SOURCE: A review of The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 29, 1987, p. 6.

In the following review, Ramsey offers a mixed assessment of The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues.

When Amiri Baraka listens to music, he hears things that might escape us if we could not depend upon him to point them out with his eloquent insistence, indignation and anger. He hears political oppression, capitalist exploitation, racist duplicity and class struggle. The beauty in the works of the great jazz masters comes to him transformed through Marxist-Leninist dialectic into ideology and sociology. That may seem a grim and joyless route to music appreciation, but Baraka has been following it for more than a quarter of a century in poetry, plays, essays, reviews and album liner notes.

[The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues] is made up of work from each of...