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

Two quotes drawn from pages of The Cricket, mimeographed music magazine edited by LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and A. B. Spellman in 1968 and 1969, most aptly reflect the intent of the magazine's vision of inter-arts solidarity, aspiration, and attitude. James Stewart's essay "Revolutionary Black Music in the Total Context of Black Distension" proclaims, "Black art is movement, being and becoming. Black art is fluid. Black creation is flux. Speech, poetry, dance and music" (Cricket 3: 14). And considering a new album by Albert Ayler in the final issue of the publication, Larry Neal writes:

   Music can be one of the strongest cohesives towards consolidating
   a Black Nation. The music will not survive locked into bullshit
   categories. James Brown needs to know Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Cecil
   Taylor, and Pharoah Sanders.... Implied here is the principle of
   artistic and national unity; a unity among musicians, our heaviest
   philosophers, would symbolize and effect a unity in larger
   cultural and political terms. Further, there should be more
   attempts to link the music to other areas of the Black Arts
   movement.

   LIKE: REVOLUTIONARY CHOREOGRAPHERS LIKE ELMO POMARE,
      JOHN PARKS, JUDI DEARING, TALLY BEATY SHOULD BE
      CHECKING OUT CECIL TAYLOR'S MUSIC WHICH IS HEAVILY
      POSITED ON DANCE CONCEPTS.

      HOW DOES POETRY AND MUSIC OPERATE IN THE CONTEXT
      OF POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS GATHERINGS.

      PHAROAH NEEDS A TEMPLE.
      SUN RA IS A BEAUTIFUL BLACK INSTITUTION.

      POETS SHOULD WRITE SONGS. (Cricket 4: 38-39)

While these two transmissions most fittingly reflect the mission of The Cricket, nearly everything that appeared in the magazine functioned to promote music as a cultural nucleus. Though only four issues were produced, The Cricket--subtitled Black Music in Evolution--vitally represented and upheld accelerated standards for progressive art by insisting on a flow between various creative forms after bebop became mainstream.

Alternative forms of Black protest music emerging subsequent to bebop significantly influenced writers contemporaneously engaged in the process of provoking cultural evolution and revolution. With the extended improvisations of jazz, the unfettered conceptual organization and whole experience of new veins of the music became a tribal chorus that initiated a breakthrough point for artists working in other forms of expression. In the 1960s, progressive interpretations of this music helped to tear away restraint away from a group of writers who assertively formed their own events, publications (printed, audio, and filmic), and institutions to provide an outlet for honest, insightful dialog and expression amongst their African American peers and communities. Bandleader/composer/pianist Sun Ra's poem "Music the Neglected Plane of Wisdom" resounds the intensity that music was felt to embody:

   Music is existence, the key to universal
   Language

   Because it is the universal language ...
   .....

   Freedom of Speech is Freedom of
   Music.
   Music is not material. Music is spiritual.
   Music is a living soul force. (Cricket 3: 20)

LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal were forward-looking writers who by 1968 had already co-edited Black Fire: An Anthology of African American Writing. The pair identified directly with musicians, shared beliefs and concerns with them. Jones and Neal sought to share resources, space, and the page with peers they viewed as "the priests of pure wisdom, in essence the voice of a people" (Cricket 1: a). Closely aligned with radical jazz music and musicians, they knew the political and cultural significance of Black music as a rejection of an oppressive European colonialist mind set. Jones's books Blues People (1961) and Black Music (1967), and various essays by Neal in The Cricket and elsewhere, demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the subject. Stylistically, their words in all forms embody mighty verbal jazz, an excursion in tune with the immediate world. Music was experience-provoking, "the consciousness, the expression of where we are" (Jones, Black Music 210). Spirit House, started by Jones on his return to Newark from Harlem in 1968, became the geographical nexus of the JIHAD Productions arts collective ambitiously spearheaded by Jones and Neal (JIHAD was the publisher of The Cricket).

In homage, upon Neal's death in 1981, Baraka describes the objectives of their effort:

   [to] raise the level of black struggle to a
   more intense expression.

      We wanted an art that would actually
   reflect black life and its history
   and legacy of resistance and struggle.

      We wanted an art that was as black
   as our music. A blues poetry (a la
   Langston and Sterling); a jazz poetry; a
   funky verse full of exploding antiracist
   weapons. A bebop and new music
   poetry that would scream and taunt
   and rhythm--attack the enemy into
   submission.

      An art that would educate and
   unify black people in our attack on an
   anti-black racist America.

      We wanted a mass art, an art that
   could "Monkey" out the libraries and
   "Boogaloo" down the street in tune
   with popular revolution....

