Soundworks

“Offering a new way of thinking about black soundwork as an understanding of text, Anthony Reed makes a deep theoretical intervention in black studies by opening up the role of recordings in the black aesthetic avant-garde. The beauty and appeal of Soundworks lies in Reed's fresh focus on the records that allow us to hear the more ephemeral and unrecordable situation of blackness.” - Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

“Anthony Reed adds his instrument to the slowly swelling chorus of intently listening, jazzed readers and critics. We've gone from the veritable whisper to a scream, and now is the time to consider the black media concept we have been inhabiting. Reed argues for an ‘overhearing,’ a phonographic mode of what he terms disalienation. Baraka called it ‘word-music’ form. Whatever we term it, it remains Black soundwork. Give it a listen.” - Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation

"Reed’s work . . . clears needed space to think through Black creative production on its own terms, and likewise, to see its revolutionary and radical ambitions as immanent expressions of Black soundwork. Overall, Soundworks offers a rich and nuanced account of media and materiality that will aid scholars in rethinking the conceptual tools and labor with which we approach Black music." - Celeste Day Moore, Journal of Musicological Research

"[T]his book is a vital addition to the growing secondary literature about the jazz-poetry interface. . . . Reed is certainly qualified to address this topic, because in addition to being an established scholar he writes poetry and is a musician. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." - B. Wallenstein, Choice

"The most satisfying aspects of Soundworks are found in Reed’s analysis of the recordings and performances he examines. Moreover, it is these sections that contain Reed’s best writing. He seems able to match the tone of his analysis and description of the musical and poetic personalities of these artists, and his enthusiasm for their art is evident." - Duncan Heining, Popular Music

"A critical contribution to music, jazz, and Black studies in particular. . . . A richly poetic text, whose depth and subtlety rewards patient, repeated engagement." - Dan DiPiero, Journal of Popular Music Studies

"The conceptualization of soundwork as both a textual and auditory practice is perhaps the most revelatory contribution made by Reed’s book, for it is a concept whose salience extends beyond phonographic poetry or black radical performance. . . . Across the book, Reed balances heady theoretical imaginings of contingent practices of freedom with attentive close listening to mediated forms of black sound." - Jessica E. Teague, Contemporary Literature