As I could have predicted, the comment section has become a mini-forum on Stanley Crouch. Crouch was a rare bird, a black critic who hung with the great black musicians and used their perspective to shape his writing. While hardly a perfect critic, that social aspect gives him a lot of room in my book, for he is quite literally almost the only voice from that quadrant of the galaxy. I wrote the NPR obit for Stanley Crouch, which explains more of my take. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913619163/stanley-crouch-towering-jazz-critic-dead-at-74
As far as Crouch and the avant-grade goes, I think he had the right to be critical, and once again, the social aspect is what needs to be examined. I go into this further in my article on Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor. The thread goes back to Ralph Ellison at least.
“Despite a few black critical champions like Baraka, avant-garde jazz would not be embraced by the African American community at large. Those eager to condemn Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis as hopelessly conservative may want to stop and learn more about what they were trying to conserve.”
On AI illustration: Absolutely. I wouldn't hire a professional artist to produce surrealist bullshit if I had an infinite budget, so I don't get an AI to produce it for free. I pay a stock-photo service, I run my own photos, and a few times a year, I pay professional photographers competitive industry rates to produce fantastic photos. As I'm about to do at the Montreal Jazz Festival. It's an indulgence, most of my readers don't care, but it makes me feel like I'm not pushing out the easiest crap I can push out.
I think it’s the more performative aspect of Stanley’s prose that puts people off. All those “hanging judge” and “gutbucket” metaphors and descriptors. But for me that’s what makes him more fun to read than, say, Martin Williams. Beyond that, the core arguments of what he has to say are endlessly debatable, to which I say, have at it, but leave me out of it. Thanks for linking to Brian Wilson essay. It’s only writing I’ve read on Brian that actually deals with his music in any sort of analytical detail. It’s the best I’ve read since Jules Siegel’s
notorious “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God,” from 1967, which anchored the decades-long obsession with SMiLE. A classic of California Noir reportage
I found the Crouch article really interesting and perceptive. But when he writes, “Even Coleman, Coltrane, and Taylor sometimes hired musicians who were “avant-garde” only because they could not fulfill the technical requirements of any other jazz style.”, I have to ask just who he is talking about? Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders? Rashied Ali? I admit I don’t often listen to late Coltrane at this point. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t get why he (and Pharoah) played like that at that time. To my ear, Pharoah’s subsequent recordings are great! His playing on Randy Weston’s records in the 1990s is absolutely masterful. Just recently I bought “The Trance of Seven Colors” and “Crescent With Love” and they are excellent.
Crouch in that article recognizes the centrality of percussion and dance rhythms. He sure seemed to move from that to neo-traditionalism in the 1980s. It seems that neo-traditionalism is what Wynton Marsalis initially took from Crouch and tried to put into practice. I gotta say, when I see Wynton doing a record with Willie Nelson I am grateful that he seems to have let go of some of that!
I will DEFINITELY get the Billy Hart book as soon as it’s available!
Wow, that Stanley Crouch article was excellent. He deserves more respect than he gets, even if he often acted the reactionary bully. I wish someone would put out that Olu Dara album.
AI illustration is an abomination unto the Lord. Why do they do it? And why do video makers use AI narration? Don't they know that within fifty miles of them they can find a dozen community theater actors/college actors who would gladly narrate for free just to list the credit? But then, most of these guys may not even have made the videos themselves, which explains much of the imbecility of many YouTube videos. "Slop videos" is the new term of choice for these.
I saw an article recently which began with a glam photo of John and Jackie Kennedy circa 1958. The article did identify them, but in small print below the photo there was what I think of as an AI leftover. It read something like: "Man and woman wearing pearls pose for photo." I've seen two or three others like it.
This comment section is wild! I will *always* be a Wallace Roney fan. I wrote the liner notes to ‘Village’ and went out to hear Wallace whenever I could. We had many talks about music, & the hometown (and now I’m back here, which I swore would never happen.) Stanley was quite a character and had an opinion about everything, including women’s perfume. I look forward to reading Billy’s book. Meanwhile, I will remind everyone that ‘Notes and Tones’ is still out here… plz read that too! Thanks, Ethan.
Of course I love Notes and Tones! Just the best. Yeah, the Crouch formulation of critiquing Wallace Roney through the eyes of his peers is the kind of move that only he could do. (I mention this Crouch article in my obit.)
I would love to be proven wrong, but if our experience in the suburb of Cleveland Heights is typical, Zohran Mamdani's struggle is just beginning.
