Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism

FINALIST for the 2022 PROSE Award in Music & the Performing Arts

Certificate of Merit, Best Historical Research on Recorded Jazz, given by the 2022 Association for Recorded Sounds Collection Awards for Excellence in Historical Sound Research

This book explores how jazz played a crucial role in propelling the rise of African American Islam during the era of global Black liberation. Amidst the social upheaval and calls for liberation of the civil rights and Black Power movements, tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp recorded a tribute to Malcolm X's emancipatory political consciousness. Shepp drew parallels between his revolutionary hero and John Coltrane, one of the most influential jazz musicians of the time. Later, the esteemed trumpeter Miles Davis echoed Shepp's sentiment, recognising that Coltrane's music embodied the very passion, rage, rebellion, and love that Malcolm X preached.

Soundtrack to a Movement examines the profound link between the revolutionary Black Islam of the post-WWII generation and jazz music. It argues that from the late 1940s and '50s through to the 1970s, Islam gained prominence among African Americans partly due to its embrace by jazz musicians. The book demonstrates that the shared values of Islam and jazz – Black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination – were central to the growth of African American Islamic communities, and that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a Black Atlantic "cool" that influenced both Black religion and jazz styles.

Soundtrack to a Movement illustrates how, by expressing their values through the rejection of systemic racism, the construction of Black notions of masculinity and femininity, and the development of an African American religious internationalism, both jazz musicians and Black Muslims engaged with a global Black consciousness and interconnected resistance movements across the African diaspora and Africa.