Synth echoes and organ notes waver amid the sound of cymbals. It’s something like the sound of weightlessness. In this sound, time floats like it’s surrounded by sound. Or we float as if surrounded by time, time that behaves like sound. But the sound is underwater and so sounds as if it comes at us from all directions at once, like time. These sounds and that surrounding kind of time stayed with me as I, engrossed, read Mark Neal’s labyrinthine meditations in Black Ephemera. In the title, Mark calls it: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive, and as I read I thought about these words. Maybe the musical challenge is about how, and why, any moment can also be a “sonic moment,” one that sounds like something. And then your mission—should you accept it—to connect those dots means a heightened, challenged, and maybe empowered level of awareness. But the way those dots connect—the moment joined to what it sounds like—places our awareness in history, which I guess might be the crisis. Since by 2022 we should know that history means time in crisis. And, so, on one level Black Ephemera sketches designs made in times of crisis, designs, most of them songs, that became tactical engagements with history. And Mark Neal, one of our most adept and knowledgeable scholars—and lovers—of sound’s design, arranges sonic moments into maroon insignia, aural veve into sonic webs and skeins of association, as he guides the reader through this complex cultural and intellectual terrain.But back to those synth echoes and organ notes amid cymbals. My sense of that suspended sound comes from an announcement: “From the Black pool of genius, we’d like to give you our rendition of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superwoman.’” Now this is the real reason those sounds accompanied me through Black Ephemera: Mark Neal’s archive is “the Black pool of genius.” Many readers of Black Ephemera will already know those words and the voice—I wonder how many others heard it reading the book—that delivered them. We know they come from Donny Hathaway’s live version of Stevie Wonder’s “Superwoman,” recorded by Wonder on Music of My Mind (1972). Music heads among us will know that Hathaway performed his “rendition” of the song on May 6, 1972, at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, while in concert with Roberta Flack. Wonder’s album had been out for two months at the time. Angela Davis was on trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy charges, one particular crisis that was, at that time, nearing its end with her acquittal in San José on June 4, which was three days after Aretha Franklin’s live gospel album Amazing Grace was released by Atlantic Records. You see how this goes: we proceed ephemerally. Apart from those in attendance at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles that Saturday night, most of us had to wait many years, until the tape of Hathaway’s “rendition of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superwoman’” was released by Rhino during the summer of 2004. So it goes with the challenges and crises of the archive, some tangle and cluster together as our awareness accumulates, often moving sideways, others sail in long silent arcs through unknown time on their way to our listening.Early on I wondered why these archives were Black Ephemera and not Black encyclopedia? I think the answer has to do with fugitive and insular elements of Black challenges and crises. Ephemeral history. Throughout the work Neal meditates on maroon communities and, even more, upon marronage: the process of escape, of extrication, which is one of the deepest and most complex signatures of Blackness in history. One kind of crisis in these archives has to do with exigencies and pathologies of ownership, of control. Neal’s knowledge of Black musical history and contemporary culture is certainly encyclopedic in the sense that it’s comprehensive. But unlike the encyclopedia, which isn’t involved in the challenge of marronage, the arrangement in Black Ephemera conceals its systems of order, the appearances of sonic moments occur by tangent and happenstance and often in pockets of time under crisis a.k.a. history. Also unlike historical encyclopedias—Britannica, World Book—that arrange ordered surveys of the most important people and events—which brings along the question: important according to who?—Neal’s ephemeral moments often arrive as moments concealed by other, maybe more encyclopedic, events. Stax Records in Memphis rebuilds its catalog after catastrophic losses in business and history—an “obscure contract clause” on the one hand and a global figure martyred during a local sanitation strike on the other. Strings of ephemeral association in history, then, connect Isaac Hayes to Jimmy Webb to Glen Campbell to the Tiki Club to Tyrone Davis to echoes of the Jackson Five and even to echoes of a version of Davis’s work intended for but never performed by the Supremes. To say Johnny Taylor, in ephemeral time, conjures a cloud of association involving the Hi-Way Que C’s, Lou Rawls, and Sam Cooke, which connects to the Soul Stirrers along one axis and, via “This Bitter Earth,” Dinah Washington, who connects to Aretha Franklin, who was mentored by Washington, along another and, via “Talk to Me,” which occasions an embedded biography of Little Willie John. Neal’s virtuosic tracing of ephemeral connections conceals its logic; this makes it impossible to predict. Ephemeral moves are, therefore, just about impossible to control, which is key when marronage is the mode.If we learn things in the encyclopedia based on someone’s idea of importance made universal—by force—then we learn things in the ephemeral because someone met someone who knew someone else who’d just broken up with their cousin’s friend, who happened to have just seen a film with a certain song in the soundtrack. If precarity plays the role in the Black ephemeral that prestige—and power—plays in the encyclopedia, then wanting, desire, also does its ephemeral work. Neal quotes Marisa Fuentes’s Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive: “But the