Inspired by Brown, Baraka's Blues People spoke forcefully about the art black people produced — and the pain they endured in this country — and was well-received by black and white critics. The team of Tammy Hall/p-org, Greg Skaff/g, Michael Zisman/b, Kent Bryson/dr and Bryan Dyer/voc is mixed and matched on songs that are going to rattle your previous reference points of songs you’re familiar with. Baraka's bigotry wasn't just some fluke of ignorance or youth, he made it an unapologetic part of his creative aesthetic (thankfully, not in this work) over decades. Simple taste should have led Jones to Stanley Edgar Hyman’s work on the blues instead of to Paul Oliver’s sadly misdirected effort. While doing so, Baraka also provides a deepened understanding of American history, economics, and culture.

Granted, I come from a knowledge base primarily focused on Brazil, Afro-Brazilian culture, and the African diaspora as Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit. Technique was then, as today, the key to creative freedom, but before this came a will toward expression. And that was the real intent of that title: I wanted to focus on them — us — the creators of the blues, which is still, I think, the predominate music under all American music.She teams with Hall and a wildly free and passionate “Summertime” and then goes to the TV theme from The Jefferson’s for a swaying gospel read of “Movin’ On Up. For as I see it, from the days of their introduction into the colonies, Negroes have taken, with the ruthlessness of those without articulate investments in cultural styles, what they could of European music, making of it that which would, when blended with the cultural tendencies inherited from Africa, express their sense of life, while rejecting the rest. Jones would take his subject seriously—as the best of jazz critics have always done—and he himself should be so taken. Louis in the 1970s and early ’80s, Gunn — the trumpeter, composer and bandleader — had always felt that truth already, in a way he links to ancestral memory. Baraka used the example of black minstrels in blackface imitating white minstrels imitating black people imitating the white ruling class.

Much has been made of the fact that Blues People is one of the few books by a Negro to treat the subject. When you are finished, you won't be an expert on the subject of blues or jazz music, but he does manage to fill you deeply with a sense of ownership and responsibility for holding and transmitting the history. It’s still pretty deep but I wanted to wrap my mind around this dense, yet, succinct text that traces how the blues developed NOT with enslaved Africans but from their enslaved descendants: American born and bred; disenfranchised, not accepted as full citizens with inalienable rights. J/B avers that this caused the early division in African-American music, jazz and swing peeling off one way under the influence of a more classical European tradition (but splicing itself later) and blues, which was more down-home focused, stemming out of less secular mores.

He looks at the many African influences of the blues, as well as its opposition to more classical Western (as in Western Civilization) styles of music, and how it has evolved.