Black music is more than a sonic history: it is a living archive of memory, spirituality, resistance, and vision. This book offers a critical and narrative journey through more than a century of African American music, following a timeline that is not merely chronological, but deeply cultural, social, and existential. From work songs in the Southern plantations to the cosmic beats of contemporary Afro-diasporic electronic music, the volume moves decade by decade through the aesthetic, political, and spiritual turning points of Black music. Each chapter illuminates a period, a context, and above all, key figures—celebrated, forgotten, and emerging—each portrayed through a blend of narrative and critical storytelling that brings together biography, historical context, personal poetics, and discography. This is neither an encyclopedia nor an exhaustive timeline: it is an emotional and cultural map, a polyphonic narrative in which jazz, gospel, blues, soul, funk, rap, house, the avant-garde, and spiritual music call and respond to one another. The author builds portraits that serve as sonic tableaux: from John Coltrane to Kendrick Lamar, Charles Mingus to Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley to Prince, Marvin Gaye to Sun Ra, and Nina Simone to Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu.
Nicola Gaeta (Bari, 1956)—medical doctor, music critic, and radio host—is one of Italy’s foremost experts on Black music today. He built extensive experience as a DJ in clubs and radio stations between the 1970s and 1990s. He has collaborated with the Time Zones festival, works with the Locus Festival, and served as artistic director for the sole edition of the Bam Festival held in Bari in 2015. He writes for Musica Jazz and Quaderni d’altri tempi, and has covered major national and international festivals as a correspondent, including Roccella Jonica, Umbria Jazz, the Montreux Jazz Festival, and the North Sea Jazz Festival. He is the author of Una preghiera tra due bicchieri di gin. Il jazz italiano si racconta (2011) and Bam, il jazz oggi a New York. Battiti, artisti, club (2013), both published by CaratteriMobili.
With Nicola Gaeta e Luca Conti
