After Amiri Baraka died at the age of seventy-nine in January 2014 he was lauded or attacked for his output in the 1960s – variously for that work's wholly original conjoining of poetic voice and political expression, for its black potency in an era of increased persecution and dispossession, for its supposed inverted racism, for its male chauvinism and anti-Semitism. What is remarkable about the post-mortem on Baraka's career is that it paid no attention to the subsequent forty years of work that revised these positions and processes but mark an equally radical contribution to the power of poetry in the late twentieth century. All obituaries of Baraka effectively stop in 1974, the moment Baraka announced his turn to Marxism and moved away from the black cultural nationalism that had made him famous. The Poetry Foundation biography's ratio of 147 words on Baraka's output after 1974 in a 2,500-word article is typical, and mirrored in the focus of criticism on Baraka generally. Ignoring three-quarters of Baraka's considerable achievement is especially lamentable since his work from the mid- seventies onwards represents one of the first Marxist poetic responses to the post-war economic crisis, and one of the earliest projects for a vanguard art that explicitly rejected the claims of the traditional avant-garde. This chapter will explore these two related matters, suggesting we see both projects as developing Baraka's constant use of musical performance in poetic process, and the complex sense of audience related to it. The best commentary on Baraka's poetry has placed music at its centre, employing tropes in music to repudiate readings of the poet as didactic and dogmatic. This is an important perspective on Baraka, best shown in work by Nathaniel Mackey and Kimberly Benston, who demonstrate how a musical, improvisatory cast of thought defines the restless energy of Baraka's poems, informing a poetic voice that is ‘centrally an agon for utterance itself’ in Benston's words, or preoccupied with ‘resisting any effort to arrest … expressive vision’ in Mackey's.