Conducting an interview with Amiri Baraka published in African American Review in 2003, Kalamu ya Salaam posits: “For all artists there are moments of clarity that are so absolute everybody can see them… For example, Kind of Blue will always be one of Miles’s more definitive statements” (225–226). He then asks Baraka: “In terms of your writing, what is your Kind of Blue, your Love Supreme?” and
... [Show full abstract] Baraka replies: “Why’s actually says that in a lot of ways” (226). Despite Baraka’s assertion that Wise Why’s Y’s may represent his “definitive statement,” critics have ignored it. Wise Why’s Y’s: The Griot’s Song (Djeli Ya) (1995) is, however, a major Afro-Modernist epic that is part of a tradition that includes Melvin B. Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia (1953) and Harlem Gallery (1965), and Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), as well as Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Anniad” from Annie Allen (1949).