Amiri Baraka 1934 – 2014
Friday, January 10, 2014
If black jazz critics are mostly conspicuous by their absence today then the importance of pioneers in the field cannot be overstated.
When LeRoi Jones made his debut as a reviewer, liner note writer and essayist in the early 1960s he challenged the standard image of the ‘serious’ music scribe as a member of the white middle class. Jones was born to bourgeois African-Americans in Newark, New Jersey and saw the likes of the Shorter brothers, Wayne and Alan, around his neighbourhood as a boy. Although a lover of hard-bop and soul-jazz who wrote eloquently about players like Gene Ammons, Jones emerged as a champion of the ‘New Music’ or avant-garde, making a substantial case for the innovations of Coltrane, Coleman, Ayler, Taylor and Shepp at a time when their work alienated much of the critical establishment.
Of no less importance was the 1963 book Blues People, in which Jones gave an illuminating account of the multi-faceted, complex nature of African-American music, and how the closely entwined strands of blues, gospel and jazz reflected the broad sweep of Negro socio-cultural history that covered slavery and the post-Emancipation period. Criticism was merely one strand of Jones’s output. He was as versatile as he was prolific, and the plethora of dramatic literature, poetry and fiction that he produced singled him out as a complete man of letters. Different as they are in form, the play Dutchman and the poem 'It’s Nation Time' are uncompromising reflections on black mental repression and the need for self-empowerment.
Although his adoption of the Muslim name Amiri Baraka in1967 may have been perceived as a sign of the writer’s growth as a black cultural nationalist, he had been going down that road several years prior.
Baraka was indefatigable in his efforts to enshrine the principle of ‘Black Art’ as a means of defence against a dehumanising white power structure. Some of his views drew accusations of homophobia and misogyny, charges to which he responded by pointing out the tide of violence that had been unleashed upon African-Americans, white liberals and progressive African politicians alike: draw the line from Emmett Till to Patrice Lumumba via King, Kennedy and Malcolm X. While it is a shock to read some of the early extreme positions that Baraka took it should be noted that he was a frontline activist who lived through extreme times and confronted inequities head on.
Radical and rabble-rouser in equal measure, Baraka was also an important educator, and he held teaching posts at several universities during his life. Yet he was never an armchair academic content to sit in a book-filled study and mark papers. An integral part of Baraka’s whole being was performance. The stage was his real home. He could not conceive of the written word without the spoken word.
Arguably, the highlights of his creative life are the collaborations with jazz and hip-hop musicians, from New York Art Quartet and Sun-Ra Myth Science Orchestra in the 1960s to The Roots and Vijay Iyer at the turn of the second millennium via David Murray in the 1980s.
Baraka’s substantial body of work makes him a seminal figure in contemporary black culture. His talent was matched by a determination to tell stories from a community that he’d seen struggle up close and personal. That stance paved the way for subsequent writers, notably Greg Tate, to deliver the word of their own generation.
– Kevin Le Gendre