Ethan Iverson interviews Stanley Crouch

[Guy Berger]

Somebody posted this on AAJ -- supposedly it comes from the Bad Plus's blog, Do the Math.

Guy

EDIT (by Jim Alfredson): In honor of Ethan regarding his posting here on his blog, I've deleted the quoted article instead urge people to use the link to read the article on the original blog, in it's original format.

http://thebadplus.typepad.com/dothemath/20...view_with_.html

Thank you,

----Jim

[DTMX]

Wow - that was a good read. Thanks!

[CJ Shearn]

yeah! Stanley isn't as dismissive of free as I thought

[Guy Berger]

He definitely manages not to be an asshole, but he comes off as somewhat ridiculous when comparing Messiaen and Cecil Taylor (and getting totally called on it by Iverson).

Guy

[Werf]

Now I want to stop hating, and start drinking.

[clifford_thornton]

"EI: Yeah, they gave up that phase "black music" awhile back, but it is interesting to remember that there was that rhetoric for at least a decade. I don’t think Cecil says "Africa" too much any more, either, which is just as well, since any record of the whitest British rock has more to do with Africa than any Cecil Taylor record of the last 40 years."

Could Iverson BE the next Crouch?

[JSngry]

yeah! Stanley isn't as dismissive of free as I thought

Crouch is not dumb. He knows quite a bit about the insides of the music in terms of both technique & personality.

But he is an opportunist. That's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but when you do a lot of collateral damage along the way, which I definitely think he has, then yeah, it is.

[Lazaro Vega]

Just checked out "What's New" by Bird at St. Nick's alongside Coltrane's "Theme For Ernie" from "Soultrane" and I suppose -- it's kind of hard to tell. I mean, if recording quality is the issue the lo-fi of Bird at St. Nick's about disqualifies it...but then again, there's something there in the comparison.

For what it is worth Von Freeman once expressed to me there were no good instrumental versions of "What's New." This version by Bird is an exception.

Thought this was an exceptional interview.

[Simon Weil]

There are people who can have really long conversations with - you cover all sorts of stuff and it seems kind of interesting. Nothing untoward happens and everything seems kind of fine. But then you go home and the conversation doesn't feel quite right - like food that's gone off somewhere. Like there's some rot in there somewhere. And a few days later you start feeling ill.

Neat trick if you can manage it.

Simon Weil

[Tom Storer]

I appreciate Iverson's diplomacy. He bent over backwards to be complimentary and deferential because, I believe, that's the only way to have a conversation rather than a fight with Stanley Crouch. Of course, that's a choice--to want to have a conversation rather than a fight. Many if not most Crouch detractors prefer to trade insults with him (as long as they're not actually in punching range).

But I'm glad he did it. It's not a surprise to anyone who knows Crouch's history that yes, he's a highly experienced jazz listener with no little insight, and his tastes are more eclectic than one might guess. He's also dead wrong in some of his basic conclusions, IMHO, and as Jim points out is an opportunist. Iverson, whose own insights I find more penetrating than Crouch's, takes the risk of seeming sycophantic in order, without making the interview into a boxing match, to complain to Crouch about his aggressive, disrespectful side; defend Dave Douglas; deny Crouch's claim about Cecil Taylor ripping off Messiaen et al.; and most importantly, to say I don't think you can have the word "jazz," Stanley--you would make too many people upset if you took it away from them. Now that's class. He could have said, "You insufferable arrogant blowhard, who the fuck gave you the right to decide for everybody else what jazz means and doesn't mean??" and lots of people would have cheered and said, "That's giving it to him!" But instead he made the same point in such a clear but gentle way. I think it's important to keep communicating even if you disagree with someone, even if they piss you right off, so I say three cheers.

And of course the point Iverson makes is a good one: Crouch's insistence on claiming the word "jazz" can only be used with his approval tends to obscure the fact that swing and changes and blues are good things, worthy of being celebrated and continued. They're just not the only good things. But in the context of this sterile semantic quarrel over "what's jazz and what isn't", the conversation in the jazz community about the ways "the tradition" can be blended with all the other stuff--a conversation that was so absorbing and so fruitful up until the end of the 70's or so--has been made more difficult to carry on in a calm and easy way.

[Larry Kart]

For some reason I'm reminded of that young not unintelligent female aide to Dick Nixon in his post-presidential years (at the Nixon Library in California) who helped Nixon out on the various books he wrote, swore that if you really knew him he proved to be a sweet, kind man and even went so far (in bouts of tenderness and empathy on her part) as to sit on his f****** lap.

