This is worth sharing. The words of James Baldwin have echoed across the decades as of late. The WBGO selection includes the following jazz inspired works:
Notes and Tones by Arthur R. Taylor (Da Capo Press)
Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis (Vintage Books)
Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever by Salim Washington and Farah Griffin (Thomas Dunne Books)
To Be, or Not…to Bop: Memoirs of Dizzy Gillespie by Dizzy Gillespie (Univ. of Minnesota Press)
Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams by Tammy Kernodle (Northeastern Univ. Press)
Black Music by Amiri Baraka (Akashic Books)
If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday by Farah Griffin (One World)
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings by James Baldwin (Vintage International)
Here’s the link to the WBGO article:
From the publisher’s site, notes on Baldwin’s collection:
ABOUT THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION
The Cross of Redemption is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form.
James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society.
Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, “If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.”
Also on the Penguin Random House website is an excerpt from the book:
The Cross of Redemption by James Baldwin
Four Square Miles of Noise 
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