Just four years ago Kahlil Seren became the first non-white and first elected mayor of Cleveland Heights. Since then the city council and the political establishment has fought him tooth and nail: mocking his early, voluntary No Mow May program; objecting to appointments he wanted to make to citizen advisory councils, only to turn around and appoint the very same individuals; fighting over the budget and limiting his budgetary authority.
This year, an election year, the mud slinging has been far worse. Not that Seren was actually accused of committing any criminal acts. But instead he was "guilty" of letting his wife attend meetings, accused that his wife made staff feel uncomfortable and that she made a harsh, anti-Semitic comment about a public figure in a private text to another public figure (someone who shared the text with the media after an effort to extract $300K in hush money failed). Some of the charges have been investigated and proven untrue, others still hang in the air like a cloud. A white judge yelled at the mayor’s black wife about the state of their yard, and then called the police when the mayor paid a polite visit to the judge, and this was the subject of a video on television news. Recently the editor of Cleveland's largest newspaper and online news source said the black mayor was caught “sneaking” around because a security camera showed that the mayor was in a city hall department during off-hours.
I collected signatures for the Mayor to be included on the ballot, an effort that failed. What succeeded was a recall effort led by a white woman who lost out to this mayor in her effort to become mayor! A recall effort that would remove him just five months before he is set to leave office! The racially and economically diverse city of Cleveland Heights has been turned into a hateful place by the old guard who has resented his election from day one. I hope for your sake Zohran Mamdani doesn't face the same.
One last thing: I tried to interest the NY Times in bringing national attention to Cleveland Heights story. If you or your wife have any media connections, can you try as well? Thank you.
I will be reading Billy Hart's book as soon as I can. It's wonderful to see that some of the Icons are being written about while they are still here with us. I just finished reading Billy Cobham's book, COBHAM - The Music And Drumming Of Billy Cobham.
I hope there are more to come about the important and influential voices in improvised drumming.
I read Stanley Crouch's piece from the Village Voice. I hadn't read it in decades, but I remember parts of it fairly well. I agree with some of it and find myself chuckling out loud at other parts.
Mr. Crouch often painted with a 2 color palette. This...or...That! Black...or...White! All...or...Nothing at all! That made for inflammatory responses from his readers, me included, when he was writing for the Voice and others some years later. Now that I'm much older, I don't see the world in such stark contrasts. I see a world that is a continuum. For lack of a better description, Black to White, and a lot of shades of grey in between. Mr. Crouch's writing was certainly entertaining and often button-pushing. I guess we will never know how much was for getting a rise out of his readers, or simply how he viewed the world.
Then again, perhaps he was somewhere between the extremes he so vociferously defended and proclaimed when given the opportunity. Shades of grey? I don't know.
I hadn't read this piece before. As usual with Crouch's papal pronouncements, I find much of it simply irritating and much less to be stimulating. His knock on the avant-garde is just mean-spirited, and too cowardly to name any of the presumably large number of performers whose music disgusts him:
"Even Coleman, Coltrane, and Taylor sometimes hired musicians who were 'avant-garde' only because they could not fulfill the technical requirements of any other jazz style." "[An] abundance of absolute fakes, or players of small talent and much con, justified their ramblings with a fraudulent and pretentious mysticism." "[Some] very talented players were caught saying things as stupid as 'You’ll never play bebop better than Bird so why try? Do something new.'"
It seems that Crouch made his bones in jazz as a musician: an avant-garde drummer. (He appears on Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions.) I think that he has the zealousness of a convert, in his case to a reactionary view of creative improvised music (to use the old Cadence Review masthead). I imagine that in the 1940's, he would have been with those who considered bebop a heresy; in the 1930's, New Orleans / Chicago as the only real jazz.
His old column does have me reconsidering Filles de Kilimanjaro. So that's a good thing. But he's not the jazz writer that I would return to, with so much good writing on jazz out there; including what we have had from Mr. Iverson.
As I could have predicted, the comment section has become a mini-forum on Stanley Crouch. Crouch was a rare bird, a black critic who hung with the great black musicians and used their perspective to shape his writing. While hardly a perfect critic, that social aspect gives him a lot of room in my book, for he is quite literally almost the only voice from that quadrant of the galaxy. I wrote the NPR obit for Stanley Crouch, which explains more of my take. https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913619163/stanley-crouch-towering-jazz-critic-dead-at-74
As far as Crouch and the avant-grade goes, I think he had the right to be critical, and once again, the social aspect is what needs to be examined. I go into this further in my article on Charles Mingus and Cecil Taylor. The thread goes back to Ralph Ellison at least.
