Black Grooves is a music review site hosted by the Archives of African American Music & Culture (AAAMC) at Indiana University. Our goal is to promote Black music by providing our readers with monthly updates on interesting new releases and quality reissues in all genres─including gospel, blues, jazz, funk, soul, R&B, world music, and hip-hop—as well as classical music composed or performed by Black artists. Books and DVDs may also be featured. An extra effort is made to track down releases by indie, underground, foreign, and other small labels that don’t get covered in the mainstream media. Our primary focus is on African American music, but we’ll be happy to consider music of Africa and the African Diaspora, from Afropop to reggae. Press releases and review copies submitted for consideration that fall within these parameters are added to the Black Grooves Collection at the AAAMC.

Black Grooves is targeted at students, scholars, librarians, collectors, and anyone else wanting to learn about the latest Black music releases. With that in mind, we’ll include recordings that are of academic interest─such as historical reissues, boxed sets, label and genre overviews─and any other recordings that get us in the groove.

Black Grooves is edited by the staff of the AAAMC. Our reviewers include students and faculty from IU and other universities, independent scholars, and folks connected to various non-profit and educational organizations. Sorry- readers are not allowed to post comments online, but if you’d like to submit material for review or forward comments to the AAAMC inbox, click here.

Black Grooves is linked to the AAAMC website, one of the top 10 hits on Google searches for “African American music” and a major destination for scholars, students and performers of Black music. To learn more about the AAAMC, click here.