Jazz and the blues have often given black musicians creative ways of “making it” in the teeth of middle-class presumptions about how that might be done. While I found this text challenging to read, it was also illuminating, and shrewd; written by someone with a deep love and long memory for music, black people, and other folks. the first major book of its kind by a black author — NPR So essential and, for many of today's music fans, so under-examined .

The trumpeter and composer Russell Gunn will premiere “The Blues and Its People,” a suite inspired by Baraka’s influential text, to mark its 60th anniversary. African-American experience in the USA expressed itself most particularly in the blues, only later did that musical mode become part of the general American culture, often watered down, sometimes imitated by those who didn't wish to fit in or who wished to cash in.Here he tries to show how African music became transformed into African-AMERICAN music and then American. In the same year, he moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a warehouse for music records. The book is concerned, essentially, with three interlocking ideas: 1) that the history of black people in America is best illustrated by the evolution of their music, and that this music itself reflects a gradual and complex process of Americanization; 2) that black and white musical forms have always been closely intertwined in the U.

Much the same could be said of Jones’s treatment of the jazz during the Thirties, when he claims its broader acceptance (i. And he could learn much from the Cambridge school’s discoveries of the connection between poetry, drama and ritual as a means of analyzing how the blues functions.

At certain times, it has the language of a diatribe as Baraka decries the varying periods of blues and jazz innovation which inevitably lead to mainstream acceptance and the eventual commercialization which eliminates the emotional nuance of a formerly "negro music". Perhaps more than any other people, Americans have been locked in a deadly struggle with time, with history. That’s not just because “Blues People” — which centers the blues as the foundation of American music, and the lives of Black Americans as the foundation of the blues — has been widely influential, shaping public and institutional understanding of the history of the blues, jazz and American culture. Baraka — as LeRoi Jones — came from a middle-class upbringing, including university studies at Rutgers, Columbia and Howard Universities. It's a different one from the environment Blues People was written in, but no less exploitative; no less cynical, and it needs a different analysis.