“Despite a few black critical champions like Baraka, avant-garde jazz would not be embraced by the African American community at large. Those eager to condemn Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Wynton Marsalis as hopelessly conservative may want to stop and learn more about what they were trying to conserve.”
https://jjs.libraries.rutgers.edu/index.php/jjs/article/view/198/142
On AI illustration: Absolutely. I wouldn't hire a professional artist to produce surrealist bullshit if I had an infinite budget, so I don't get an AI to produce it for free. I pay a stock-photo service, I run my own photos, and a few times a year, I pay professional photographers competitive industry rates to produce fantastic photos. As I'm about to do at the Montreal Jazz Festival. It's an indulgence, most of my readers don't care, but it makes me feel like I'm not pushing out the easiest crap I can push out.
Good for you Paul! I like to hear this
Thanks for the tip on the Matthew Guerrieri piece. Formidable!
No doubt! Thanks Richard
congrats on the book launch. looking forward to reading
It’s quite good if I do say so myself
Thank you for the link to the Crouch piece. I forget how open-minded he could be. He had big ears.
certainly true
I want to buy that book. Billy and I have been friends for nearly 50 years!
love it!
I think it’s the more performative aspect of Stanley’s prose that puts people off. All those “hanging judge” and “gutbucket” metaphors and descriptors. But for me that’s what makes him more fun to read than, say, Martin Williams. Beyond that, the core arguments of what he has to say are endlessly debatable, to which I say, have at it, but leave me out of it. Thanks for linking to Brian Wilson essay. It’s only writing I’ve read on Brian that actually deals with his music in any sort of analytical detail. It’s the best I’ve read since Jules Siegel’s
notorious “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God,” from 1967, which anchored the decades-long obsession with SMiLE. A classic of California Noir reportage
thanks Chuck
I found the Crouch article really interesting and perceptive. But when he writes, “Even Coleman, Coltrane, and Taylor sometimes hired musicians who were “avant-garde” only because they could not fulfill the technical requirements of any other jazz style.”, I have to ask just who he is talking about? Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders? Rashied Ali? I admit I don’t often listen to late Coltrane at this point. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t get why he (and Pharoah) played like that at that time. To my ear, Pharoah’s subsequent recordings are great! His playing on Randy Weston’s records in the 1990s is absolutely masterful. Just recently I bought “The Trance of Seven Colors” and “Crescent With Love” and they are excellent.
Crouch in that article recognizes the centrality of percussion and dance rhythms. He sure seemed to move from that to neo-traditionalism in the 1980s. It seems that neo-traditionalism is what Wynton Marsalis initially took from Crouch and tried to put into practice. I gotta say, when I see Wynton doing a record with Willie Nelson I am grateful that he seems to have let go of some of that!
I will DEFINITELY get the Billy Hart book as soon as it’s available!
Wow, that Stanley Crouch article was excellent. He deserves more respect than he gets, even if he often acted the reactionary bully. I wish someone would put out that Olu Dara album.
Best thing I've read yet on Brian Wilson (and "Love You" is a marvel)
I think I will actually cover a Wilson composition for my next sextet gig
AI illustration is an abomination unto the Lord. Why do they do it? And why do video makers use AI narration? Don't they know that within fifty miles of them they can find a dozen community theater actors/college actors who would gladly narrate for free just to list the credit? But then, most of these guys may not even have made the videos themselves, which explains much of the imbecility of many YouTube videos. "Slop videos" is the new term of choice for these.
I saw an article recently which began with a glam photo of John and Jackie Kennedy circa 1958. The article did identify them, but in small print below the photo there was what I think of as an AI leftover. It read something like: "Man and woman wearing pearls pose for photo." I've seen two or three others like it.
I enjoyed the Brian Wilson article.
“slop videos” it is
This comment section is wild! I will *always* be a Wallace Roney fan. I wrote the liner notes to ‘Village’ and went out to hear Wallace whenever I could. We had many talks about music, & the hometown (and now I’m back here, which I swore would never happen.) Stanley was quite a character and had an opinion about everything, including women’s perfume. I look forward to reading Billy’s book. Meanwhile, I will remind everyone that ‘Notes and Tones’ is still out here… plz read that too! Thanks, Ethan.
Of course I love Notes and Tones! Just the best. Yeah, the Crouch formulation of critiquing Wallace Roney through the eyes of his peers is the kind of move that only he could do. (I mention this Crouch article in my obit.)
I would love to be proven wrong, but if our experience in the suburb of Cleveland Heights is typical, Zohran Mamdani's struggle is just beginning.
