Between the Night and Its Music
Between the Night and Its Music
by A.B. Spellman (B.A. '56)
Jazz critic and poet A.B. Spellman’s latest collection of poems are sensual selections that explore the relationship between Black collective conscious, music, and dance.
About the Author:
ALFRED BENNETT (A. B.) SPELLMAN is both a founding member of the Black Arts Movement and one of the fathers of modern jazz criticism. Before beginning his thirty-year tenure at the National Endowment of the Arts, Spellman was an active poet, radio programmer, and essayist in New York, the poet-in-residence at the Morehouse College in Atlanta, and a visiting lecturer at Emory, Rutgers, and Harvard universities. He has also been a regular jazz commentator for National Public Radio and has published numerous books and articles on the arts, including The Beautiful Days, a chapbook of poems first published by the Poets Press in 1965, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, a classic in the field of jazz criticism that is now available as Four Jazz Lives, and the book of poems, Things I Must Have Known (2008). Poetry selections from Things I Must Have Known form the basis of the musical work, A Passion for Bach & Coltrane by Jeff Scott, whose work as a member of the Imani Winds ensemble is represented in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
What People Are Saying About the Book:
"Between the Night and Its Music is a revelation from an architect of the Black Arts Movement. This is a book to read and re-read for the music it helps us hear, and its own music."
- Anthony Reed, author of Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing
"This collection of A. B. Spellman's poetry captures the 'sensuality of a collective consciousness.' Spellman uses these words to describe the Black Arts Movement (the movement that set his poetics in motion). This necessary book shows that his entire poetic flow has been a profound movement of words that create the sensuality, music, and quiet of a Black collective consciousness."
- Margo Natalie Crawford, University of Pennsylvania
Find the book here.