Edited February 28, 2007 by Larry Kart

[Larry Kart]

Oh, yeah -- she also said she was "tough" on Nixon at times, called him out when he indulged in bouts of ratf*** behavior. But she sat on his lap.

[paul secor]

that's a fair interpretation, Tom, & essentially the same as mine. I maintain the best policy re: Crouch is just to IGNORE him. i'll gleefully scorn when the topic comes up but Iverson plays the dupe there when ya'll all know--

what Crouch most most most loves is attention.

in short, he's a sociopathic blowhard & any late attempts at mitigating that might-- oh just might-- have a little to do w/the "Good Ship" Marsalis sinking in both popular & critical esteem.

with the GIANTS aged or aging (Praise Be Unto George Lewis The Younger), Crouch is also setting himself up-- even further might I add-- as some exceptional goddamn historical arbiter bc contradictory voices of authority will be leaving (adios Leroy).

seriously, what great "insight" has Crouch ever offered ya'll moreso than anyone here, whom you didn't even know existed until this whole interweb craze? Yah, he's hung w/a few people-- big deal.

Read: HIGHLY unreliable narrator.

& I still think Iverson is part of the circle jerk & Yah, He. Wants. More. Attention. To.

***

it's called ADVERTISING.

***

Putney, bruthas in the black room!

edc

I agree - ignore the SOB. If people didn't pay attention to him, he'd dry up and disappear.

[Lazaro Vega]

The idea that Cecil's music is not jazz because it is corrupted by classical music ignores his music and what he's said about it, yet more importantly it ignores the tradition of jazz. From statements by the great stride players that they could play Chopin faster than anyone; or the bel canto singing tradition on the sound and phrasing of Fats Navarro; or Teddy Wilson's whole thing, or Tiger Rag being a French dance, classical music has a deep, penetrating influence on jazz. Did classical music de-Negro Nina Simone? Not in a million years. And the sound of Bach on Mingus was fairly playful. Classical music has always been part of the mix. Just because it remained so when the new vocabularies of rhythm, melody and ensemble organization came to the forefront of jazz after Ornette showed the way out of song form doesn't mean that music was not jazz. The fundemental "thing" that Stanley does with his arguement is change the idea that jazz is a way to the notion that it is a thing ("blues plus swing equals jazz" is a commodification, a logo line, not an artistic process). I don't understand why people haven't challenged him on the idea that classical music corrupts jazz until it is unrecognizable with the same tradition he claims to so thoroughly comprehend.

The little episode about Roland Kirk sitting in with Cecil echoes Wynton trying to sit in with Miles as both were told 'no' for the same reasons: we have a band here with certain operating principles that you don't know. That, to me, is legit.

What of the notion that "free" musicians "should" have a pathway open for jazz musicians to sit in with? I've seen people jam in unplanned contexts at the old Southend Music works in Chicago-- Reggie Workman with Gerry Hemmingway, Paul Smoker, Steve Hunt and Kent Kessler -- who've made incredible music, whole music with a beginning middle and end all unplanned. So it seems the arguement breaks down as you get into the music more. I mean, Reggie Workman is a jazz musician, right?

Listening to that WNUR interview with Leroy Jenkins it was clear he feels more comfortable "jamming" with Joseph Jarman than just about anyone else because he trusts Joseph's level of understanding the musical outcome they're both aiming for. How could he, then, just give over to someone who is only comfortable playing changes, and why would we expect him too?

[Hot Ptah]

Why did Crouch claim that Cecil Taylor's music is drawn from Messiaen, without qualification? Iverson calls him on it, then Crouch says that Braxton had previously told him the same thing. So if Crouch previously knew it was incorrect, from Braxton, why did he say it again here?

I remember reading a Crouch piece in the Village Voice in the 1980s which made this claim, that Cecil Taylor's music is just Messiaen with drums added. I have never been able to hear this connection. I have heard a fair amount of both Cecil Taylor and Messiaen, and just don't hear it.

I wonder if Crouch has ever really heard any of Messiaen's music?

[jasonguthartz]

The idea that Cecil's music is not jazz because it is corrupted by classical music ignores his music and what he's said about it, yet more importantly it ignores the tradition of jazz. ...

Well said.

And of course there's the tautology in Crouch's claim that Cecil hasn't "influenced any real jazz today, either": If Cecil isn't "real jazz", then anyone building on his aesthetic (e.g., Fred Anderson) couldn't be "real jazz" either.

