Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production(Refiguring American Music)

About the Book

In Soundworks Anthony Reed argues that studying sound requires conceiving it as process and as work. Since the long Black Arts era (ca. 1958-1974), intellectuals, poets, and musicians have defined black sound as 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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Black Sonic: Textuality  1
1. Voice Prints: Toward a Black Media Concept  23
2. Communities in Transition: A Poetics of Black Communism  61
3. Tomorrow is the Question! Amiri Baraka's Poetics for a Post-Revolutionary Age  103
4. Body/Language: The Semiotics and Poetics of Improvisation and Black Embodiment  143
Coda. No Simple Explanations  181
Notes  195
Bibliography  235
Index  251

About the Author :
Anthony Reed is Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing.

Review :
“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” - Margo Natalie Crawford, author of (Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics) “Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” - Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of (Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation) "Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." - Celeste Day Moore (Journal of Musicological Research) "[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - B. Wallenstein (Choice) "The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." - Duncan Heining (Popular Music) "A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." - Dan DiPiero (Journal of Popular Music Studies) “It is significant that Reed describes this work as recreation, and that he highlights the significance of remediation in Black soundwork. One of this book’s key innovations is that it is a media history of poetry, and an examination of poetry’s work as mediation.” - Sarah Dowling (Poetics) "The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." - Jessica E. Teague (Contemporary Literature)