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The Grackle

The Grackle: Improvised Music in Transition was Ron Welburn’s quarterly devoted to Black and improvised music – jazz – as art and Black culture. In the tradition of the “little magazine,” The Grackle published articles by writers and on topics outside the mainstream press, in a non-commercial manner. Welburn notes that the title, The Grackle, refers to the bird’s symbolism in his and others’ poetry: “The grackle is a majestic blackbird and Black music is a majestic music.” As such, “The Grackle recognizes the Black roots and continuum of jazz as well as jazz’ international and intercultural appeal at home and abroad.” 1

Ron Welburn (1944-) is a poet, jazz writer, and professor emeritus (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) of Assateague/Gingaskin and Cherokee descent, who became involved in the Rutgers Jazz Institute Oral History project and completed a seminal Ph.D. dissertation on jazz criticism in the 1930s.  Welburn’s partners in The Grackle were Roger Riggins (1949-2015), a prominent jazz writer, poet, and critic, and James T. Stewart, a poet, saxophonist, and writer in Philadelphia. In a retrospective article, Welburn described The Grackle as “a forum of ideas for the three men of color who created it” – a venue to publish serious journalism on jazz which at the time could not be found in other publications, either in the mainstream or Black press. Welburn notes that he also invited Victor Manuel Rosa, a writer on Latin/Nuyuicon music, but turned down white writers who had other publication opportunities available. 

Four issues of The Grackle appeared in 1976 and a fifth was published in 1979. The first issue features two interviews – Anthony Braxton interviewed by Steve Rosen and Carlos Ward by William Welburn – and two pieces by Ron Welburn, a prospectus for The Grackle and a column on new voices, ranging from the Pointers Sisters to Eddie Jefferson, Joe Lee Wilson, and a new recording from Tribe Records in Detroit. Roger Riggins reviews Braxton’s album Five Pieces and Stewart provides an extended review of Arnold Shaw’s book The World of Soul. 

Issues 2 to 4 greatly expanded the number of pages and range of content. Interviews continue – with Marion Brown (by Victor Manuel Rosa), David Murray (Riggins), Steve Lacy (Welburn), Paul Bley (Riggins), Armano Peraza (Rosa), and Riggins interviewing himself – along with essays, record, and performance reviews. Stewart’s “Just Intonation and the New Black Revolutionary Music” (issue 2) and “On the Marketability of Improvised Music” (issue 5), and Welburn’s “Building from the Urban Indigenous Aesthetic” (issue 4) have been frequently cited in the years since their publication. Reviews of recent albums – jazz and salsa, vanguard and avant-garde, sometimes experimental, often connected with political and racial issues – are found in each issue. The final issue, though separated from the first four by some two years, continued apace with interviews of Hamiet Bluiett, Anthony Davis, James Newton, and Jerome Cooper, along with Rosa’s article on Hilton Ruiz. Welburn wrote on modal improvising and Sonny Rollins and contributed to a critics symposium featuring the editors plus Vernon Gibbs, Henry Rock, and Max Salazar.

As Welburn noted in his retrospective, The Grackle ultimately ceased due to the burdens of running a magazine. Since its publication it has remained a model of a devoted and serious publication on jazz and the Black perspective.


1The Grackle 1: iv.

2 Ron Welburn, quoted in Willard Jenkins, ed. Ain't But a Few of Us: Black Music Writers Tell Their Story (Duke University Press, 2022): 108.

"Ron Welburn began his prolific career in music (and literary) criticism in the late 1960s. He helped found the important journal The Grackle in 1976. Although oriented towards free jazz, coverage extended to Latin music, an interview with Ralph Ellison, a Welburn piece on Eddie Jefferson and Joe Lee Wilson. It maintained a strict policy of publishing work by people of African descent. Welburn recounted being asked by several white writers to be published in The Grackle; his consistent response was that the purpose of the magazine was to provide an outlet for black writers on jazz, whose work was not being accepted by established jazz magazines."

 W.S. Tkweme,
Vindicating Karma: Jazz and the Black Arts Movement (2007)

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