The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant-garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic, and the Black Arts Movement

On March 28, 1965, a benefit concert for the newly formed Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School was held at the Village Gate in New York City. Arranged by LeRoi Jones, founder of the organization and influential Black Arts Movement writer who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, this event represents an historic confluence of dominant figures in the so-called “avant-garde” jazz movement of the 1960s. The concert brought together diverse voices from the experimental fringes of the jazz community, many of whom were entrenched in improvisatory methodologies that challenged traditional assumptions about jazz. In addition to performances by John Coltrane and Sun Ra, two of the primary innovators of the new music, a number of "first wave" experimentalists, like Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler, also appeared. Baraka was an outspoken black critic and supporter of the music sui generis; his essays frequently appeared in Down Beat and other music magazines; in 1963 he published Blues People, a landmark socio-political history of African American music; and his 1968 anthology of music criticism entitled Black Music analyzes the emergence of the jazz avant-garde in broad detail. This new music, or "New Black Music" as Baraka branded it, became the soundtrack to a developing black nationalism in literature. The Black Arts Movement looked to black musical expression as a site of authentic artistic "blackness." By exploring the conjuncture of music and literature, we see the emergence of a discursive critical space that generates a number of questions about “meaning” in music, and that is centrally constructed around improvisation, experimentation, and new musical vocabularies. Within this discourse, the function of criticism itself is attenuated through the music’s radicalization of the moment, through its processual nature that undermines the possibility of reified, static identities and musical meanings.