Amiri Baraka - Black and Beautiful Soul and Madness (LP)

Deluxe edition, housed in a reverse board printed sleeve with printed inner sleeve. Three LPs came out on Jihad, the label Amiri Baraka ran out of his own house in Newark. Two of them - Sonny's Time Now and A Black Mass - entered the canon of the New Thing decades ago. The third stayed a rumour: a title traded between collectors, a track a radio DJ might drop once a year, a record far more people had heard about than heard. Original copies surface rarely and sell for three figures. Black and Beautiful... Soul and Madness is back, on vinyl for the first time since 1968. Baraka - still signing as LeRoi Jones - had returned to Newark after the Harlem Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School collapsed, and built Spirit House on Stirling Street with his wife Amina: part theatre, part meeting hall, part studio. This is where the album was cut, months after the city had burned in the summer of 1967. Jihad existed to put that work on record. The people making it thought of themselves, in Baraka's phrase, as cultural workers. The music is warmer and odder than the reputation suggests. The Jihad Singers - Freddie Johnson out front, Yusef Iman holding the bottom, Aireen Eternal, Leonard Cathcart and Gilbert Monk filling the middle - sing street-corner harmony that owes everything to Motown and to the doo-wop groups of a decade earlier. Beautiful Black Women was built on the frame of Smokey Robinson's Ooo Baby Baby. Underneath, congas and Russell Lyle's alto and flute keep the arrangements loose, closer to a rehearsal room than a session date. And over it, through it, sometimes against it, Baraka declaims - flat, insistent, pushing ahead of the beat in a cadence that would not be named for another fifteen years. That is the thing worth holding onto. This came out two years before the first Last Poets album, two before the Watts Prophets, two before Gil Scott-Heron walked into a studio. The form barely existed and here it is, fully assembled, on a record pressed by a poet for a Newark community centre. The politics are unbrokered and the rhetoric is of 1968, not of now - Baraka himself spent the rest of his life arguing with the man who made it. It remains a document with the temperature of the moment still in it. Reissued by Moved By Sound, a label that leaves copyright and publishing with artists and their families and takes only its share of the vinyl. That principle is why this took as long as it did: after a protracted rights situation the record is finally in production. Worth the wait. Recommended. "Calling all black people calling all black people, man woman child Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in Black people, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling you, calling all black people calling all black people, come in, black people, come on in." - Amiri Baraka