The music Book

Mainly interested in the essays, real refreshing considering the dearth of radical interpretation of jazz music. figured id read this instead of barakas earlier work on the subject so i could catch him in the marxist stage of his theoretical development. it helped me flesh out a lot of history of the scenes, but after a bit there was some diminishing returns and baraka seemed to be making the same points (fusion as commercialization of hard bop). part of this is possibly due to the collection being across a couple different mediums and him just trying to get the same framework across to a different audience, but it starts to add up. at times he gets quite contradictory considering his treatment of davis in the (new york times? certainly a strange place for a marxist leninist to be writing) interview in which he has nothing but praise despite previously lambasting all the genres davis performed. an excessive focus on genre may be a fault in the work, especially with the tendency of jazz performers to cross these boundaries routinely throughout their careers. not to mention the whole crouch reference baraka likes to bring up. i wonder what he would have to say of crouch's protégés the marsalis brothers and the sort of coddling up to the state academic apparatus they've made a career off of. is this "tailing europe"?