Stanley Crouch v. white jazz critics and Jazz Times' firing of him

True, but with Crouch it is, and the implicit stuff about race is interesting to some of us. Crouch has had problems with his fellow African-American writers who like hiphop, so with him it's not just about race. He likes to be uh, provocative...

stanley crouch is a bigot, an idiot, an occasionally good writer, and should not have been fired, more than likely.

however, if he really wants to know why there are fewer young black jazz critics in 2003 than 1953 or even 73, he should probably ask less often about the presupposed cabal of white critics and more about when and why the music stopped speaking to young people of any color in large numbers.

Jess OTM. The Society of Creative Jazz Anachronism, anyone?

The central question I guess is: does the racial balance in jazz criticism mirror the racial balance in jazz performance? If not, what accounts for the discrepancy?

P.S. Ned, Jess et al: I think Crouch does address this, albeit not in a fashion that you or I might sympathize with. He has acknowledged the declining importance of jazz in the black community.* I think he identifies white critics as promoting "out" jazz which is less accessible, and to which he expects (imagines? wishes?) the black audience for jazz to be indifferent. He takes the term "accessible" at face value along with the idea that "inaccessibility" is somehow tied to white pretentions, white control, etc. There is some truth there but Crouch seems too intellectually lazy to interrogate these ideas and see where the truth lies. He'd rather toss invective around.

*I think this kind of talk is well past its sell-by date anyhow; jazz stopped being "popular" in the ILX sense in the 1940s.

Agreed that the firing was unwarranted and that there are issues of perception and interpretation (and who has the 'right' to interpret and who doesn't, thus that quoted passage of Baraka's) in this mess. Ralph Ellison to thread!

He's patently ridiculous, and his own best enemy really. In a recent Atlantic (I think it was The Atlantic) article on Wynton Marsalis, Crouch speculated that the reason M. didn't get respect from the critical establishment is that he was (paraphrasing) "a good-looking young man" who (not paraphrasing) "could obtain a higher class of female" than the critics.

I was astonished that the article let that quote pass without comment, let alone criticism. Perhaps the author simply felt that Crouch had done a good job of hanging himself without needing assistance, but then again the whole piece was very sympathetic to Marsalis and to the idea that the establishment has been doing him a disservice, so in that context you could almost imagine the author applauding Crouch's trenchant analysis.

There are so many reasons to fire Stanley Crouch. His famous fistfights, the ad hominem attacks, etc. It's the timing of this firing that's suspicious.

From most appearances that process was very gradual, beginning almost with jazz's inception, but by some accounts certain performers switched from playing almost all-black audiences to playing almost all-white audiences virtually overnight.

Crosspost. I haven't read Hajdu's book on Dylan & Baez (I think that's the same guy--right?). What was his Times comment exactly? I mean, "folk music" (as its construed now, by many) is kinda the sound of (a big segment of) the new lesbianism. Visit a Northhamption record store.

ahem.

anyway I think ned's point is best -- crouch & co. killed jazz killed it the moment they tried to make it "good for you" and hip-hop is still bad enough they're afraid of it.

Also who is "& co"?

I think I've heard more good jazz than electronic albums lately.

similiary we can see in today's big broadway musicals obv traces of their roots in opera and operetta. but the establishment that promoted and wrote about opera were similarly taxinomically conservative and thus "opera" today is a slim and marginal genre indeed.

so we have to separate the actual musical evolution from the evolution of genre.

=trying to get toward a value-free notion of genres being alive/dead

"crouch & co. killed jazz the moment they tried to make it "good for you"" can also =

*music thrives when it is bad for you
*music is good for you but you can't admit it
*good isn't fun
*talking about good isn't fun
*talking isn't fun
*crouch as an extreme expression of what was happening to jazz anyway
*crouch as a moderate expression of what was happening to jazz anyway
*crouch as having nothing to do with real jazz
*crouch having narrowed the limits of jazz so much that he's welcome to the wasteland that remains
*talking is fun
*good leeches fun
*talking about leeches is good
*crouch killed jazz because HE declared it dead, finished, poof!
*jazz is really dead and crouch just eulogized it.
*jazz lives, crouch doesn't.
*jazz isn't a genre, but many
*jazz has nothing to do with genre and everything to do with tradition
*jazz never lived

etc.

