Imamu Amiri Baraka
It's Nation Time / African Visionary Music
Label: Motown
Catalog: MOTOWN 28723LP
Reissue, originally released in 1972. 2018 release. "Imamu Amiri Baraka's Pan-African manifesto It's Nation Time -- African Visionary Music, out of print since 1972, repressed in 2018 via Motown/UMe. The spoken-word jazz album, originally released on Motown Records' Black Forum subsidiary, has been repressed on 150g black vinyl with tip-on jacket in a faithful reproduction of the original packaging." "In the liner notes for Amiri Baraka's 1972 album It's Nation Time (Motown-Black Forum), Baraka asserts, 'This recording is an institution.' Recording on the heels of the 1970 Congress of African People, Baraka felt that the establishment of a pan-African nation was paramount, but where ought such a nation to be established? Could a recording be an institution? What does a nation sound like? The album, which received a limited release under Motown's progressive Black Forum label, mixes poetry with free jazz, African drumming, and R&B -- melding together the popular with avant-garde and traditional forms of black music. In doing so, It's Nation Time attempts to re-inflect black life with a proud African ancestry and spirituality... It was a call to action for black people to imagine new futures for themselves -- an album that put into action his ideas about black music and Black Nationalism by creating new black sonic space within the dimensions of the stereo LP." --Jessica E. Teague, from Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2015)