[Lazaro Vega]

Well, it's right under his nose: listen to Joey Calderazzo in Branford's Quartet. Though not a starting point for him, Cecil's vocabulary will come into play during climaxes of the music. Then, too, there's Myra Melford, Marilyn Crispell, to some extent Craig Taborn....Cecil's modus operandi is so personal that it would difficult to play "like" him without being an immitator, and a lesser one, yet pianists have played off him and incorporated aspects of his pianistic approach. Cecil's band approach and compositional method is one of many ways of dealing with the changes in jazz after the discontinuation of playing traditional song form.

Maria Schneider once described Messiaen's music to me as like walking into a room that's all one color and then, woosh, the color changes. Basically she's saying it's solids, though. Cecil's music is more like bubbles, violent bubbles, and is underpinned an elemental quality that is like creation myths meeting the blues.

[PHILLYQ]

I'm not a musician nor have I ever studied music, but Cecil Taylor is squarely in the tradition to my ears. Yes, he goes 'out', but he's definitley extendeing the tradition to my ears. It's also worth noting that Jimmy Lyons has been considered as an update of Bird, Bird for the avant-garde.

It's a shame that an ignorant fool like Grouch is all over the place trying to sell his homogenized version of the music- he does this great music a massive disservice and his activities lead more and more to museum music that is frozen in amber like an ancient insect.

[Tom Storer]

What of the notion that "free" musicians "should" have a pathway open for jazz musicians to sit in with?

That's no more practical than that "real jazz" musicians should have a path for "free" musicians to sit in. It can happen, sure, but it doesn't make sense to say it's a kind of obligation.

I think Crouch means to say that jazz "needs" a community in the specific sense of a widely shared repertoire and shared musical goals and practices, and to the extent that some music becomes more dependent on idiosyncratic systems or processes, ignoring traditional methods, and thereby excluding musicians who haven't made a specific study of the more idiosyncratic music, it is outside the "community" and no longer jazz. He wants "jazz" to be a genre in which everyone can be judged by the same criteria.

Having a single community with a single set of standards is a nice and cozy idea; everyone likes to be part of a group and share in what the group is all about. To an extent (but only to an extent) jazz had that up to the late 50's or so. But it's long gone.

On the other hand, there remains a very large and vibrant community within the larger jazz world that meets Crouch's criteria. It's not like swing and changes aren't still the focus of a majority of jazz players in the world. The more insecure members of that community, such as Crouch and that other guy, the trumpet player, resist any expansion of the definition of "jazz" as if it were a criticism of their own preferred style; but of course that isn't the case. Most aficionados of "free" or non-traditional jazz that I know are in love with the whole tradition, and the musicians involved, whether or not they could play convincing bebop themselves, are usually knowledgeable and appreciative of what Crouch calls "real jazz." Likewise, many straight-ahead players love a lot of "free jazz," whether or not they play it. Crouch would have it that jazz is made up of two rival camps, viewing one another with anger and suspicion, and in fact his writing tends to encourage such tendencies when they are latent. But Iverson is right: "it is high time to put this issue--which has fragmented the jazz world terribly--onto the table and look at it in a serious way."

Edited March 1, 2007 by Tom Storer

[Big Beat Steve]

Tom, if the positions of Stanley Crouch that you sum up here are the reasons why his writings so often meet with hostililty, does this mean that Stanley Crouch is commonly seen as the Rudi Blesh or Hugues Panassié of the 21st century? :D

[Larry Kart]

Crouch would have it that jazz is made up of two rival camps, viewing one another with anger and suspicion, and in fact his writing tends to encourage such tendencies when they are latent. But Iverson is right: "it is high time to put this issue--which has fragmented the jazz world terribly--onto the table and look at it in a serious way."

But "to put this issue ... onto the table and look at it in a serious way," given your accurate description of the position and motives of the "other side," is to more or less grant upfront the "sideness" (so to speak) of that side -- which is exactly the move these "move-the-goal posts" bastards want us to make. They're essentially engaged in a power/propaganda operation that they wish to/need to disguise from time to time as rational discourse. To sit down with them and talk "in a serious way" about any of this just makes it easier for them to engage in their next act of useful (to them) table-pounding slander; after all, they can point to the "serious" discussion you-all had as proof that they're willing to talk that way and thus must be taken seriously across the board. It's like having a serious discussion with Karl Rove or the late Lee Atwater.

[JSngry]

with the GIANTS aged or aging (Praise Be Unto George Lewis The Younger), Crouch is also setting himself up-- even further might I add-- as some exceptional goddamn historical arbiter bc contradictory voices of authority will be leaving (adios Leroy).

Elder Don, you have hit the nail squarely on the head.