also dead is cool cf. Buffy. But you still gotta have "soul" i guess.

it reminds me of a "review" i recently read about shallow Hal by some programmer in Chicago. "the most misunderstood movie of 2001" (or 2002, or whatever)--i don't see what is gained by telling us this and then refusing to elaborate.

actually anyway sterling i think i figure out what you were saying and it's something akin to my formulation above about taxonomy becoming a major feature of a genre's indentity = dead in a certain mass-culture sense. but where i think that notion is not all too useful is this: it doesn't mean, at all, that brilliant/beautiful/etc. music cannot be made in even the most narrow and "dying" of contexts. this is a very 19th c. notion and I'm not even sure i subscribe to it but it is more expansive and optimistic in a sense.

But that doesn't explain punk, or the electronica which moves the floor both of which are as obsessive about distinctions as anything.

what is sad about him is that he can be a great writer but so much of the time he comes out with asinine statements like the 'wynton gets a better class of pussy thus leading to jealousy' type of crap comments that make me wanna strangle him. Sadly that(even if not quite that bad) kind of stupidity characterizes most of his writings and pontifications.

He needed to be fired, as Matos said tho, the timing sucks. It looks bad for all involved.

ok, back to more general thread issues. I think the post about smooth jazz reminded me of this but jazz is HUGE in s. africa but you find mostly 'smooth jazz' though filtered through a s. african mode.

I was talking to someone who told me he loved jazz, was his fav. form of music so i offered to send stuff to him. As most of our (my) modern refernts didn't work I decided to go back to Miles, Coltrane etc. as a starting point. He'd never heard OF Miles or Coltrane, let alone mingus, let alone whoever - it took me aback as ppl like that i see as basic building blocks in vocabulary of jazz. However, it seem spossible for major jazz fans there to miss out (and s. africa has developed its own sound) so is it possible for pl to get jazz w/out knowing these elders?

http://www.slate.com/id/2137993/?nav=tap3
Miles Davis, Romantic Hero
Assessing the trumpeter's legacy as he enters the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
By Stanley Crouch
Posted Monday, March 13, 2006, at 5:32 PM ET

"Following Charlie Parker, in whose band he did some of his earliest work, Davis was moody. He gave the impression that he was not even interested in being known, especially by white folks. The trumpeter was not given to any aspect of the minstrel tradition that has dogged the Negro artist for over a hundred years and has most recently restated itself in the jigaboo antics of rap videos." Stanley Crouch is the author of The Artificial White Man and the forthcoming Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.

WTF, did he run this sentence through Babel Fish? First sentence is a mite ungainly too.

Crouch is absurd. Given that many of Miles' most fruitful musical collaborations were with white musicians, where is Crouch's evidence for making a statement like this? His agenda transforming every single aspect of jazz and jazz performance into an expression of the racial struggle is misguided and transparent.

This is a pretty commonplace observation about Miles. None of his biographers would argue with it. It has nothing to do with his playing with white musicians.

I actually thought this the best thing Crouch has written in ages, issues of tortured syntax notwithstanding.

But jesus. Crouch is just talking about race in this piece. I know that talking about race pretty much amounts to racism for twentysomething white liberals, but there's nothing to get offended by here.

And I think it's more than an appreciation piece. I think this analysis of the nature of Miles' romanticism and how it related to masculinity and race is quite original and nuanced.

And I often find Crouch unbearable too, especially in his essay about Miles' electric period, which really is racially inflammatory.

Gee, I've studied Davis a little bit, and my distinct impression was that he was standoffish around everybody.

Crouch seems like he wants to say that Miles embodied a unique and individualistic form of masculine romanticism but just can't help including his own personal jabs at "the White American idea of the poetic soul" on one side, and his hatred of anything resembling hip-hop culture, "streetcorner braggadocio of the Negro hustling world." Stan, are you talking about the same Miles Davis whose every other word was "motherfucker?" Yeah, no braggadocio there.

Believe me, I'll talk about race all day as long as it's grounded in reality and not Stanley Crouch's opinions. If he could ever get this shit under control he would probably write something I could read and not get pissed at.

Oh, and thanks for taking the time to discuss this bugged out. You seem classy.

