Amiri Baraka, a provocative writer and leader of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s died on Thursday, January 9, at age 79, while interest in his Jazz and White Critic resurfaced.
Amiri Baraka is a poet and playwright who illuminated the black experience in America. His death was confirmed by Ras Baraka, his son and a member of the Newark Municipal Council. He died at the Beth Israel Medical Center but the cause of death was not specified except that he was hospitalized since December 21, 2013.
His death brought to the fore once again his take on black culture in America and one of these is jazz music. Amiri Baraka Jazz and the White Critic, originally written in 1960, talked about jazz criticism and writing at the time, which was almost exclusive to white critics.
In Amiri Baraka Jazz and the White Critic, he pointed out that critics got it all wrong and said that jazz is a black art, while white critics write from their own social and cultural mores. Baraka, in a fiery tone said of white people that they think they can appropriate jazz culture.
Amiri Baraka Jazz and the White Critic went on and said, "Negro music is essentially the expression of an attitude, or a collection of attitudes, about the world, and only secondarily an attitude about the way music is made. The potential [white] critic of jazz [think rap/hip-hop if you will] had only to appreciate the music, or what he thought was the music, and did not need to understand or even be concerned with the attitudes that produced it, except perhaps as a purely sociological consideration."
An excerpt from Amiri Baraka Jazz and the White critic goes, "most hazz critics were not only white middle-class Americans, but middle-brows as well. The irony is that because majority of jazz critics are whit biddlebrows, most jazz criticism tends to enforce white middle-brow standards of excellence as criteria for performance of a music that in its most profound manifestations is completely antithetical to such standards; in fact, quite often is in direct reaction against them.Amiri Baraka was controversial even in political circles. He championed Newark's racially disenfranchised people, while others see his prime and glory to end also in the 1960s.
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