The Cricket (magazine)
| File:The cricket black music in evolution.jpg | |
| Editor | Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), A. B. Spellman, Larry Neal |
|---|---|
| Categories | Music Magazine |
| First issue | 1968-1969 |
| Company | Drum Publications Ltd |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Website | [1] |
The Cricket took its title from a music gossip newspaper printed at the turn of the century by New Orleans cornet master Buddy Bolden. Like its namesake it was defiantly street level. Within its visually ascetic, mimeographed pages, it resonated with the same aura of revolutionary spirit, city street authenticity, and interartistic collaboration that defined of the Black Arts Movement of Harlem in the 1960.
Content and Themes
The editorial in the first issue of The Cricket spells out the publication's 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." Subtitled Black Music in Evolution, the magazine was created by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, and A. B. Spellman in 1968 in the spirit of the hip, improvised come-to-consciousness of Black Nationalism, using the perspective of the music being created within it as a base.
Just consider the names, the conjuring all-star syllables of a revolutionary moment in history: Sun Ra, Milford Graves, James T. Stewart, Sonia Sanchez, Don L. Lee, Clyde Halisi, Stanley Crouch, Cecil Taylor, Mwanafunzi Katibu, Albert Ayler, Willie Kgositile, Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts, Archie Shepp, Stevie Wonder, Ornette Coleman and more - and all that in just four issues published over only two years.
The Cricket's jittery graphic design matched its eclectic contents. Within its bright covers, in sharply etched in black and white the world of black culture was explored, interrogated, celebrated, exploded. A music magazine? Sort of. A literary magazine? That too. A critical journal. Sure. A philosophical intervention into everyday life? Absolutely.
The Cricket integrated the energy of various musicians: Sun Ra, the percussionist Milford Graves, and pianist Cecil Taylor are listed as advisors. Poetry and drama intermingled with record reviews and Black Nationalist polemic. Musician-writer-activists spun verse and prose; poet-essayists tried to capture the pulse and attitude of the new music while trumpeting black power and condemning white racism. Stylistically, their words in all forms embodied a kind of verbal jazz. "We wanted an art that was as black as our music," Baraka recalled. "A blues poetry (a la Langston and Sterling); a jazz poetry; a funky verse full of exploding antiracist weapons and new music poetry that would scream and taunt and rhythm-attack the enemy into submission."
Publisher
After four issues however, The Cricket was destroyed by the very political agenda it embodied. As Baraka later reflected, "We had gotten so deeply immersed in the political aspect of it [Black Nationalism] that really the kind of edifying things like The Cricket were let slip..." While numerous publications from Ron Welburn's The Grackle (mid-1970s) to Straight No Chaser (1988 - ) continued in The Cricket's spirit, no one has yet matched its innovation, creative promiscuity and intense belief in the possibility of freedom. As Baraka says, "Beauty has nothing to do with it, but it is!"
View[[2]] a digest version of the fourth volume of The Cricket, published in Albert Ayler, Holy Ghost, rare & unissued recordings (1962 - 70), 9 CD Spirit Box, 2004. This article uses text from the Chimurengal Library under the GFDL
Resources
- Gennari, John. Blowin' Hot and Cool: Jazz and Its Critics. University of Chicago Press, 2006. p. 287 - 290.
- Funkhouser, Christopher. "LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and the Cricket: Jazz and Poets' Black Fire", African American Review, Vol. 37, 2003.
- Komozi Woodard Amiri Baraka Collection, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African-American Culture and History. Series I: Black Arts Movement, 1961-1998.
- Poet Amiri Baraka on the freedom movement and Black art, The Gainesville Iguana, January 2007.
- Thomas, Lorenzo and Nielsen, Aldon Lynn. Don't Deny My Name: Words and Music and the Black Intellectual Tradition. University of Michigan Press, 2008, Page 131
- Kalamu ya Salaam. Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka, First in a Series of Conversations with Established and Emerging African-American Writers. The Black Collegian Magazine.
- Smethurst, James. Pat Your Foot and Turn the Corner: Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the Poetics of a Popular Avant-Garde; African American Review, Vol. 37, 2003
- Hanson, Michael. Suppose James Brown read Fanon: the Black Arts Movement, cultural nationalism and the failure of popular musical praxis. Popular Music. Cambridge University Press, 2008, 27:341-365
External links
[[3]]- Komozi Woodard Amiri Baraka Collection
[[4]] - Poet Amiri Baraka on the freedom movement and Black art
[[5]] - Djali Dialogue with Amiri Baraka, First in a Series of Conversations with Established and Emerging African-American Writers.