Holiday Book Trio

Each book in this trio takes a different avenue into its investigation of Black music history: Wesley Brown’s Blue in Green reimagines a week in the life of Miles Davis in novel form; The Cricket anthologizes the poetry, criticism, and position papers from Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal’s music magazine of the same name; and Ahmed Abdullah’s A Strange Celestial Road maps his life traveling with the Sun Ra Arkestra in memoir. But all three works delve deep into the transcendent pleasures of building artistic and political coalitions in late 20th-century New York—as well as the inevitable friction that arises from such intimate relational networks. The grit and fervor of the city buzzes through these books, as does the heady, hard-earned moral clarity of those who know just how much they depend on other people.

The Cricket was an experimental music magazine that grew out of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969. The publication ran poetry, position papers, music essays, and gossip, alongside concert and record reviews. Across these genres, it set out to critique the conservative jazz press, fostering critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and artists, and provide space for experimental writers (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) to devise new styles of music journalism. Blank Forms Editions’ recent anthology gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.”

Now out in paperback, following its hardcover release in October 2022, Blue in Green is a historical novel from Wesley Brown, who has been called “one hell of a writer” by James Baldwin, “wonderfully wry” by Donald Barthelme, and a “writer’s writer” by Ishmael Reed. Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of the New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis’s brief stint in custody, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis’s temper—fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse—reckons with her strict upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his Ferrari. 

In his captivating memoir A Strange Celestial Road, the first full-length account of life in the Arkestra by any of its members, Harlem-born trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah recounts two decades of traveling the spaceways with the inimitable composer, pianist, and big-band leader Sun Ra. Gigging everywhere from the legendary Bed-Stuy venue the East to the National Stadium in Lagos, Abdullah paints a vivid picture of the rise of loft jazz and the influence of Pan-Africanism on creative music, while capturing radical artistic and political developments across Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s. Richly illustrated with more than fifty pages of photographs and posters from Adger Cowans, Marilyn Nance, Val Wilmer, and others, A Strange Celestial Road interweaves the author’s own moving story—his battles with addiction, spiritual development, and life as a working class performer—with enthralling tales of tutelage under Cal Massey, collaborations with the likes of Ed Blackwell, Marion Brown, and Andrew Cyrille, and profound, occasionally confounding, mentorship by Sun Ra.