Come on... if you've read any Miles bio--John Szwed, Ian Carr--you must know that he had a special chip on his shoulder (for want of a better expression) for white people! He grew up when Jim Crow was still in full effect. And his performance--his commonly playing with his back to the audience--is traditionally read as being very much to do with that, as an expression of disdain and independence.

You're right about Miles partaking of the same braggadocio as hip-hop... but Crouch would doubtless say that the period he's talking about was before Miles "succumbed" to that syndrome in the 70s, which of course is the period Crouch hates (although it's interesting that, if I recall correctly, Crouch tries to codify the fusion period as "white," musically speaking).

As for the "maudlin Jello that usually came with the White American idea of the poetic soul"... I think that's defensible... for instance, look at, to stay within period, Jack Kerouac and the beats... that whole idea of this spewing of personal expression that they embodied is maudlin, it is flabby, it is sentimental. He's praising Miles for being, at least on this recording, tough but not macho.

But hey, what are we thinking, talking about the greatest musician of the 20th century as if he were important! He's dead, right? This is just retrogressive canon fetishism, clearly.

anyway, whatever.

I think you're right about what Crouch would say, but Miles was bringing his cooler-than-thou motherfucker attitude into recording sessions probably from the 50s on. Ain't no way around it.

And while I think the point about White America's impression of "soul" may be defensible, Crouch's line here is needlessly barbed. There are probably better examples than the Beats, too. I'm not a fan of them but their poetry flexes its muscles often enough; in On the Road Kerouac rides around the Midwest on the back of a flatbed with a bunch of drifters and a bottle of corn liquor....a lot tougher than anything my white middleclass ass has ever done.

But yeah I need to return to my wood-panelled study full of leatherbound volumes before we accidentally discuss something that happened after 1980.

Agreed about cooler-than-thou, but still there's a difference in the tenor of that attitude after 69... Miles suddenly felt the need to act more, to prove that he as badass, and while I love the 70s stuff, its true that there's something a little desperate about that pose... in the 50s, he didn't have to prove anything, and that was a truer cool.

I don't know, I don't see why Crouch shouldn't be barbed and bring race into it. He's supposed to be polite? At least in this instance, he didn't step over the line.

1) Jazz music was good until the 60s.
2) White people can't play it "right" (in which he and Kerouac are basically making the same ignorant point).
3) Black people need to act a certain way or they are White America's dupes.

The article we're talking about either implies or says all these things, and since I know that Crouch has said them all in the past and has crossed lines he shouldn't, it just frustrates me to see them repeated here for no good reason in an otherwise decent piece.

it was approx. the same time when, like, most of the avant-garde figured out stanley was a terrible drummer.

also, sam rivers once smacked crouch in the gob after some nyc loft gig, which might've pushed stanley closer to wynton

It's much less misguided than you think, and he'd know a lot better than you because he was in the front row for a lot more of jazz history than I imagine you were. Why do you think Miles Davis chose Jack Johnson as a figure to name an album after? Why the Afro-centric cover art on Bitches Brew?

I don't ultimately care that much for Crouch, but I can kind of see where he's coming from. For most of jazz history there was a dichotomy between most black musicians/writers/listeners for whom jazz was very much entangled with their racial struggle, and most white musicians/writers/listeners for whom jazz was just another kind of music to like and appreciate. It's not hard to see why this might have engendered resentment in the past.

-- Shakey Mo Collier (audiobo...), March 14th, 2006.

But this is just as much of the product of an "agenda" with regard to jazz as are Crouch's views -- it's the same agenda expressed by so many people who approach jazz from a punk/rock/noise perspective. It implies that jazz is about strangeness and being "out there" and freaky bewildering. Which is all fine, and people should listen to music from whatever perspective they want. But it also ignores most of jazz history and what jazz "meant" for most of that history.

But seriously I think my conversation with bugged out elucidites my position on Crouch clearly enough. You certainly don't need to tell me that there are many many racial subplots in the history of jazz, but can't it once in a while just be about the music? The portions of the Crouch piece that are actually about "My Funny Valentine" are quite nice, and I think his attempts to bring race into that discussion are forced.

haha - a record Crouch dismisses as his SELL-OUT TO WHITEY

I see where you're coming from, but that isn't really a fair assumption - to me jazz's central thread is improvisation, whereas Crouch/Marsalis are only willing to follow that thread as long as it fits within a proscribed framework (acoustic instruments, swing, etc.), which is a purist position I just can't get with. My introduction to jazz was mostly post-bop and modal stuff as a teenager - Miles' "Kind of Blue", Trane's "Blue Train", Thelonius Monk. It took me awhile to come around to the free-er end of things. Tho I confess I totally loved Miles' electric stuff from the first time I heard it...

haha - a record Crouch dismisses as his SELL-OUT TO WHITEY

-- Shakey Mo Collier (audiobo...), March 15th, 2006.

