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

Amiri Baraka is a national treasure. Besides his numerous accomplishments in the worlds of drama, poetry, autobiography, and fiction, Baraka was also instrumental in the creation of the Black Arts Movement, both as a founder of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School in Harlem and as a coeditor with Larry Neal of the definitive anthology Black Fire (1968). With Neal and A. B. Spellman, he coedited the important Black Arts magazine The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution (1968–69). Even though The Cricket ceased publication after only four issues, it provided a forum for black intellectuals to think experimentally about the relationship between music and radical politics. In The Cricket’s first editorial, the editors describe how music has served as their inspiration: “The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians. They were the first to free themselves from the concepts and sensibilities of the oppressor.” This statement succinctly describes the conceptual core of Baraka’s writing about music, in which he returns again and again to the manifold ways in which black music intersects with political liberation.

In the history of African American letters, many prominent writers of fiction and poetry have also been brilliant and innovative essayists (e.g., James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Nathaniel Mackey, and Alice Walker, to name only a few). Baraka is no exception in this regard, since his music criticism inventively deploys the essay form to worry the distinctions between critical scrutiny and poetic language. Baraka’s two previous volumes of essays concerned with the sociopolitical and aesthetic dimensions of black musical formations, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) and Black Music (1967), still serve as the standard against which studies of black music are measured.

Over forty years later, Digging offers another helping of Baraka’s musical essays. Following a brief introduction, the collection is divided into three parts: the first consists of extended essays about the significance of black music within the framework of American music more generally; the second offers illuminating portraits of artists such as Miles Davis, Abbey Lincoln, Bruce Springsteen, Max Roach, and Duke Ellington; and the final section collects incisive reviews of musical recordings and performances. In this way, Digging combines the broad analytic and historical sweep of Blues People with the portraits of individual musicians that make up the greater part of Black Music, even while cementing Baraka’s status both as one of the foremost critics of American music and as a virtuoso stylist of the essay genre. Baraka does not merely describe musicians and musical practices; he also allows the sonorities, rhythms, and textures of his prose to animate the “objects” of his study. Rather than constructing an analytic that positions form against content, music against liberation, aesthetics against politics, the pieces collected in Digging stage improvisatory conversations with and about the relational interaction between these supposedly clashing forces.

Though “American” appears twice in its subtitle, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music is the first text in Baraka’s music trilogy to not use the word “black,” which underscores his desire to conceptualize Afro-American music not simply as a reaction to centuries of enslavement, segregation, lynching, etc., but as American music writ large. Taking a cue from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a text that Digging frequently echoes and reformulates, Baraka moves away from the black nationalist tenets of Blues People and Black Music to describe black music as the quintessential embodiment of American classical music. Still, this shift in emphasis should not be overestimated, since all three of Baraka’s music collections are centrally concerned with developing a criticopoetic framework that sounds out how black musical aesthetics shape radical politics, and vice versa. Black music thus emerges as a force with the potential to disfigure existing social structures, and more important, as the chief modality for imagining a different world.

Digging represents an archaeology of black musical practices obscured by...