CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN REMNANT

Cold Fusion: Stanley Crouch wages jazz by other means (Kerry Howley, June 27, 2003, Reason)

That Crouch had become impossible to work with squares with his reputation, but his accusations of racism are anything but predictable. Crouch has called Louis Farrakhan "insane" and Al Sharpton a "buffoon." He has denounced black nationalism, Afro-centrism, and "the balkanization of America." He writes columns with titles like "It's Not Profiling, It's Good Policing." These are not the positions of a reverse racist, and this is not a man who plays the race card lightly.

So why now?

Crouch's position has less to do with color than it does with sound. He defines jazz within famously narrow limits--a music that doesn't stray far from the blues or the techniques that have traditionally produced it, musicians who never, ever forget where and how the sound was born. One doesn't have to be black to find a groove (though some critics have taken him to mean this), but one must be willing to bow to the "Negro aesthetic." He is convinced that the white establishment resents a musical history from which it can't help but feel alienated, and so champions jazz that sounds "white" instead of jazz that looks backward. In this view, the desire to innovate past swing is tantamount to fearing its origins and the people who created it. The lines between the advancement of a music and the rejection of its history become entangled in the vast mire of racial politics. [...]

What some see as the degeneration of the music is, to others, its inherent forward motion. To try to stem the flow of creativity, to establish a canon and declare all else "not jazz," is to alienate the very population Crouch seeks to engage. But Crouch insists that definitions shape reality. "If you can't define jazz," he declares, "it doesn't exist." [...]

It is a lonely place that Crouch inhabits at the moment, outside of an "establishment" that largely embraces the music of free jazz, ethno fusion, and, to a lesser extent, crossover. As long as it stays that way, the critic's caustic rants and purist diatribes are just another welcome sound.

Like all conservative critics, Mr. Crouch's essays will be pertinent twenty years after he's dead, while the "free jazz" and other stuff he's ripping will be long forgotten. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 14, 2003 8:24 PM