in the early 1960s. As John Coltrane, Baraka's musical patron saint (though Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler come close in his pantheon), led the way, a movement towards musical freedom received documentation from a man who thoroughly understood what was developing, and could describe it with a sense of humor, honor, and passion.

The newly republished (courtesy Akashic) book builds towards an original essay, "The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music)," in which Baraka posits a future in which all forms of black music will unite into one ultimate expression of cultural meaning. This didn't exactly happen, as most of the musicians he loved so much either remained on the margins, or changed to accommodate the public's preference towards more obvious melodies and simpler rhythms. But it's impossible to read Black Music without wishing you could have been there soaking up all this creativity, or at least without wanting to throw on some free jazz and feel the waves of emotional power, rhythmic expression, and sonic urgency that's clear on every page.