LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and The Cricket: jazz and poets' Black Fire

The first of two main articles by musicians in the inaugural issue of The Cricket is Sun Ra's "My Music Is Words" (Ra's picture appears on the cover of the issue). In inimitable style, Ra establishes his cosmic view of the relationship between words and music, connecting their purposes:

   My words are the music and my music
   is the words because it is of equation is
   synonym of the Living Being ... darkness
   upon the phase of the deep ... the
   face phase ... the eye of infinity ...
   black equation from and of the angelic
   is ... the immeasurable ARE ....

      My words are music and my music
   is words and none can understand better
   than the pure in heart, for they
   being pure know purity in any guise. If
   something or even nothing does not
   know its own kind, it is not being kind
   to itself. My words are music and the
   music is words but sometimes the
   music is of the unsaid words concerning
   the things that always are to be....
   (6-7)

Percussionist Milford Graves' essay adds another voice to the chorus of the engagement:

   Black music is a living and experienced
   music and not one to be studied
   from any western intellectual source
   (textbooks, schools), that the only
   source is through actual spontaneous-improvised
   participation among our
   fellow black brothers to positively
   assemble and direct our feeling--visions
   that we have experienced in
   life. (17)

The first issue also includes a poem by Sun Ra, Larry A. Miller's impressions of contemporary "Rhythm N Blues," Jones' review of Pharoah Sanders' LP Tauhid, an index of JIHAD productions, and an "Exploitation Blues" poster on the back cover.

Stevie Wonder appears on the cover The Cricket's second issue. The first article, Stanley Crouch's "Black Song West," promotes unsung local artists. Crouch exposes the poor working conditions faced by trumpeter Bobby Bradford and other musicians in Los Angeles and the lack of venues for black artists in general. A devotional poem to Otis Redding by Gaston Neal precedes James T. Stewart's scholarly essay "Just Intonation and the New Black Evolutionary Music," in which Stewart discusses tonal qualities in the music of Ornette Coleman and blues singers to build a dichotomy between white and black music, and challenges the accuracy and "entire musical construction" of the Western tonal system (13). The second issue concludes with poem by Stewart ("The New Black Music"), Larry Neal's commentary on (and defense of) Ornette Coleman's Empty Foxhole LP, and a JIHAD catalog and subscription solicitation.