Sound as Black Situation: Anti-Neo-Colonial Poetics and Black Nationalist Music, 1965-1985

• In Event: Musical Movements and Sonic Identities

Abstract

“The true voices of Black liberation are Black musicians.” So wrote activists and music critics Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal in their first editorial for the Black music magazine The Cricket in 1968. Published through Baraka’s New Jersey-based press Jihad Productions, The Cricket was a response to what its editors and founding writers considered an anti-Black music industry – a jazz industry in which press, record labels, and venues were controlled by white executives who catered to an increasingly white audience. The authors of The Cricket maintained that Black tradition must be cultivated outside the influence of the mainstream music industry, and further that “the music of Black peoples must be considered in the context of a non-white culture.” Baraka, Spellman, and Neal belonged to a cohort of Black nationalists spurred into action by the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965. In reflecting on the work of the cohort, influential music critic Greg Tate, writing nearly two decades later, criticized the “Black-übermensch campaign” for failing to achieve its overblown revolutionary agenda. But he did credit these cultural separatists for the production of a tradition “every bit as def as classical Western civilization” – a tradition that he argued “freed up” the potential for Black creativity, and Black critical theory, over pursuant generations.

This paper identifies what I call Black Nationalist Music and its specific, co-constitutive Black music criticism, parsing this Black tradition, so identified by Tate, from its scholarly and broader generic classification as “experimental jazz.” It does so, first, to argue that Black Nationalist Music was the paradigmatic aesthetic response to Late-Stage American Empire, and, second, to show that its critical languages, aesthetics, and sonic forms coalesced as a cultural poetics critical to the anti-U.S. struggle against what had, since 1956, been called “neo-colonialism.” By rejecting the capitalist structures of mainstream music production, Black Nationalist Music turned its face against the anti-Black conditions of artist production in the United States, just as it aligned with “Third World” mass struggles fighting proxy wars and the “soft imperial” logics of Cold War militarism.

Black Nationalist Music was revolutionary, as Neal wrote, because it was “formalistically revolutionary [and broke] with all the previous ways of improvisation.” Baraka, too, called the music “politically revolutionary and artistically powerful” – the musicians, to him and to the Black nationalist community, were the front line of their politic: “both artists and militants.” Even so, most scholarly histories of the movement tend to sideline this sonic-political movement as a narrowly “cultural” phenomenon (in the ways Tate did), assessing its impact only in view of the United States, and favoring triumphalist, integrationist histories of U.S. race relations. American literary critic Darwin Turner called for the specific and subject-engaged re-historicization of this 1960s political landscape – the results of which would shape pursuant education in African American Studies. This paper works to narrate the 1960s as a prototype for the struggle against American neo-colonialism from the perspective of the “elsewhere” that is Black Nationalist Music.

Biographical Information

Max Jefferson (she/hers) is currently a PhD candidate in Music at the University of California, Berkeley, in the field of Musicology. Her work, broadly, follows histories of Black music in which the narrative pen has been held by Black hands: insider stories. In her 2023 long review for The Opera Quarterly, “Hearing Real Magic in … Iphigenia” she address “a growing body of work that honors Blackness and those artists who know from experience the violence of hegemonic archetypes and traditions,” calling for scholarly recognition and attendant critical literatures for this artistic movement. Her forthcoming 2025 article “Sun Ra’s Space Program: Resituating ‘The Forefather of Afrofuturism’” meets this need historically and contemporarily. The article recontextualizes Sun Ra as a political actor rather than the eccentric oddity, writing against Ra’s anachronistic theoretical framing under “Afrofuturism,” and preferring such historically explicative frameworks as “Afro-Surreal Expressionism.” Her dissertation develops from the Sun Ra research. Until now, the Black nationalist cohort she studies has only been recorded in disjunct, or at best parallel, narratives that abstract each actor – including Amiri Baraka, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sonya Sanchez – from political or musical context. This work continues a nascent cooperative Black history in music studies – a history engaged with and contributed to by scholars such as George Lewis, Daphne Brooks, Philip Ewell, and Matthew Morrison – that has begun to contend with the fallacy of Black objecthood pervading the field. Major sources of support for this project have been the H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Endowment Grant awarded by the American Musicological Society, The Eileen Southern Fellowship awarded by the Society for American Music, and the Summer Research Grant awarded by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at the University of California, Berkeley.

Author

• Max Jefferson, University of California Berkeley