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

African American Review, Summer-Fall, 2003 by Christopher Funkhouser

   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.

Otis Redding is shown on the cover of issue number three, which begins with a lengthy letter from A. B. Spellman (then recently located to Atlanta from New York City). Spellman's letter covers a range of topics having to do with geo-cultural livelihood and "the hole contemporary black 'jazz' musicians are struggling with" (2). He draws "a death picture of the New Music among black folk in Atlanta" and bemoans his experience because "Black music is an always has been essentially a call (to action) and an answer (movement), and audience feedback ... " (3-6). Spellman's piece is followed by a series of poems: Sonia Sanchez's "Memorial," about the Supremes selling out; a pros poem/review by Clyde Halisi which casts Sun Ra's group spirit with words; and Don L. Lee's poem "blackmusic/a beginning," about the Beach Boys taking notes listening to Pharoah Sander and, again, the Supremes selling out. James T. Stewart's essay "Revolutionary Black Music in the Total Context of Black Distension" focuses on the process of invention in form. "Music is process in motion," Stewart writes, "and it is the best paradigm of nature and movement and reality we have to teach us, why we must change reality And because all art supports and substantiates the values of its people, nationalism, the ideological redact of our culture validates our art" (13). Milford Graves' essay "Music Workshop" explains the need to define and to build a "strong economic program for the Black Arts" (17). Graves celebrates the publication efforts of the subculture: "We must have black music literature like LeRoi Jones' BLACK MUSIC, and THE CRICKET magazine, to uplift the morale of the black musicians, books, magazines, leaflets, etc. that will guide black musicians and people in a positive direction" (18). Sun Ra's poem "Music the Neglected Plane of Wisdom" is followed by Stanley Crouch's essay on Horace Tapscott. Crouch dilates the concerns in his previous article about the corrupt conditions for musicians: Tapscott had been "whiteballed" by the local musicians' union, who made it law "that anyone known to be playing with him would not be able to get work in any club" (22). The Cricket's poem "Inquiry" is a repeating one-line chant: "DO YOU THINK THE MAFIA KILLED OTIS REDDING??????????????????????????????" (28). Norman Jordan's poem "The Silent Prophet," a eulogy for John Coltrane; "Harlem Column #1," a poem by the painter Ben Caldwell; and a gossip page conclude the issue.