Now that the primary audience for "jazz" is white folk (middle-class & upwards, and slightly less middle-aged and upwards), and now that real jazz musicians (i.e. - those who came up in the music/culture organically) number between slim and none (with Slim looking at the clock on the wall and then the door in intervals of increasingly shorter duration - a cat like Shelley Carroll is the exception that more than proves the rule), the need(s) for all concerned to have Crouch's "unlettered black person who should be the final arbiter of value, because they have absorbed the truth through their nostrils or something when eating collard greens and cornbread when growing up poor in the South" to have a voice through his mouth is going to be too powerful to resist. Crouch calls the notion of such a figure having such power "sentimental" & "bullshit", but damned if that's not the role he's been working himself into - The Educated Voice Of The Soul Of The Black Man's Jazz Who Is Able To Articulate That Which Has Heretofore Been Inadequately Articulated For Those Who Most Want/Need To Hear It.

Too many degrees of separtation at this point, waaaaay too many (Crouch himself may have at one time been such a person as he fantasizes about, and deep inside, he may still be one, but like the Road Runner running through air after running off the cliff, once you look down, it's all over...). For almost everybody concerned. It's a con game, pure and simple, and there's enough marks to make it lucrative for the duration. But the truth is much more complex, and it's the nature of true evil to take the truth of the past and turn it into a lie for the present in order to capture your soul for the future.

I'm not saying that Crouch himself is a tool of the devil, or anything like that, just that he's one of many who are falling for the lie that freedom of the soul comes in a package of ready-made pre-fabricated identity. It doesn't.

But dammit if there's not a market.

[Tom Storer]

To sit down with them and talk "in a serious way" about any of this just makes it easier for them to engage in their next act of useful (to them) table-pounding slander; after all, they can point to the "serious" discussion you-all had as proof that they're willing to talk that way and thus must be taken seriously across the board. It's like having a serious discussion with Karl Rove or the late Lee Atwater.

Yeah, maybe I'm just too earnest. I see your point. But I suspect the idea was not really to try to change Crouch's mind but to publish an interview that shows the debate in a different light. The rhetorical effect of that interview is to undermine the terms of the debate as Crouch defines them. Without slamming his own shoe on the table, Iverson gently refuses Crouch's sectarianism, but without defining his own position as anti-Crouch. He says he also values what Crouch values, but doesn't rule out all the rest.

I've never known anyone in face-to-face conversation about jazz styles to raise their voice in anger and start hurling insults around. Unless you're Stanley Crouch or someone he's managed to enrage, it just doesn't happen, to my knowledge. But on the Internet it happens all the time whenever Crouch or Marsalis and their views are mentioned. Flame wars attract flame throwers, and the resulting impression is that there's a war on. But in real life? Musicians play all kinds of stuff. If some neoboppers want to bring hip-hop into their mix, they do. If some downtown free-jazzer wants to play bebop, he does. And so on and so on. How many musicians really make their choices based on what Crouch or Marsalis would approve of? Not many, I'm guessing.

It's a false debate and if it were real, Crouch would already have lost it. What would be cool is if people could discuss these issues, on line and in print as well as in person, with the mutual respect that goes out the window when the flaming starts. On the Internet it's impossible to shout anyone down or to have the last word. Rather than trying to, Iverson smoked the peace pipe and, IMO, made that approach look a lot more attractive and interesting than fisticuffs. It remains to be seen what kind of continued dialogue, if any, it will stimulate.

But of course, Stanley won't change. He'll be back with table-pounding slander in the wink of an eye. You're right about that. And the flame-throwing won't end either. So maybe I'm just a gentle dreamer. [sings: "Imagine all the people... Living life in peace..."]

[Hot Ptah]

Iverson's interview technique is familiar to litigation attorneys who have taken a lot of depositions--get the hostile, dishonest, or otherwise very difficult person to open up and give information by pretending to be friendly and open and agreeable. In the litigation context there is a goal in mind, to win a lawsuit or at least obtain enough information to get the case evaluated properly and then settled.

What I am uncertain about is what Iverson's goal was. Why adopt this mask with Crouch, for what purpose or end? It must have placed a strain on Iverson to remain in character for the entire interview. Why would he want to get Crouch to open up like this? It is not clear to me.

[Lazaro Vega]

Tom,

You're right about the musical catholicity of musicians. Recently trumpeter Roy Campbell and bassist/violinist Henry Grimes played live on Blue Lake Public Radio. To warm up they played "Jordu," "What's New" and the "Shadow of Your Smile." When they hit the air it was all completely improvised.

I recall producing a concert by Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio featuring Lester Bowie and the poetess N'tozake Shange (sp!) with Malachi Favors, bass; Ari Brown, tenor and piano; and Kahil on drums. As the band was packing up, Ari sat down at the piano and played "Betcha By Golly Wow."

A genie in disguise, laddies.