Technique was then, as today, the key to creative freedom, but before this came a will toward expression. O’Meally focuses on Baraka’s liner notes to jazz LP albums, arguing that they too are an important and distinctive form of jazz writing. After learning that Amiri Baraka had passed away (October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014), I wanted to commemorate him by reading some of his work.

Inspired by Brown, Baraka's Blues People spoke forcefully about the art black people produced — and the pain they endured in this country — and was well-received by black and white critics.A host of soloists and performers, many with deep connections to Baraka, will augment the 24-member band: the saxophonist and poet Oliver Lake, the singer Jazzmeia Horn, the trombonist Craig Harris, the Grammy-winning vibraphonist Stefon Harris, the poet Jessica Care Moore and the West African djembe player Weedie Braimah. A must for all who would more knowledgeably appreciate and better comprehend America's most popular music — LANGSTON HUGHES A panoramic sociocultural history of African-American music . The blues speak to us simultaneously of the tragic and the comic aspects of the human condition and they express a profound sense of life shared by many Negro Americans precisely because their lives have combined these modes. That experience exemplifies deeper aspects of the theories that Baraka, who died in 2014, first laid out in “Blues People” and then explored the rest of his life: that the music’s history is an ongoing community narrative of a people and their adaptation to and adoption of American life. It is a tradition that is capable of reducing any human conceit or natural dignity to the barest form of social outrage.

Punk 45: There Is No Such Thing As Society (2024 Edition) Get A Job, Get A Car, Get A Bed, Get Drunk!In this essential and impassioned text, LeRoi Jones traces the intertwined development of blues and jazz music with the history of its creators in 'White America'. Around 1974, Baraka himself from Black nationalism as a Marxist and a supporter of third-world liberation movements. And he was always very insistent that we know the music of the founders, and to know why their music endures, and what made that music. Here he tries to show how African music became transformed into African-AMERICAN music and then American.