Music as the self. Music as politics. Music as power. Welcome to the all-black music journal ‘The Cricket’
‘The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians’
In his 1966 essay “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” music critic Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) wrote, “We are bodies responding differently, a (total) force, like against you. You react to push it, re-create it. Resist it. It is the opposite pressure producing (in this case) the sound, the music.” This idea of music as resistance is woven throughout the essay, and throughout Baraka’s work. For him, music went hand in hand with protest or any other political thought. He approached music criticism with an activist’s passion and a poet’s touch. “The elements that turn our singing into direct reflections of ourselves are heavy and palpable as weather,” he wrote. Music as the self. Music as politics. Music as power.
It’s not surprising that Baraka would take this belief to the page to create his own music journal — The Cricket: Black Music in Evolution — in 1968. Combining music criticism, poetry, essays, and reviews, the magazine, which published only four issues before folding, provided a revolutionary and boundary-blurring platform. The lines dividing art and politics, music criticism and poetry, and musician and author were erased, and music was examined through a wide-ranging historical, political, and artistic lens.
Named for a possibly apocryphal magazine published by enigmatic New Orleans musician Buddy Bolden in the 1930s, Cricket was founded by writers Baraka, Larry Neal, and A. B. Spellman. The editors’ note from the first issue made the magazine’s stance clear: “[Cricket] represents an attempt to provide Black History with a powerful historical and critical tool.” Like the jazz featured in its pages, Cricket flowed with an improvisational and experimental energy. Sun Ra’s poetry shared space in its pages with album reviews, an Ishmael Reed poem, a remembrance of Coleman Hawkins, and a gossip section on musicians’ comings and goings. It was all at once loud, quiet, immense, small, structured, and free. As writer and educator Chris Funkhouser wrote in the 2002 article “LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and ‘The Cricket’: Jazz and Poets’ Black Fire,” the magazine thrived on fluidity and experimentation: “musicians and painters writing essays and poetry, with poets reviewing music and writing prose.”
The magazine was a DIY affair. “We had a little electronic mimeograph machine, with an electronic stencil,” Baraka recalled in a 2000 interview. But the homemade aesthetics of the journal didn’t dull the message inside. It was a way to place black music in the context of a larger political movement. The Black Arts Movement, a cultural and artistic movement responding to the political, social, and economic factors affecting black America, was in full swing. There was no reason to leave music out of the equation. “The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians,” the editors wrote.
Cricket’s masthead read like a who’s who of the avant-garde jazz world: Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves — musicians who pushed the form to its edges. And because its mission rested so firmly on the idea that music was political, its writing pushed just as hard, often against the idea of selling out or profiting from music, which, at its core, was supposed to be about much more than money. Writer Sonia Sanchez’s poem in the magazine’s third issue called out Motown group the Supremes for selling out; in Cricket’s fourth issue, Jones’ poem “Integration Music,” which cautions against the conflation of art and financial success, invokes the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone; and the final issue also leveled this accusation at Albert Ayler.
Consider Albert Ayler. The saxophonist’s 1964 album Spiritual Unity plays like a fever dream. It’s all winding paths, riddles, and odd shapes trying to fit into even odder holes. Something aching to be put right, or maybe aching to be broken. It’s off-kilter, but somehow exactly what it’s supposed to be. Free jazz was reshaping the form, or maybe even trying to build a new form, a new understanding of what the music was and could be.
Four years later, Ayler would turn up in the pages of Cricket with his essay “To Mr. Jones I Had a Vision,” which reads as part religious ecstaticism, part chain letter, part UFO sighting, part desperate plea. He’d share space in the issue with a negative review of his latest album, New Grass, which reviewer Larry Neal called “a failure,” wondering if this latest attempt to meld R&B and jazz was an example of Ayler’s separation from his core audience: “If you speak to your Brothers and Sisters, to us who really love and care not just for you, but for us, you will be in fact universal.” Cricket felt free to explore the artist, give platform to the artist, and dismantle the artist all on the same page.
After putting out four issues, Cricket stopped publishing. “I think that we had gotten so deeply involved in political action, particularly around the whole National development of construct, that it became less and less possible,” explained Baraka. Looking back at the magazine now, it’s an uneven but powerful document. It frames music as a serious art form worthy of consideration. But it’s easy to see the cracks in its veneer. Funkhouser detailed these failings in his essay on the magazine, noting its “dimensions of chauvinism” and narrow scope, criticisms that marked the whole of the Black Arts Movement.
But artists like Baraka, Neal, and Spellman were carving out a space where they could consider the deeper implications of the music around them, a space where they could figure out how it fit into their bigger goals. It was messy and beautiful and raw, a brief moment in time for a movement that would go on to influence a generation of writers and artists. It was a publication of its time and, in a way, beyond its time. “The reason the magazine came out is because it needed to come out to do this,” Baraka said, “whatever that was.”
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