The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution, 1968-69

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The Cricket: Black Evolution in Music is a rare document of the Black Arts Movement. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, and Larry Neal in 1968-69, and published by Baraka's New Jersey-based JIHAD productions around the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, short plays, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anti-commercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez, and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and musicians (including Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Mtume, Albert Ayler, the Black Unity Trio) to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement-"a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed," as Spellman write's in the books preface-and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, "to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool," and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers "to finally make a way for themselves." This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with a new critical introduction by artist and writer Kodwo Eshun