I heard an interview with him where he spoke at length about how much effort he put into trying to get into Bitches Brew before finally giving up. I think it was sincere.

I mean if you follow improvisation to its logical conclusion, free jazz is what you get. And I'm fine with that, I love it.

Improvisation is an essential component of jazz, but improvisation does not make jazz. There's been improvisation in non-jazz music all over the world for pretty much as long as music has existed -- even in classical music. Until free jazz, jazz was always about improvising within certain frameworks. The frameworks evolved over time but didn't disappear until the 60s (and its arguable that some free jazz uses "frameworks" of sorts).

Until then jazz also involved having to go through a long journeyman-like process of learning the craft so you could cut it on the bandstand. Free Jazz didn't require that, which created a some doubt among musicians about the genre's validity as jazz.

Ultimately I don't care, because I don't like musical ideologies. I don't care that much whether free jazz or fusion are "real" jazz. But I do think there's a case to be made that Bitches Brew and even moreso Jack Johnson and On The Corner have as much or more in common with rock and funk as with jazz.

Almost all of it does. Whether it's Pentecostal/black-church call-and-response (Frank Wright), or Indian/Middle Eastern drones with screaming solos on top (Pharoah Sanders), or primitive pre-jazz folk melodies (Albert Ayler), or ultra-happy melodies little kids would love (Ornette Coleman), there's almost always something there. Even the most volcanically "out" music I own, Cecil Taylor's solo piano discs, have an overarching structure, a through-line, and repeated motifs in the form of melodic cells.

I'd go further: they are not jazz. The only reason anyone would think they are jazz is because Miles Davis' name is on the cover.

It's hard to call them rock or funk either, mind. They exist in a weird interzone between genres. But I'd settle for rock, myself.

And that's fine. But while this is great music worthy of endless study, it's also no more than a tiny footnote in the history of jazz. So while I am no fan of Crouch or Marsalis, I don't really have a problem with their casting Miles' fusion outside the tradition. That's not really a diminishment (even if it might be in their eyes), it's just a recognition of the nature of the music.

It might have been nice to see a piece that argued that Miles' inclusion in the rock hall of fame was valid because of this. That would have been more interesting than the pieces that did run questioning it.

this is not true. almost any major free jazz figure that you can think of - except maybe archie shepp - paid some major journeyman dues.

I agree.

Shepp knew his stuff even back then. Listen to his BYG albums - there's bluesy stuff, standards...shit, Hank Mobley plays on at least two of his albums, though the only one I can think of right now is Yasmina, A Black Woman. Shepp is steeped in tradition.

I agree, but free jazz is still easier to 'fake' in a lot of ways, or perhaps more attractive to those who haven't put in the time.

that's true, but a lot of people looked down on him because he didn't start playing sax until 16 or something, and was interested in other non-music stuff like theater and whatnot.

He says this in the interviews on the Isle of Wight show DVD, and I'm sure he is sincere - but his reasons for not liking it strike me as largely political and idiotic. (I don't know why they bothered to include him on the DVD, slagging off the very music the viewer is about to watch - Herbie Hancock's 2-minute improv tribute to Miles is totally fucking amazing tho. I love Herbie.)

oh absolutely - but the set of skills you're referring to are only relevant to that particular form of music. Being able to improvise creatively on the spot is a totally different skill from being able to play a lot of notes really fast in a very tight arrangement... which is why, actually, the opposite is NOT true. We're discussing different skillsets. Its like the speed metal drummer saying oh, I dunno, Tony Allen is a shitty drummer because he can't do double-kickdrum fills at 145bpm.

I only harp on this point because in my experience finding musicians who can really improvise well is *incredibly* rare - most musicians are simply not experienced or trained to do it. Their minds don't work that way. Which is why when I hear free jazz guys who really CAN rip off a lot of ideas off the top of their heads, I'm totally blown away. It is not an easy thing to do.

sometimes even moreso than a lot of the jazz that preceeded it.