struggle against dehumanization is in the wanting” (49). Sippie Wallace ushers in Bonnie Raitt, who often eclipses Wallace, like Blind Lemon Jefferson steps in front of Victoria Spivey, in the encyclopedia. In Neal’s Black ephemeral space of association, the veiled return. In a hypothetical encyclopedia, under “Soul Superstars,” of course, we find entries on Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic years and Marvin Gaye’s political insurgency at Motown. In Black Ephemera, we see them both again, according to fugitive signatures of their wanting: Aretha with Columbia Records, moving with the songstress shadows of Judy Garland, Dinah Washington, and Barbra Streisand; and Marvin, seeking mastery in the American songbook, following images of Sam Cooke at the Copa, married to his boss’s sister, and trying, and mostly failing, but wanting, to channel Frank Sinatra.In Black Ephemera, we’re propelled by “citational moments” as well as sonic ones. On one page, Ricardo Cortez Cruz’s narrator mentions “With You I’m Born Again.” A few pages later we’ve traced our way across Billy Preston’s biography and find that the song “would be included on the soundtrack for a largely forgettable Gabe Kaplan film, Fast Break (1979)” (57). In my ephemeral challenge, which was also clearly someone’s crisis, I recall my eighth-grade French teacher playing that song for us, for at least a week, while she sobbed inexplicably at her desk. I also recall DC Dacey (Harold Sylvester) hugged up with Roberta “Bobby” James (Mavis Washington) in Fast Break after his crisis of wanting almost made him skip town. Roberta James had been posing as a man, Robert “Swish” James, in order to gain a scholarship to college. Fast Break is possibly forgettable as a Gabe Kaplan film, though interesting for its racial as well as sexual slippages, when, among other things, early in the film Kaplan’s character is slurred as an “ethnic” in a job interview at Hotel St. Moritz on Central Park South and then bounced from a pool hall by its Black owner as a Puerto Rican. Ephemerally, I also remember how the game of basketball moved with a rare authenticity—The White Shadow and Cornbread Earl and Me notwithstanding—along with characters played by b-ball greats like Washington, Bernard King, and Michael Warren. Later I’d later learn that Warren sat out the 1968 Olympics, along with his UCLA teammates Lew Alcindor and Lucius Allen, rather than represent the United States on the international stage in Mexico City. Unlike entries in an encyclopedia, which are presented with (false) neutrality, sonic and citational moments in Black Ephemera travel routes of our wanting, propelled and frustrated by crises in history and the ways we’re positioned to make our way through them. Ephemeral moments gather meaning according to how we got over before we went under.Late in Black Ephemera, Neal takes up citational strategies that emerge in historical and recent cinema. Meditations on fugitive elements in Ryan Coogler’s otherwise hypervisible Black Panther, John Akomfrah’s “data thief” in The Last Angel of History, “nonextant archives” signaled in his later film, Precarity, and in beautiful attention to musical ephemera in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep and Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight draw together webs of genius work where visual and aural elements of cinema come together. We pause where Burnett puts us to watch his couple in crisis dance to Dinah Washington’s “The Bitter Earth,” the song sounding somehow what holds them together and keeps them apart (or holds Stan back?) at the same time. Somewhere nearby, though a generation before and embedded ephemerally in a historical community that never happened, Stella (Kim Hunter) sinks her fingers into another Stanley’s (Marlon Brando) muscled back while censors with the Legion of Decency blackmailed producers to swap out Alex North’s sensual score for disembodied strings.Turning to Moonlight, Neal leads us to the penultimate scene noting that Jenkins found the sound—and even the camera angle—for Chiron’s (Trevante Rhodes) drive from Atlanta to Miami in Caetano Veloso’s version of “Cucurrucucú Paloma” from Wong Kar-wai’s incredible Happy Together (1997). Ephemerally, we may recall that Jenkins’s idea of how music might relate to the visuals in cinema was likewise affected by Wong Kar-wai’s use of music (especially The Mamas & The Papas’s “California Dreamin’” and Dinah Washington’s “What a Difference a Day Makes”) in his breakout film Chungking Express (1994). Before Neal concludes the book folding a biography of Little Jimmy Scott into Denzel Washington’s version of August Wilson’s Fences, he pays exquisitely curated, ephemeral attention to the way archives emerge through scenes that affect us the most. So it is that Aretha Franklin’s “One Step Ahead” (1965), “Our Love” (1979) by The Edge of Daybreak, an obscure group formed in “Powhatan Correctional Center outside Richmond,” Virginia, and Barbara Lewis’s “Hello Stranger” (1963) provide archival accompaniment to the reunion of friends long separated by violence, each reaching toward the other from a slippery and insidious masculine isolation.The preceding accounts for just a few out of dozens and dozens of deft connections Mark Anthony Neal curates in Black Ephemera, his intricate and unruly web of archival resonances involving the musical, literary, filmic and critical work of scores of fellow travelers. As Neal remarks, his book is just the tip of the iceberg, signaling the existence of vast “archives unnamed and unclaimed” (183). In the way that “Maroons on the plantation stole moments with loved ones,” Neal’s work makes “space for a disruptive interiority” (182) that runs alongside “as a direct contrast to the spectacle of Black life” (169) that too often asserts its dominance. Maybe most importantly, and in his presence in the world as well as in his work, Mark Anthony Neal makes it possible for us all to imagine and reimagine ours and each other’s ephemeral lives pulsed by mutual wanting, lives which implore our interiors to emerge and to connect.