Baraka wrote early on about the power of popular black music—of Dionne Warwick, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and, especially, James Brown—and his vision, from 1966, of “The Rhythm and Blues mind blowing evolution of James-Ra and Sun-Brown” was utterly prescient of musical history and of my own pleasures, forecasting the plugging in and amping up of Miles Davis, most famously with “Bitches Brew.” Above all, Baraka—who, of course, was a poet—wrote criticism like a poet; the arm’s-length didactic authority of journalistic discourse was not for him. He was a bardic theorist who gave a musical language to music, artistic language to the experience of art.