Overview
- Examines the entirety of Baraka’s discography
- Argues that avant garde jazz was every bit as important a model to New American Poetry as was abstract expressionism and field painting
- Tracks Baraka’s movement into R & B musical forms in addition to avant garde jazz
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature (PASTMULI)
Access this book
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Other ways to access
Table of contents (5 chapters)
-
Front Matter
-
Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka examines the full length of Baraka’s discography as a poet recording with musicians as well as his contributions to jazz and R & B, beginning with his earliest studio recordings in 1965 and continuing to the last year of his life, 2014. This recorded history traces his evolution from the era of Beat poetry and “projective verse,” through the period of the Black Arts Movement and cultural nationalism, and on to his commitments to “third world Marxism,” which characterized the last decades of his life. The music enfolding Baraka’s recitations ranges from traditional African drumming, to doo wop, rhythm and blues, soul and the avant garde jazz that was his great love and the subject of so much of his writing, and includes both in-studio sessions and live concert performances. This body of work offers a rare opportunity to think about not only jazz/poetry, but the poet in the recording studio and the relations of text to score.
Reviews
“Shuttling back and forth between, on the one hand, critical description and analysis and, on the other, a fan’s sheer pleasure, Aldon Nielsen’s nail-hard, rhapsodic tribute The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka fills a crucial gap in the literature, analyzing the various album and digital recordings Baraka made in the settings of half a century of black music, from bebop to hip hop. It’s always hard to write about music, but in this book Nielsen’s affective sensibilities as a fan complement the critical rigor.” (Tyrone Williams, Professor of English, Xavier University, USA, and author of Adventure of Pi (2011))
“In this ground-breaking study, the first totally devoted to Amiri Baraka’s poetry performed with music, both jazz and pop, Aldon Nielsen, one of the finest Baraka scholars, surveys the poet’s entire poem-with-music oeuvre, both live and recorded, including collaborations with such figures as Sonny Murray, Archie Shepp and William Parker. This is a rich body of work which deserves our attention. With his intimate knowledge of both Baraka and the music, there is nobody better for the job. This is a must-read book.” (William J. Harris, author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic (1985)) “Noted scholar Aldon Nielsen, who took generations of new researchers back into the archive of African American poetry through his writing and teaching, now offers us a rare front row seat at Amiri Baraka’s many collaborative performances with eminent jazz musicians, including those he worked with and his own groups, the New York Art Quartet and Blue Ark. Drawing on a collection of rare recordings, as well as his own observations of live performances he attended over a thirty-five year span of knowing Baraka (first as student, later as friend and colleague), this volume reads like a conversation with Nielsen in which he tells you everything you need to know about the soundings of Baraka’s poems both on and off the page, as well as the cultural institutions, political ideologies and collaborative relationships that initiated their production.” (Kathy Lou Schultz, Associate Professor of English, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Memphis, USA, and author of The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (2013))Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Aldon Lynn Nielsen is the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature at the Pennsylvania State University, USA. He was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, and has received such other recognitions as the Darwin Turner Award, the Josephine Miles Award and the Kayden Prize.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka
Authors: Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75758-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75757-1Published: 29 June 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-75760-1Published: 30 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-75758-8Published: 28 June 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-5133
Series E-ISSN: 2946-5141
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 139
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Poetry and Poetics, Contemporary Literature, North American Literature, Music, African American Culture