"Black talk" of course is black music is babble - oral/aural vs.
white (Western Civilization) "linear semantics" as the author
demonstrates several very un-hip times per page of this hodgepodge
study of the relationship between music and nearly everything else
in Black America from slavery on up, up, up. Sentences like "They
had already accepted the oral orientation of nonanalysis and were
learning how to apply the concept of actionality" abound as the
author uses repetition and sociological gobbledygook to reconcile
contradictions (he'd call it dialecticism) to arrive at the
tautological center where anything goes. Every overworked culture
hero from Marshall McLuhan to Ludwig Wittgenstein (not to mention
Stokeley and Abbie) puts in at least a brief appearance in a vain
attempt to lend erudition to what is essentially a slight history
of the development of jazz, weak on soul, rhythm-and-blues, and
nearly everything else. (Kirkus Reviews)
Black Music--whether it be jazz, blues, r&b, gospel, or
soul--has always expressed, consciously or not, its African "oral"
heritage, reflecting the conditions of a minority culture in the
midst of a white majority. "Black Talk" is one of those rare books
since LeRoi Jones's "Blues People" to examine the social function
of black music in the diaspora; it sounds the depths of experience
and maps the history of a culture from the jazz age to the
revolutionary outbursts of the 1960s. Ben Sidran finds radical
challenges to the Western, white literary tradition in such varied
music as Buddy Bolden's loud and hoarse cornet style, the call and
response between brass and reeds in a swing band, the emotionalism
of gospel, the primitivism of Ornette Coleman, and the cool ethic
of bebop. "The musician is the document," says Sidran. "He is the
information himself. The impact of stored information is
transmitted not through records or archives, but through the human
response to life."
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