The Last Poets sold best by replacing avant-garde jazz with militant spoken-word

Evidence

The laid-back jam-session quality of Coleman’s SoHo LP Friends and Neighbors: Live at Prince Street, recorded on Valentine’s Day 1970 (but not released until 1972), would have scarcely rehabilitated the artist in Jones’s eyes. On the contrary. But if Ornette had gone hippie, Ayler commercial, and if even Pharaoh Sanders had been co-opted by FM radio, soul and funk would be superseded. The summer’s best-selling R&B album, despite infrequent airplay, belonged to a Harlem trio that came together on what would have been Malcolm X’s forty-third birthday, May 19, 1968, at a public poetry reading in Mount Morris Park. These were the Last Poets. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1578

Categorization

• XREF: The Last Poets’ Mount Morris Park origin and commercial success despite minimal airplay is a strong example of a scene emerging from a specific material place — echoes the two-part structure argument and the geography-of-scenes thesis.