and America in the development of jazz. In this essay on the West African wordgriot, or “storyteller,” he points out that a griot was much more than an oral historian who transmitted traditional African values from one generation to another. A griot also expressed the extraordinary joy and inner strength felt by those who nevertheless suffered greatly at the hands of their oppressors. Baraka argues that jazz musicians are in their own way griot who smile while simultaneously conveying to listeners the profound suffering of dignified African Americans. Those African Americans’ lives, Baraka believes, are enriched by liberating music designed to remind them of their rich African heritage.

Baraka also directly links African tradition to the joyous “shouting” in African American churches, where people learn about both the Gospels and the “God Spell.” Jazz, which Baraka often calls “that music” or “our music,” has a mesmerizing effect on listeners. It elevates them while at the same time bringing them extraordinary bliss.

In an essay titled “Ritual and Performance,” Baraka effectively contrasts the performance of classical European music with the performance of jazz. On one hand, those learning to play classical European music can be taught how to hold their instrument, how to dress, and how to remain stoic on the stage. On the other hand, it is not sufficient for jazz musicians to learn how to play their instruments. They must also learn to feel the intensity of the music and adapt their performances based on the reactions of listeners. Improvisation is essential in jazz, while it is largely discouraged in performances of classical European music.

Baraka even associates the experience of performing or listening to jazz to “religious ecstasy.” With the exception of Bach, who created and performed religious music designed to fill an entire church with joyful sound and to provoke an intense emotional reaction from churchgoers, very few classical European composers strove to produce such a strong sense of ecstasy in their listeners. Baraka discusses at great length the myriad links between jazz and experiences of religion in African American churches. In traditional West African societies, from which most first-generation slaves were kidnapped and transported to America, people generally believe that the past, the present, and the future coexist. This is an alien concept to Americans of European descent, who consider time to be linear. In jazz and in traditional African American churches, however, the coexistence of various time frames serves to remind people of their place in an extremely old culture that must adapt once again to a changing world.

The title of this volume of essays, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music, is richly evocative. Like all great poets, Baraka is sensitive to the many levels of meaning that words possess. He is figuratively “digging” into the recordings and oral histories of major jazz musicians whom he never heard live. The word “digging” also evokes the meaning of “enjoying,” as in the expression “I am really digging it.”

Baraka was born in 1934 and therefore had to rely on recordings that were not always of the highest quality to experience the performance techniques of such influential jazz musicians as Scott Joplin and Bessie Smith. Although he recognized the significance of their contributions to early jazz, from ragtime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the blues of the 1920’s and 1930’s, Baraka also understood the harsh racism with which both artists had to deal during their years performing jazz. American opera houses of Joplin’s day refused to perform his great opera Treemonisha (pb. 1911, pr. 1972) not only because of the composer’s skin color but especially because its major characters are all African Americans. The first complete performance of Treemonisha took place in 1972, a full fifty-five years after Joplin’s death. Although Treemonisha is now considered to be the greatest American opera, Joplin’s contemporaries knew of him only as the composer of rags.

Racism even contributed to the death of Bessie Smith. On September 26, 1937, she suffered serious but not fatal injuries as a result of a car accident near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Ambulances came from Clarksdale’s hospital for whites and its hospital for African Americans. The ambulance drivers argued about who should take Smith to which hospital. The delay caused her to lose so much blood that her situation was hopeless when she was finally treated in Clarksdale’s hospital for African Americans.

Baraka describes well how jazz developed from ragtime to blues, swing, big band, bebop, cool jazz, hard bop, modal jazz, free jazz, jazz fusion, and experimental jazz, but he also reminds his readers that these categories refer only to general jazz trends and do not describe the genius of individual jazz musicians and composers. He reminds them as well that many great jazz musicians did not limit themselves to one form of jazz but rather kept recreating themselves. Miles Davis, for example, began by performing bebop and then evolved into an original performer of cool jazz, hard bop, and eventually electric jazz.

Baraka laments that white record producers tried to make jazz more acceptable to white listeners by releasing more records by rather unimaginative white jazz musicians and fewer records by highly creative African American jazz musicians. In his essay “The American Popular Song,” he also observes that, in the first “talking film,” The Jazz Singer (1927), a white actor named Al Jolson sings supposedly jazz songs in blackface. It is possible but not very likely that Al Jolson in blackface made jazz more acceptable to racists in 1927, but this film offends modern moviegoers because of its overt racism.

There is much to recommend in this excellent volume of essays. In his theoretical essays, Baraka describes very well the profound likenesses between black African music, traditions, and spirituality and jazz as composed and performed by generations of talented African American jazz musicians. He also describes very well the true originality of many famous and some unjustly neglected African American jazz musicians, from Scott Joplin to the present.