First issued in 1971 on BYG Records’ Actuel series, Black Suite stands as a defining statement of diasporic jazz and political consciousness. Recorded in Paris in 1969, the album brings together a transatlantic ensemble led by Jacques Coursil, uniting figures from the American avant-garde and postcolonial Europe, including Anthony Braxton, Arthur Jones, Burton Greene, Beb Guérin and Claude Delcloo.

Structured around two extended, meditative movements, Black Suite reframes jazz as a philosophical and emancipatory language. Coursil draws on the ideas of Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, translating Black intellectual thought and the urgency of the civil rights era into sound. The result is music that moves patiently yet with force, balancing abstraction with emotional weight.

Coursil’s background — born in Paris to Martiniquan parents — informs the album’s dialogue between African, Caribbean and African-American identities. Sound becomes argument; improvisation becomes statement. Long regarded as a touchstone of radical Black expression, Black Suite belongs alongside era-defining works by Pharoah Sanders, Eddie Gale and Frank Lowe: music of resistance, dignity and self-definition that continues to resonate.