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Such Sweet Thunder: Views on Black American Music.

Article Excerpt
Such Sweet Thunder: Views on Black American Music. Edited by Mark Baszak; photography by Edward Cohen. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Fine Arts Center, 2003. [xiii, 205 p. ISBN 0972678506. $25.] Illustrations.

In 1971, the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst embarked on what would become a three-decade long annual tribute to African American music, known as the Black Musicians Conference. Over the years, each conference featured academic panels, master classes and workshops, art collections, film showings, a Distinguished Achievement Award presentation, and a culminating concert. The proceedings of these conferences have been collected and published from time to time, but never so lavishly and lovingly as this fourth and final volume. Mark Baszak's deft editing and Edward Cohen's journalistic, black-and-white photography capture the annual event's essence, as well as the indelible stamp of festival coordinators and music scholars Frederick Tillis and Clarence Horace Boyer. As a book project, Such Sweet Thunder is luscious, a tribute to a noble project. Poignantly, though, the book also chronicles the Festival's culmination and demise. Baszak, in his introduction, challenges his readers to replicate and then build on the festival's impetus, although he does so without grappling with the difficult question of why this one had to end.

The length of the conference's run is remarkable. One of the lasting outcomes of the Civil Rights...

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