      We wanted the oral tradition in our
   work, we wanted the sound, the
   pumping rhythm of black music. The
   signifying drawl of the blues. Larry
   incorporated it all into his work. (in
   Neal, Visions ix-xii)

Further, Baraka writes of The Cricket: "... wish we had it today.... they were significant in that for the first time, black people were defining their art, their aesthetic, their social aesthetic and aesthetic ideology, not someone else" (xii-xv). The collaboratively edited magazine shows a fruitful and potent identification among individuals and between these individuals and the larger society around them. They would build and work within a network, striving to break down barriers between and among artistic forms, transmitting radical viewpoints and considerations far beyond their own physical space.

The magazine's title was borrowed from a music gossip newspaper printed at the turn of the century by New Orleans cornet master Buddy Bolden. The Cricket's contents--one hundred thirty-five pages of writing in total--reflect the hip, improvised come-to-consciousness of Nationalism, using the perspective of the music being created within it as a base. It is an atypical music magazine, incorporating an abundance of poetry, short plays, and blended forms with essays and reviews. The quality of the printing is raw, and the magazine's typographical "look" shifts slightly between the first two issues and the third, and then again in the fourth. The first issue consists of randomly colored pages, the typeface is not consistent, and nearly half the original copies of the journal I have seen are missing at least one page insertion. The first three issues of The Cricket are fairly compact in terms of their page count; the fourth issue is as large as the first three combined.

The editorial in the first issue of The Cricket spells out the publication's inspiration: "The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians. They were the first to free themselves from the concepts and sensibilities of the oppressor." Jazz and its innovations in this era propelled the instincts of poets Jones and Neal, inspiring them to galvanize the experience they knew to be true to their lives and culture. Their initial editorial emphasizes that

   we must bring all Black Art back into
   the community, putting it at the core of
   the developing black consciousness.
   The Cricket represents an attempt to
   provide Black Music with a powerful
   historical and critical tool. In assuming
   this responsibility, we are saying to the
   world that no longer will we as Black
   Men allow the white sensibility to
   dominate our lives. It is the responsibility
   of black musicians and writers to
   finally make a way for themselves.

Intending to support a cultural revolution, The Cricket sought to use "the force of the music and the black poem (rhythm and blues) to blow them away, to blow the white thing out of them, and take control of their own thing" (1: a-b). Through trans-disciplinary artistic collaborations, The Cricket integrated the energy of various musicians: Sun Ra, the percussionist Milford Graves, and pianist Cecil Taylor are listed as advisors to the magazine.

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.

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.

Ben Caldwell's cover image on the fourth volume shows a pair of musicians blowing, and overtly demonstrates the inter-arts flexibility of The Cricket, as Caldwell's contribution is in a completely different form than in Issue 3. The revolutionary journey demands expansive mental and expressive efforts, though it is not without play and colloquial moments, as illustrated by the black-on-white title-page of the essay "Trippin'--A Need for Change," Mtume's opening blast in the fourth and final issue of The Cricket. Mtume begins by stating that "the Black musician must, as any other revolutionary artist, be a projector whose message reflects the values of the culture from which his creation owes its existence" (1). Clearly, as editors of an arts periodical, Jones and Neal, with their own "do it yourself"-for-and-from-your-people production ethic, successfully achieved this objective. The Cricket blended traditional senses of what a magazine is with a contemporary, instinctive, polemical/by any means necessary aesthetic and awareness. "Trippin'" asserts a redefinition for the music. Mtume writes, "We ... have as an act of self-determination chosen to define our music as 'Trippin', as opposed to using the word Jazz, for that is what the artist does when he plays and involves us in his journey in search of new sounds, new colors, and new realities beyond the comprehensions of this dimension" (2).

Mtume's essay effectively sums up the impetus for the late '60s' collaborations between Jones and Neal, American Black Nationalist activists and writers whose poetry and poetics pronounced the spirit and intentions of revolutionary arts. Their efforts ventured into powerful new artistic and social territory; their endeavors were bold moves toward implementing transformation on a collective human scale. Yet in an ironic sense, the "Trippin'" motif, in effect announcing the final issue, also unintentionally indicates or foreshadows what soon resulted, that the force fell over; their project-at-large was not to proceed in this form. Baraka has expressed regret that their focus turned to less creative areas: "We had gotten so deeply immersed in the political aspect of it [Black Nationalism] that really the kind of edifying things like The Cricket were let slip.... We left that to concentrate on public education and the school systems. These were correct decisions to a certain extent, but to let go of the culture work to the extent which we did was an error" (Interview).

