The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues

Poet and playwright Baraka and his poet wife here collect his recent talks, articles, book and record reviews about jazz, blues and soul, 34 poems, the text for an anti-nuclear jazz musical and 15 of her poems. Declaring that he is ""not a populist . . . but a Marxist-Leninist,'' Baraka, in this angry, repetitious agitprop material, seems to use almost every occasion possible to attack ``white chauvinism.'' Instead of focusing on the music itself, to which he is clearly addicted, he focuses on the fact that ``black music, like black people generally, is . . . left to the tender mercies of white racist monopoly capitalists'' and that ``jazz writing, like everything else in the society, has shifted toward the right.'' More than ever, he is convinced that white jazz critics impose a critical standard on the music that is opposed to the standards the music itself carries with it and describes. Illustrations not seen by PW. (May 19)