Those who followed music in the 1960s—whether soul, rock or rhythm and blues from Detroit, Memphis, Muscle Shoals or San Francisco, or the avant-garde jazz, soul and punk evolving along the East Coast in the 1970s and 1980s—will remember the music as documented through reviews and essays, both critical and laudatory, backstories and expository explorations in publications seeking to report on something about which many readers could only speculate, the pulse of evolving cultural movements and their accompanying music soundtracks.
Nothing But the Music: Documentaries from Nightclubs, Dance Halls & a Tailor’s Shop in Dakar by Thulani Davis fills this gap. In her latest poetry collection Davis provides synesthetic, documentary insight, a sonic-social history full of anecdotal and impressionistic responses to embodied experience of the music and its creators and followers in the places and times of its creation and sharing.
Davis goes aggressively for the jugular of the experience,...