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. 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.

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, musical, his classic work on the place of jazz and blues in American social, economic, and cultural history.

In tracing the music, he brilliantly illuminates the influence of African Americans on American culture and history. The path the slave took to 'citizenship' is what I want to look at.

Black Music AkashiClassics: Renegade Reprint Series

He was named poet laureate of new jersey from 2002 to 2004 by the New Jersey Commission on Humanities. He lives in Newark, New Jersey. It is composed of essays, liner notes, reviews, musical analyses, interviews, and personal impressions from 1959–1967. Used book in Good Condition. His most recent book, tales of the out & the gone akashic Books, 2007, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and winner of a PEN/Beyond Margins Award.

. Jones has learned—and this has been very rare in jazz criticism—to write about music as an artist. Nat hentoff ksblack music is a book about the brilliant young jazz musicians of the early 1960s: John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Thelonious Monk, and others.

Also includes amiri baraka's reflections in a 2009 interview with Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. Leroi jones now known as Amiri Baraka is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History of the Mississippi Delta

Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: robert johnson, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show and brought blues to the airwaves; and John Lee Hooker, B.

Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to international popularity, recognition, to the steamy bars of Chicago’s South Side, and imitation.

King, and many others. Entrancing study" -- greil Marcus "Palmer has a powerful understanding of the music and an intense involvement in the culture. The nation Used book in Good Condition. B. A lucid. Penguin Books.

The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States

Floyd maintains that while african Americans may not have direct knowledge of African traditions and myths, they can intuitively recognize links to an authentic African cultural memory. Floyd dismisses the assumption that Africans brought to the United States as slaves took the music of whites in the New World and transformed it through their own performance practices.

For example, the jazz clarinetist sidney bechet said, who died a slave as a young man, in speaking of his grandfather Omar, "Inside him he'd got the memory of all the wrong that's been done to my people. Striving to break down the barriers that remain between high art and low art, it brilliantly illuminates the centuries-old linkage between the music, myths and rituals of Africa and the continuing evolution and enduring vitality of African-American music.

That's what the memory is. When a blues is good, that kind of memory just grows up inside it. Grounding his scholarship and meticulous research in his childhood memories of black folk culture and his own experiences as a musician and listener, Floyd maintains that the memory of Omar and all those who came before and after him remains a driving force in the black music of America, a force with the power to enrich cultures the world over.

When jimi hendrix transfixed the crowds of woodstock with his gripping version of "The Star Spangled Banner, in part, to the revolutionary guitar playing of Howlin' Wolf and the other great Chicago bluesmen, " he was building on a foundation reaching back, and to the Delta blues tradition before him.

Penguin Books.

Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday

Angela davis provides the historical, bessie smith, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. The works of rainey, Smith, and Holiday have been largely misunderstood by critics.

From one of this country's most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Through meticulous transcriptions of all the extant lyrics of Rainey and Smith—published here in their entirety for the first time—Davis demonstrates how the roots of the blues extend beyond a musical tradition to serve as a conciousness-raising vehicle for American social memory.

A stunning, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, indispensable contribution to American history, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph. Used book in Good Condition. Overlooked, has been the way their candor and bravado laid the groundwork for an aesthetic that allowed for the celebration of social, Davis shows, moral, and sexual values outside the constraints imposed by middle-class respectability.

Penguin Books.

Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music

Rooted in the thick-as-tar delta soil, Delta Blues is already “a contemporary classic in its field” Jazz Review. Combining extensive fieldwork, interviews with living musicians, argument-closing incantations to draw a line through a century of Delta blues” New York Times, archival research, this engrossing narrative is flavored with insightful and vivid musical descriptions that ensure “an understanding of not only the musicians, and first-person accounts with “his own calm, but the music itself” Boston Sunday Globe.

38 illustrations Used book in Good Condition. King, delta blues delves into the uneasy mix of race and money at the point where traditional music became commercial and bluesmen found new audiences of thousands. From the field hollers of nineteenth-century plantations to Muddy Waters and B. B. The essential history of this distinctly American genre.

Atlanta journal-constitution in this “expertly researched, dispassionate yet thoughtful history” Gary Giddins, elegantly written, award-winning author Ted Gioia gives us “the rare combination of a tome that is both deeply informative and enjoyable to read” Publishers Weekly, starred review. Penguin Books.

W w norton Company.

Mumbo Jumbo

Penguin Books. Used book in Good Condition. The classic freewheeling look at race relations through the ages. Mumbo jumbo is ishmael reed’s brilliantly satiric deconstruction of Western civilization, a racy and uproarious commentary on our society. Used book in Good Condition. Cited by literary critic harold bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.

W w norton Company. In it, one of our preeminent african-American authors, Reed, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy.

The History Of The Blues: The Roots, The Music, The People

Used book in Good Condition. Da capo Press. W w norton Company. Francis davis's the history of the Blues is a groundbreaking rethinking of the blues that fearlessly examines how race relations have altered perceptions of the music. Tracing its origins from the mississippi delta to its amplification in Chicago right after World War II, Davis argues for an examination of the blues in its own right, not just as a precursor to jazz and rock 'n' roll.

Used book in Good Condition. Penguin Books. The lives of major figures such as robert johnson, and Leadbelly, in addition to contemporary artists such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray, Charlie Patton, are examined and skillfully woven into a riveting, provocative narrative.

Black Power : The Politics of Liberation

An eloquent document of the civil rights movement that remains a work of profound social relevance 50 years after it was first published. Penguin Books. Used book in Good Condition. A revolutionary work since its publication, black power exposed the depths of systemic racism in this country and provided a radical political framework for reform: true and lasting social change would only be accomplished through unity among African-Americans and their independence from the preexisting order.

W w norton Company. Used book in Good Condition. Da capo Press.

Jazz: A History of America's Music

The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. The story of jazz encompasses the story of american courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities—New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York—and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.

Visually stunning, this book, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration—and a celebration—of the American experiment. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Bix beiderbecke, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, who helped lead a musical revolution, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether.

W w norton Company. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best. Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: louis armstrong, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, and captured more of American life than any other composer.

Buddy bolden, dave brubeck, jelly roll morton, and ella fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Ornette Coleman, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Artie Shaw, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, and a host of others. But jazz is more than mere biography.

The History of Jazz

Knopf. Oxford University Press. W w norton Company. Here are the giants of jazz and the great moments of jazz history--jelly roll morton, stan getz, and lester young, louis armstrong, pat metheny's visionary extension of jazz-rock fusion, Miles Davis's 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie's advocacy of modern jazz in the 1940s, Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality, cool jazz greats such as Gerry Mulligan, the contemporary sounds of Wynton Marsalis, and the post-modernists of the current day.

He also evokes the many worlds of jazz, the bawdy houses of new orleans, the cotton Club, taking the reader to the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the rent parties of Harlem, the Savoy, the after hours spots of corrupt Kansas city, the speakeasies of Chicago during the Jazz Age, and the other locales where the history of jazz was made.

Ted gioia's history of jazz has been universally hailed as a classic--acclaimed by jazz critics and fans around the world. Now gioia brings his magnificent work completely up-to-date, drawing on the latest research and revisiting virtually every aspect of the music, past and present. Da capo Press. Used book in Good Condition.

Gioia provides the reader with lively portraits of these and many other great musicians, intertwined with vibrant commentary on the music they created. Gioia tells the story of jazz as it had never been told before, in a book that brilliantly portrays the legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the world in which it evolved.

Penguin Books.