Black Music is interesting because of its proximity to the moment. Written during the emergence of free jazz, while the scene was still volatile, it captures a live current. But that same closeness often becomes a weakness. Much of the writing feels prematurely definitive, trying to pin down something still in motion.
For example, the author casually dismisses Wayne Shorter for not being radical enough, seemingly content in Miles Davis’s second quintet. Well... he got that one wrong. Shorter would go on to create some of the most expansive and exploratory work in jazz. That failure of foresight reflects the book’s larger limits.
It reads more like a loose collection of essays than a focused critical work. There’s a recurring tendency to name-drop rather than engage, to gesture at ideas without developing them. Jones moves quickly between artists and scenes, often stopping just short of analysis. For anyone with a basic understanding of free jazz, much of it feels familiar. The writing hints at urgency, but rarely follows through.
Still, there are moments where the writing cuts through. Jones is most compelling when he shifts focus away from individual players and toward the broader stakes of the music. In these passages, jazz is not just a style but a historical force, shaped by and shaping Black life in America. It is memory, resistance, continuity, survival. These insights carry a clarity that is missing elsewhere, when the text gets lost in scene reportage and name-checking.
His critique of white, middlebrow jazz critics is also one of the few moments I found genuinely sharp and convincing. I loved reading this part and agreed with it completely. Jones pushes back against critics who approach jazz through the lens of detached, supposedly “objective” taste, ignoring the music’s political, racial, and historical dimensions. For Jones, this posture of neutrality is not just misguided: it’s ideological. It reinforces a framework where Black cultural expression is measured against white, bourgeois standards of value, and where commitment, anger, or urgency in the music is treated as excess rather than meaning.
I found this especially resonant because I’ve always felt a little turned off by overly technical or analytical approaches to jazz. There’s something in the music that asks to be felt before it’s dissected — something that resists being flattened into theory or reduced to form. Jones’s refusal to separate the music from the lives and struggles behind it reminded me why I care about it in the first place. These moments in the book felt honest, grounded, and politically clear in a way that much of the rest didn’t.