Amiri Baraka, who died in January, came to prominence in the early 1960s as a poet with links to the Beats, writing under the name of LeRoi Jones. As the decade went on, he emerged as an influential jazz critic, writing reviews and essays as well as the classic book, Blues People. A vociferous advocate of the New Thing, he also set up his own record label, Jihad, which released three albums – all now very rare: Sunny'.s Time Now with Sunny Murray, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry and Henry Grimes; and A Black Mass with Sun Ra's Arkestra. But Black and Beautiful best captures the decade' heady mix of hope and tumult. Vocal group The Jihad deliver gospel-tinged, street-corner harmonies, buoyed up by simple conga beats and sax blasts, over which Baraka declaims impassioned poetics exploring the nature of black beauty, the ineffable quality of ‘soul,’ and existential racial politics: “Calling all black people! Calling you urgent!”