Black Music: Essays on Jazz

'In Black Music, Baraka wrote with ecstasy - highly informed and intricate - about ecstatically complex music' NEW YORKER

LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, was one of the most pioneering and influential jazz critics of the 1960s. The essays collected here show him articulating in real time the astonishing transformations taking place in the clubs and coffee houses of New York City during jazz music's most febrile creative era.

An essential read for any follower of the genre, Black Music offers unmissable contemporary insight into the most brilliant jazz musicians of the day: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles David, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra and more. This rich and vital collection is comprised of essays, reviews, interviews, liner notes, analyses and personal impressions written between 1959 and 1967.

'Baraka wrote with ecstasy about ecstatically complicated music'
Richard Brody, New Yorker

'Baraka was a jazz man to the bone; he recognised in the music a potent and radical means of cultural expression. His writings on jazz shed penetrating light on both the art form and its social context, which he understood to be more or less inextricable'
Jazz Times

• Publication date: 5 November 2026
• Page count: 224
• Dimensions: Height 196 mm; Width 129 mm; Thickness 19 mm
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN-13: 9781399638494