In 1971, French jazz critics Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli co-wrote Free Jazz/Black Power,
a treatise on the racial and political implications of jazz and jazz
criticism. It remains a testimony to the long ignored encounter of
radical African American music and French left-wing criticism. Carles
and Comolli set out to defend a genre vilified by jazz critics on both
sides of the Atlantic by exposing the new sound's ties to African
American culture, history, and the political struggle that was raging in
the early 1970s. The two offered a political and cultural history of
black presence in the United States to shed more light on the dubious
role played by jazz criticism in racial oppression.
This analysis
of jazz criticism and its production is astutely self-aware. It
critiques the critics, building a work of cultural studies in a time and
place where the practice was virtually unknown. The authors reached
radical conclusions--free jazz was a revolutionary reaction against
white domination, was the musical counterpart to the Black Power
movement, and was a music that demanded a similar political commitment.
The impact of this book is difficult to overstate, as it made readers
reconsider their response to African American music. In some cases it
changed the way musicians thought about and played jazz. Free Jazz / Black Power
remains indispensable to the study of the relation of American free
jazz to European audiences, critics, and artists. This monumental
critique caught the spirit of its time and also realigned that
zeitgeist.
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