“A Couple of Reams of Paper”: Black Arts and The Revolutionary Written Words of ‘The Cricket’
I always find myself very fascinated by musicians that put pen to paper and discuss music and its cultural implications in prose (see: my post on Vivien Goldman from last year). I still remember when we first got The Cricket collection in stock at the shop a couple years ago. Its cover is striking, stopping you in your tracks with its wall of blinding yellow. The font of the title is a bold sans-serif and feels as if it was cut out of construction paper. I also recall us struggling to keep it in-stock. The second it was there on the shelves, I’d blink and it was gone.
The design of The Cricket was absolutely essential. As Geeta Dayal notes, The Cricket was “in contrast to [the jazz magazine] Down Beat’s slick photography and copious advertising.” Mimeographed and circulated at around five-hundred copies, The Cricket stood as an underground sounding board for Black musicians to discuss and critique Black music, literature, and political ideas, eschewing the glossy veneer of larger publications and avoiding the overabundance of white writers interjecting their opinions of Black arts. Overall, The Cricket saw music especially as the pathway to liberation, stating in the first issue, “The true voices of Black Liberation have been the Black musicians. They were the first to free themselves of the concepts and sensibilities of the oppressor. The history of Black Music is a history of a peoples’ attempt to define the world on their own terms.”
The Cricket published four issues between the years 1968 and 1969, edited by Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, and A.B. Spellman, capturing critical years of the Black Arts Movement. Its issues focused primarily on the New Music, which more mainstream jazz publications weren’t engaging with at that time. Sun Ra, Milford Graves, Albert Ayler, and Cecil Taylor’s words all graced the pages of the magazine, from Sun Ra’s cosmic poetry to Grave’s essay criticizing the studying of Black music from “any western intellectual source.” The Cricket’s contributors came from all over, including New York, Chicago, DC, Cleveland, Newark, and even South Africa. The contents of each issue included contributions such as album and live reviews, poetry, essays, and gossip, forgoing categorization in favor of eclectic expression.
A.B. Spellman’s preface for the Blank Forms compendium of The Cricket beautifully outlines the context and history for the birth of the magazine. He writes, “By the late 1960s, many of the Black intellectuals and artists active in the era’s burgeoning arts scene found ourselves compelled by the Black Power movement rising in the South and the clarion that was Malcolm X, and we began to reintegrate ourselves into the African American communities out of which we had moved…In sum, we soaked ourselves in Blackness, in the name of cultural nationalism.” The Cricket was a place of reclaiming Black space and Black identity. The magazine came up around the same time as other artistic endeavors to promote Black art and music in the United States, some coming to mind such as the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Black Jazz Records, Black Artists Group, Black Fire, and many others. It was also in step with other Black Arts Movement era magazines, and those that pre-dated the movement, such as Beau Cocoa, Umbra, Dasein, The Free Lance, and Liberator.
One of the introductory essays in the Blank Forms collection, written by David Grundy, highlights many compelling aspects of The Cricket’s writing and its history, a couple jumping out at me as I read. One was that each of the editors were poets first, and the magazine featured a blending of musical style, language, and standards of criticism to create a unique approach to music writing. As Grundy wrote, the pieces were “drawing on the phrasing and timbre of AAVE as much as they were conventional pieces of music writing.” Doing so created both an aesthetic change in music criticism, and ideally, a broader societal change as well.
The other point Grundy highlighted that struck me, as someone who has firsthand experience in Western classical environments, was his description of the contributions by musician-writer James T. “Jimmy” Stewart. Stewart provided in-depth musical analyses that were uncommon at the time in a critical magazine (and still is somewhat unheard of to this day). Musical analyses certainly have more of an association with Western classical music. Stewart’s analyses, specifically one about Ornette Coleman and just intonation, explored how concepts created within the context of Western classical music, such as “blue notes,” were “more than mere secondary technical features; inserted into ‘the western musical complex,’ they were ‘the aesthetic evocation of a non-white people, a stylized equivalent of a distinctive tonal orientation.’” As I hinted at above when mentioning the essay from Milford Graves, there was certainly a through line in The Cricket of Black artists grappling with how genres such as jazz and blues were framed in Western classical settings, and how to change the script so that these genres could be defined on their own terms, in the context of Black arts and history.
I want to come full circle to The Cricket’s design once more, which was printed on the Gestetner mimeograph machine. A.B. Spellman described the machine as “clumsy, extremely messy — you got blue ink on all of your clothes; blue ink soaked into the flesh of your hands for days. But with a mimeograph, a couple of reams of paper, a good stapler, you could have yourself a publication. We didn’t need no stinkin’ Internet.” As has been the theme with a few of my blog posts so far this year, Spellman alludes to the power of DIY methods in bring art and change into society. While the Internet has had positive effects in circulating political thought and bringing together those in marginalized communities, The Cricket proves that the tried-and-true method of radical print forms were effective in the past, and are still powerful to this day.
All of my words here are simply an introduction, a gateway into the writing found between the pages of The Cricket. If you want to read each issue and get the fullest sense of how Black musicians engaged with their own work and the art of their contemporaries, the Blank Forms collection is out there. Chicago folks can grip it at the new Torn Light location, and I saw a copy of it a couple weeks ago at Downbound Books for the Cincinnati crowd.
– Hannah Blanchette
July 11, 2024 | Blog