For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane—and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados—Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music

Arts & Photography

Baraka, Amiri

Music

University of California Press

For almost half a century, Amiri Baraka has ranked among the most important commentators on African American music and culture. In this brilliant assemblage of his writings on music, the first such collection in nearly twenty years, Baraka blends autobiography, history, musical analysis, and political commentary to recall the sounds, people, times, and places he's encountered. As in his earlier classics, Blues People and Black Music, Baraka offers essays on the famous―Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane―and on those whose names are known mainly by jazz aficionados―Alan Shorter, Jon Jang, and Malachi Thompson. Baraka's literary style, with its deep roots in poetry, makes palpable his love and respect for his jazz musician friends. His energy and enthusiasm show us again how much Coltrane, Albert Ayler, and the others he lovingly considers mattered. He brings home to us how music itself matters, and how musicians carry and extend that knowledge from generation to generation, providing us, their listeners, with a sense of meaning and belonging.

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Volume 13)

These four one-act plays deal with the African-American experience of today. Their central elements are love and hatred echoed in violently explosive words, actions, thoughts and metaphor. The sum total of three hundred years of contained fury, they are powerful statements about the real meaning of white oppression of black people. In their militancy and anger, they perfectly express the mood and frustrations of black America and are as relevant today as when they were first publicly performed. This edition contains a foreword by playright, novelist, journalist and lecturer Lindsay Barrett, who has also made widely acclaimed radio and TV programs on jazz, the arts and African cultural matters.

Four Black Revolutionary Plays

Literature & Fiction

Dramas & Plays

Marion Boyars

A richly illustrated study identifies the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that helped slaves from various regions of the African continent integrate their individual religions, artistic expressions, and languages into a rich and distinctive African-American culture, in a volume that includes contributions by Amiri Baraka, Gail Lumet Buckley, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among others.

Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture

Biographies & Memoirs

Buckley, Gail Lumet

Gordon-Reed, Annette

Dodson, Howard

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis

Community & Culture

National Geographic

S O S: Poems 1961-2013

A New York Times Editors' Choice Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka"whose long illumination of the black experience in America was called incandescent in some quarters and incendiary in others" (New York Times)was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. Selected by Paul Vangelisti, this volume comprises the fullest spectrum of Baraka's rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to previously unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer (also published as LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. The environments and social values that inspired his poetics changed during the course of his life, a trajectory that can be traced in this retrospective spanning more than five decades of profoundly evolving subjects and techniques. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.

Poetry

GROVE PRESS

One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books WITH AN APPENDIX OF NEVER-BEFORE-PUBLISHED WORK Fusing the personal and the political in high-voltage verse, Amiri Baraka was one of the preeminent literary innovators of the past century. This volume comprises the fullest spectrum of his rousing, revolutionary poems, from his first collection to unpublished pieces composed during his final years. Throughout Baraka’s career as a prolific writer in several genres (also published under the name LeRoi Jones), he was vehemently outspoken against oppression of African American citizens, and he radically altered the discourse surrounding racial inequality. His legacy in world literature is matched by his widespread influence as an activist and cultural leader. Praised for its lyricism and introspection, his early poetry emerged from the Beat generation, while his later writing is marked by the Black Arts Movement's intensely rebellious fervor and subversive ideology. All along, his primary focus was on how to live and love in the present moment despite the enduring difficulties of human history.

The complete autobiography of a literary legend.

The Autobiography of Leroi Jones

Arts & Literature

Freundlich Books

A poetic voyage in five parts that charts the ebbs and flows of the African-American movement.

Wise, Why's, Y's: The Griot's Song Djeli YA

THIRD WORLD PRESS +

Intended to cut clean through the oppression imposed upon the mainstream by society's ""intellectual superstructure,"" this collection of revolutionary essays by literary and cultural legend Amiri Baraka raises numerous issues concerning contemporary African American life. The socially conscious will appreciate the creative analyses and stimulating critiques on display here, buoyed by Baraka's distinctive, bold, and aggressive opinions about the ways our culture bestows ignorance upon the ignorant merely to exploit them. Further developing the ideals of black nationalism and social justice that put Baraka on the cultural map, these essays dissect the sedentary attitudes of the American majority to promote a finer tomorrow.

Razor

Essays & Correspondence

Somebody Blew Up America

House of Nehesi Publishers

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baraka, Amiri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Baraka, Amiri

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Baraka, Amiri. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music

Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Volume 13)

Four Black Revolutionary Plays

Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture

S O S: Poems 1961-2013

S O S: Poems 1961-2013

The Autobiography of Leroi Jones

Wise, Why's, Y's: The Griot's Song Djeli YA

Razor

Somebody Blew Up America