The words in "Integration Music," by Jones (now named Imamu Ameer Baraka), wail about selling out:

   Re: Jimi Hendrix
   Sly & F.S.
   5m Dim

      The principle is the same as
   Guess Who Went Out To Lunch. It is
   for the money#! But for the feeling (as
   money. Money as feeling, or, more
   clearly, Money, as a way of life.
   Fahamu?) Money, here, and "success"
   are interchangeable. Success in a particular
   vein. JH, of course, being an
   actual freak. The rest as artfull
   dodgers, from real, all the way back
   into white shadows. (3)

Larry Neal's beautiful poems for Monk and review of Pharoah Sanders' LP Karma further develop a poetics of life and language, in and of music, "the sum total of a people's song" ("Monk" 7). A performance review describes the scenarios faced, the archetypes presented in unison at a Sun Ra concert: "The brothers move about the stage, changing instruments, blowing, beating, shaking. And the two sisters: dancing, singing, keep you geared, take you where the band is headed" ("Karma" 10). Roger Riggins' poem "Scenes: Basic Makeup of the Music," in step with the overall intent of The Cricket, proclaims:

   The western aesthetic
   Falls
   & angels
   take forms
   that represent
   the beauty of
   our
   creation (13)

James Stewart's essay "A Consideration of the Art of Ornette Coleman" describes how Coleman's methods and aesthetic are a part of the Black Revolution:

   Let us say that this artist has caught
   some glint of the conception he is
   attempting to actualize. He has
   worked it out and through a particular
   instrument. Then he relinquishes that
   instrument and taking up a totally different
   and unfamiliar instrument proceeds
   to apply the working out of his
   conception on the new instrument,
   attacking his ignorance of that instrument's
   mechanism alone, without any
   previous knowledge of the procedure
   of its mechanics or of its methodology.
   Imposing, in fact, his own methodology
   on the instrument. This is the sui
   generis Black artist in the new Black
   revolutionary music. (17)

This model of process, artists forsaking their primary instrument to attend in other modes of expression, is evident throughout the content and intent of The Cricket: musicians and painters writing essays and poetry, with poets reviewing music and writing prose.

Albert Ayler contributes a chain letter within his missive "To Mr. Jones--I Had A Vision." His personal visions (of Biblical proportion) are transmitted alongside surprisingly didactic and long quotes from the Bible, urging readers to print pamphlets of the letter. Among the other poems/writings/reviews included in the last issue of The Cricket are: Riggins brief elegy for Coleman Hawkins ("Respect"), Askia Muhammed Toure's "Eulogy for Tommy," Baraka's "Rock Group" (mocking The Beatles and their fans), Willie Kgositile's "Mbaqanga" (describing how pennywhistle music and the dance that accompanies it function as essentials to South African culture), Ibn Pori's expose on the locations for creative activism in Detroit (similar reports from Cleveland, Newark, and San Francisco also appear), and Neal's negative yet instructive review of Ayler's album New Grass, which reminds the reader of Ayler's influence ("he really blew our minds, opening us up to not only new possibilities in music, but in drama ant poetry as well"), then describes the "failure" apparent on New Grass (37). The final blast of the magazine describes the scene at a Pharoah Sanders concert in Newark, resounding with design, praise, and a question:

   Full spirit, of the holy Blackman
   (Pharoah-Leon) in the air. Everybody
   rocked, back and forth feeling good.
   The Spirit was inside us. Pharoah started
   dancing, and we camel walked.
   Images of red and green turn up in
   your heart warm Sun. Pointing constantly
   past, what is seen or felt, turn it
   into light. Heavy nigger conversations
   on Howard St. The sound(s), hums,
   moans. All these together. The experience
   of Blackman in this country from
   past, present, future. The finders, innovators,
   reach for. All in one wave. The
   self with others....

      For all times, These beings are
   priests, creators of (all) that breathes,
   new looking cities. Pharoah Sanders,
   James Brown, Jr. Walker, Sun Ra, Leon
   Thomas, Spirit House Poets in they old
   reading days had what everybody has
   picked up on to use. Voices, music,
   motion, chants in the dark. The beginning.
   When will they come back with it
   again stretched out beyond that? (Reed
   64)

A poem by Sun Ra, "There," alongside his photograph, is presented in broadside (or poster) style on the back cover.

The editors of The Cricket connected with contemporary, innovative interpretations of jazz. It was their main artistic inspiration, the axis around which the magazine and their poetry were built. The fact that they believed in something so intensely--something beyond their own thing--that it became the driving force for something else so creatively potent, remains impressive today. Unfortunately, few magazines exist that feature writers cultivating a body of thought focused on an art form alternative to their own.

