Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production

"Soundworks takes the many recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians associated with the long Black Arts era (the late-1950s through mid-1970s) as the occasion to reframe the object of black sound studies as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological forces. Through new interpretations of Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka, and the disparate experimental modes of "free jazz" practiced by Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, Jeanne Lee, and Jayne Cortez, Soundworks recovers the visionary world-making impulses encoded in the poetics of experimental practice and the alternative forms of communal and individual being to which those practices correspond". Anthony Reed takes the recorded collaborations between African American poets and musicians such as Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Cecil Taylor, and Charles Mingus to trace the overlaps between experimental music and poetry and the ways in which intellectuals, poets, and musicians define black sound as a radical aesthetic practice. In Soundworks, Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as a process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958&;1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as a radical aesthetic practice. Through their recorded collaborations as well as the accompanying interviews, essays, liner notes, and other media, they continually reinvent black sound conceptually and materially. Soundwork is Reed&;s term for that material and conceptual labor of experimental sound practice framed by the institutions of the culture industry and shifting historical contexts. Through analyses of Langston Hughes &'s collaboration with Charles Mingus, Amiri Baraka&;s work with the New York Art Quartet, Jayne Cortez&;s albums with the Firespitters, and the multimedia projects of Archie Shepp, Matana Roberts, Cecil Taylor, and Jeanne Lee, Reed shows that to grasp black sound as a radical philosophical and aesthetic insurgence requires attending to it as the product of material, technical, sensual, and ideological processes.