Though best known for his role in the 1960s US Black Arts Movement as a Black Nationalist critic, poet and dramatist, Amiri Baraka was an unusually varied artist who exploded traditional boundaries of nations, politics, and art forms. I mobilize the microcosm of a 1977 Berliner Jazztage performance by Baraka's lesser-known funk ensemble “The Advanced Workers”—a performance panned by prominent West German critics Ulrich Ohlshausen and "Jazz Pope" Joachim-Ernst Berendt—to expand onto shifting, macrocosmic “constellations” (Benjamin) of actors, histories and discourses. The most local story is a quarrel between the festival’s founder, Berendt, and his successor, Swiss pianist/composer George Gruntz. Increasingly suspicious of politics in jazz, especially Black Nationalism—and ignorant of Baraka’s recent shift to Third World Marxism in 1976—Berendt turned from jazz to a depoliticized, universally humanist concept of Weltmusik, whereas Gruntz championed Baraka’s poetry and politics. Broader contextualization tells a more global story. West Germany reeled in the immediate wake of Deutscher Herbst, while Baraka's poetry spoke to multiple transnationalisms: not just transeuropean, transatlantic jazz festival circuits, but also, networks of solidarity with the Third World. In dialogue with contemporary Black Studies (Moten, Da Silva, Okiji) and transnational Jazz Studies (J. Wipplinger, B. Barson), I summon Baraka’s “Changing Same”—from his 1966 essay on “R&B and New Black Music” and taken up again in 1978 by N. Mackey in his analysis of Baraka—to argue that Baraka’s “Black Soundwork” (A. Reed) disrupts critical mishearings and refuses to submit to ongoing hegemonic categorizations and fixed understandings of Black Music.