Just four years ago Kahlil Seren became the first non-white and first elected mayor of Cleveland Heights. Since then the city council and the political establishment has fought him tooth and nail: mocking his early, voluntary No Mow May program; objecting to appointments he wanted to make to citizen advisory councils, only to turn around and appoint the very same individuals; fighting over the budget and limiting his budgetary authority.
This year, an election year, the mud slinging has been far worse. Not that Seren was actually accused of committing any criminal acts. But instead he was "guilty" of letting his wife attend meetings, accused that his wife made staff feel uncomfortable and that she made a harsh, anti-Semitic comment about a public figure in a private text to another public figure (someone who shared the text with the media after an effort to extract $300K in hush money failed). Some of the charges have been investigated and proven untrue, others still hang in the air like a cloud. A white judge yelled at the mayor’s black wife about the state of their yard, and then called the police when the mayor paid a polite visit to the judge, and this was the subject of a video on television news. Recently the editor of Cleveland's largest newspaper and online news source said the black mayor was caught “sneaking” around because a security camera showed that the mayor was in a city hall department during off-hours.
I collected signatures for the Mayor to be included on the ballot, an effort that failed. What succeeded was a recall effort led by a white woman who lost out to this mayor in her effort to become mayor! A recall effort that would remove him just five months before he is set to leave office! The racially and economically diverse city of Cleveland Heights has been turned into a hateful place by the old guard who has resented his election from day one. I hope for your sake Zohran Mamdani doesn't face the same.
One last thing: I tried to interest the NY Times in bringing national attention to Cleveland Heights story. If you or your wife have any media connections, can you try as well? Thank you.
And you have to live with the Fact, that Al Foster played great Funk and Rock Drums on Agharta and on many Concerts back than.
And I have to live with the Fact that I have Zero Talent when it comes to practicing Art. Opposite to you!
That is why I have to compensate with „Big Taste“. Something very good Musicians don’t have to.
Stanley Crouch wrote some good Stuff but like the Philosopher Adorno not necessarily about Jazz.
And he wasn’t the best „Free Jazz“ Drummer either.
I will be reading Billy Hart's book as soon as I can. It's wonderful to see that some of the Icons are being written about while they are still here with us. I just finished reading Billy Cobham's book, COBHAM - The Music And Drumming Of Billy Cobham.
I hope there are more to come about the important and influential voices in improvised drumming.
I read Stanley Crouch's piece from the Village Voice. I hadn't read it in decades, but I remember parts of it fairly well. I agree with some of it and find myself chuckling out loud at other parts.
Mr. Crouch often painted with a 2 color palette. This...or...That! Black...or...White! All...or...Nothing at all! That made for inflammatory responses from his readers, me included, when he was writing for the Voice and others some years later. Now that I'm much older, I don't see the world in such stark contrasts. I see a world that is a continuum. For lack of a better description, Black to White, and a lot of shades of grey in between. Mr. Crouch's writing was certainly entertaining and often button-pushing. I guess we will never know how much was for getting a rise out of his readers, or simply how he viewed the world.
Then again, perhaps he was somewhere between the extremes he so vociferously defended and proclaimed when given the opportunity. Shades of grey? I don't know.
I hadn't read this piece before. As usual with Crouch's papal pronouncements, I find much of it simply irritating and much less to be stimulating. His knock on the avant-garde is just mean-spirited, and too cowardly to name any of the presumably large number of performers whose music disgusts him:
"Even Coleman, Coltrane, and Taylor sometimes hired musicians who were 'avant-garde' only because they could not fulfill the technical requirements of any other jazz style." "[An] abundance of absolute fakes, or players of small talent and much con, justified their ramblings with a fraudulent and pretentious mysticism." "[Some] very talented players were caught saying things as stupid as 'You’ll never play bebop better than Bird so why try? Do something new.'"
It seems that Crouch made his bones in jazz as a musician: an avant-garde drummer. (He appears on Wildflowers: The New York Loft Jazz Sessions.) I think that he has the zealousness of a convert, in his case to a reactionary view of creative improvised music (to use the old Cadence Review masthead). I imagine that in the 1940's, he would have been with those who considered bebop a heresy; in the 1930's, New Orleans / Chicago as the only real jazz.
His old column does have me reconsidering Filles de Kilimanjaro. So that's a good thing. But he's not the jazz writer that I would return to, with so much good writing on jazz out there; including what we have had from Mr. Iverson.
Lots of good stuff here, with special thanks for recommending the Soho the Dog post on Brian Wilson. Wow.
I hear you! Soho is the man