by Allen Dwight Callahan
CONSIDERING GENIUS: WRITINGS ON JAZZ by Stanley Crouch (Perseus Books Group, 2007)
In this recent collection of essays, some published at least once before, critic Stanley Crouch treats his abiding passion for jazz. His gift for polemical judgments and well-turned phrases makes for page-turning criticism of a musical art form, and of so much else, that is quintessentially American.
There are times when Crouch's prose is positively numinous. Of the relationship of African Americans and modernity, he offers up with deft strokes of pathos this summary of three American centuries: "Their ancestors had arrived in the holds of slave ships as the black gold of labor cargo; they had been sold as chattel even more times than they had been repeatedly sold out by the nation; they had taken the Christianity taught to them and removed from it an all too pervasive sentimentality so that the tragic essence of the tale of Christ achieved the bottomless pain and the glory of transcendence central to its charisma." Quoting himself from an earlier essay, "Body and Soul," he says of the creation of jazz in the twentieth century: "Given the attempts to depersonalize human beings on the plantation, or reduce them to the simplicity of animals, it is understandable that a belief in the dignity of the Negro and the joyous importance of the individual resulted in what is probably the century's most radical assault on Western musical convention." In such passages there is more matter with more art than anywhere else in jazz criticism, and as much as anywhere in American letters.But all is not sweetness and light. If it were, it wouldn't be the Stanley Crouch we've come to know through his previous volumes of collected essays, NOTES OF HANGING JUDGE, THE ALL-AMERICAN SKIN GAME, and THE ARTIFICIAL WHITE MAN. That same cantankerous, curmudgeonly Stanley Crouch is ever in character throughout this volume—even and especially when he is out of sorts. At such moments, he's very good even when he's very bad. But Stanley Crouch does Mae West one better: he is often very good and very bad at the same time.
And Crouch can be quite bad. Black pop artists are targets of his disdain. He has unkind epithets for Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie that I won't repeat. His attack on arch Black Nationalist and rival jazz critic Amiri Baraka in "Jazz Criticism and Its Effect on the Art Form" is downright vicious: "When I received a copy of [Baraka's] paper, it appeared to have been written in one sitting, its very sloppiness symbolic of the lack of aesthetic seriousness so obvious in its content." Baraka's analysis of jazz is "a mouthful of dust" and "an effort to reduce the artistry of jazz to no more than political pulp." And all this is only the first paragraph.
Crouch charges that Baraka, whom he insists on calling by his former name Leroi Jones, "has simplified the complexity of inspiration, invention, adaptation, and context to a battlefield on which black victims war against a conspiracy of racist corporate heads and white jazz writers." Later in his career, however, Crouch would find himself wounded on that very battlefield when he was fired by the JAZZ TIMES for writing about white critics regularly overrating white jazz artists.
Crouch's hatred of Black Nationalism erupts again in "Coltrane Derailed," where he writes of John Coltrane's descent into "an artistic abyss" in the mid-sixties. During concerts in Chicago and New York, Coltrane is reported to have "put down the saxophone and started shouting, yodeling, and screaming through the microphone while beating on his chest." Crouch asks, "What could have led one of the intellectual giants of jazz...in an arena so emotionally narrow and so far removed from his roots and accomplishments?"
The culprit of Coltrane's demise, Crouch claims, is those damned Black Nationalists: "During the period of the 1960s, everything traditional was under fire, from politics to ethnic identity, for both rational and irrational reasons. It is not impossible to believe that Coltrane was attracted to the romantic fantasies about Africa that black nationalists attempted to impose on both Negroes at large and Negro artists."
Crouch doesn't even begin to make a case for this accusation and doesn't feel the need to. Yes, the screaming, publicly incoherent Coltrane was confused. But did Black Nationalism push him over the edge? Were his "romantic fantasies about Africa" to blame? Or was it the laud of fawning white critics and the admiration of equally clueless white fans who praised Coltrane's sheer incomprehensibility as proof of his genius? Was it not that Coltrane made the fatal mistake of believing his own press clippings? The aggregate of these pressures, not notions of Africa, was Coltrane's third rail.