Examples pls? Not saying you're wrong, I just want to know what you mean.

xpost, that is definitely true about different skill sets, but then we might as well not talk about free stuff in relation to jazz

i don't really think that something like louis armstrong's hot fives and hot sevens' stuff, for example, is nearly as complex in structure and form as, say, alan silva's "seasons," just to make a really bad apples n' oranges comparison. most free jazz dispensed with traditional song forms entirely, and gave extended improvisation, larger/modified ensemble sizes and extended technique the major roles in structural terms. so i really don't think it's that bold to say that a large ensemble piece well over three minutes (which of course didn't/couldn't really exist before the lp) (and of course that doesn't describe every free jazz thing ever, but A LOT of free jazz could probably be described within those parameters) is by definition more structurally complex than, say, a lot of jazz before it.

Absolutely true. I have a friend (film professor at UCLA) whose daughter, who I believe is under age 4, loves Ornette. I've long thought his music would probably resonate best for little kids, who wouldn't hear it as tricky or challenging, but as fun. Same with Thelonious Monk, who frequently sounds like he could be the music to a skit on The Muppet Show.

For about the first 55-60 years of jazz, "structure" was something very specific, namely improvisation over set chord changes during a set number of bars in time. The forms shifted in complexity over time, getting more baroque during and after bop for example, but that very specific kind of structure was always there until free jazz.

Ornette Coleman's earlier albums had "structure" in a related sense, but they also weren't really free jazz albums. Ornette basically wrote compositions that relied on improvising around looser "tonal centers" instead of set chords, but still often worked in time around a set bar structure. In a way this was only slightly looser than what Miles Davis and John Coltrane were doing by 1960, working with "modal" forms that often stayed in the same mode/chord for 8 bars rather than requiring playing over complex chord changes. (btw, some claim Ornette couldn't really play over complex chord changes. I don't know to what extent that was true)

Jump to something like Spiritual Unity, however, and the only "structure" you have is basically starting and ending by playing a melody. After that it's basically a three-man free-for-all. There might be a lot of interesting spontaneous interplay between the musicians, but it's not really "structure." Again, it's ultimately more important to me whether the music is good, but it's not hard to see why some at the time would have called it "not jazz."

as to the qn of whether what Miles ws doing jazz or not i'd say that well, it ws a path taken by jazz as a music in general, one that surely can be appreciated for those who may not like much else of what jazz has to offer (as seen on many threads on ilm). anyhow there are much more important qns than this and it comes down to a border-patrolling game that Stanley and Wynton seem to spend so much of their efforts time-wasting us with.

isn't 'spontaneous interplay' a generation of, not only content, but possible structures? it maybe all-brief and fleetingly gone, but the fact that it has been recorded for future listening means that it can be replayed/recycled by in future plays, although that probably isn't an entirely progressive move (if it feeds into its 'fake'-ness) - i hear many composers almost unconciously transcribe so many of these moves right up to today, just like how AACM were listening to New York school etc. to modify their methodologies (?)

Not exactly on point, but anyone who hasn't seen Mtume school Crouch ought to set aside a little time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OLqid9RABs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OLqid9RABs

Not only can Mtume play better than Crouch can, he can think better too.

Oops, that second one was supposed to be this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAtaxon9t5g

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/24/the-stanley-crouch-i-knew/

"When the drumming chair in Cecil Taylor’s unit opened up, in the late 1970s, Stanley reportedly hoped that Taylor might hire him and give him a shot at glory. But Taylor declined to even audition him. Stanley, who reportedly never recovered from this slight, stopped playing drums, though he often insisted that if he’d only had proper training, he would have been one of the greats."

This is odd:

Don Pullen was a blazingly talented musician who admired Taylor and started out by emulating him, but Pullen’s mature style was all his own, and it had a much more traditional sense of swing and song form.

I swear I've read Pullen interviews where he said he developed his approach wholly independent of Taylor's, and that he hadn't actually heard Taylor until he'd solidified his own style.

I love Pullen's playing & I know he said that w/r/t Taylor but that is one of those things where, I suppose it could be true but it is a little hard to believe

Shatz's Crouch obit I think does a better job of addressing Crouch's issues than the Iverson one