Ultimately, The Cricket might be criticized for the same reasons other aspects of Nationalism or the Black Arts Movement have been: dimensions of chauvinism and "hero-worshipping" (Autobiography 323-27). Moreover, the magazine's polemical force ("unity form") may have been too narrow in scope (Cricket 4: 40). Baraka has critiqued and moved away from these tendencies himself in subsequent years. Importantly, beyond simply casting The Cricket as "Black Nationalist," one must acknowledge that powerful insight and discussion are contained within its pages; its contents are extremely informative. People looking to practice or realize how "real" connections are made and understood between parallel arts communities and social groups can benefit from the example of this magazine. Baraka expands his theory on this need in "Notes on Lou Donaldson & Andrew Hill," in the final issue of The Cricket:

   What is necessary is constant effort at
   achieving a total. At achieving something
   New. Make it New is attributed
   to Ezra Pound is Eastern. It is the
   African (and Sufi) explanation of why
   life, even though contained by an endless
   cycle, or not contained, is an endless
   cycle, can be, is worthwhile, i.e.
   make it new and lo and behold
   KARMA (digit???). (46)

To animate human issues, to make them alive through publications and gatherings, is essential. Thought and inspiration, in the best cases, lead to action. Action is always essential. Baraka's work in this sphere continues to this day; he repeatedly stresses his view that there are places now just like Newark was in 1967. Creative people everywhere can and need to make progress by responding to their own surroundings on their own terms. Presently, Baraka and various associates produce the Unity and Struggle newspaper. He and his wife Amina host various activist meetings and arts events at their home. Ras Baraka, their son, is a political leader as well as an editor and poet who co-hosts programs at a poetry cafe in Newark. These nonstop efforts by the Barakas are completely vital for regional arts and cultural awareness.

The Cricket may be, as Nathaniel Mackey recently told me, "a blink of an eye" in Baraka's career (meaning it is not widely known because of its brief existence). Yet it is, finally, a valuable moment. The Cricket inspired black artists to express themselves using jazz's informal yet expansive methods in language. The magazine provided an outlet for their voices, enabling innovations and freedoms in written form. At points, musicians themselves take on language as vehicle. For awhile, the poets and musicians were trippin" together, living "Black Music in Evolution." The Cricket helped to promote innovative projections of art in sync with a revolutionary movement. The magazine made advances by trumpeting poetic articulations and shifting cultural formulations. If enough people were to share a common extra-poetic inspiration, this type of collaboration today--in any location where arts and culture are thriving, and people share passionate beliefs ... and/or online--would be a worthwhile endeavor. Since so many poets are combining forces with musicians in performance, why aren't more people working together on inter-arts magazines, pooling resources to co-create visionary publications?

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. The Autobiography of Leroi Jones. New York: Freundlich, 1984.

--. Personal interview. 21 June 2000.

Baraka, Imamu Ameer. "Integration Music." Cricket 4 (1969): 3.

--. "Notes on Lou Donaldson & Andrew Hill." Cricket 4 (1969): 46.

Crickets. "Inquiry." Cricket 3 (1969): 28.

Crouch, Stanley. "Black Song West: Horace Tapscott & The Community Cultural Orchestra." Cricket 3 (1969): 22.

Graves, Milford. "Milford Graves." Cricket 1 (1968): 17.

--. "Music Workshop." Cricket 3 (1969): 17-18. Jones, Leroi. Black Music. New York: Morrow, 1967.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Personal interview. 9 June 2000.

Mtume. "Trippin'--A Need for Change." Cricket 4 (1969): 1-2.

Neal, Larry. "Karma/Pharoah Sanders." Cricket 4 (1969): 10.

--. "Monk at Count Basie's." Cricket 4 (1969): 7.

--. "New Grass/Albert Ayler." Cricket 4 (1969): 37-39.

--. Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings. Ed. Michael Schwartz. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1989.

Ra, Sun. "Music the Neglected Plane of Wisdom." Cricket 3 (1969): 20.

--. "My Music Is Words." Cricket 1 (1968): 6-7.

Reed, Ishmael. "Aide Denies LBJ Called Pope 'A Dumb Cunt.'" Cricket 4 (1969): 64.

Riggins, Roger. "Scenes: Basic Makeup of the Music." Cricket 4 (1969): 13.

Spellman, A. B. "Letter from Atlanta." Cricket 3 (1969): 2-6.

Stewart, James T. "A Consideration of the Art of Ornette Coleman." Cricket 4 (1969): 17.

--. "Just Intonation and the New Black Evolutionary Music." Cricket 2 (1968): 13.

--. "Revolutionary Black Music in the Total Context of Black Distension." Cricket 3 (1969): 13-14.

Christopher Funkhouser teaches in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology, edits the Newark Review and We Press, and serves as webmaster for amiribaraka.com.