The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka

Download or read book The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka written by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2022-07-13 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.