Stanley Crouch Parker biography reviewed

[Steve Reynolds]

heard Crouch this AM in a short interview with Don Imus and it was interesting to hear him speaking to a mass audience

For me with my trained ear - even in this mainstream context, Stanley said that in jazz one cannot improvise alone on stage with other musicians and we know we hear that alot - of course VERY FEW of the millions of people listening to the interview have any idea what he is talking about.

For me I know that he simply cannot help himself in his resentment of music he dislikes and even disdains just because the inteplay of certain improvising musicians or altered or different approaches of improvisation and interplay isn't the *same* or as obvious as the interplay of the music of be-bop, hard bop or more mainstream jazz music.

One thing he did say that speaks of the truth - when Don axsked him about Parker's heroin addiction - Stanley responded that he stumbled into it and couldn't escape. Now this speaks of wisdom from Crouch.

It does? Yes it does from my perspective which includes personal experience with drug addiction and recovery. Most addicts never escape active addiction even today when there are avenues and opportunities to recover and get clean.In Parker's time the understanding regarding the disease of addiction did not exist. It was looked at as a moral deficiency and personal weakness which it certainly is not.

.

No one had any clue about any of it - who the hell knew what they were getting into when they figured they were just fooling around with another drug...when did start using heroin? Late 30's or early 40's?

On the other hand many people who have used drugs including heroin did NOT and do NOT become addicts because they were or are NOT addicts. Some people are simply prone to addiction and at some point, once they are using they are unable to stop using through their own will. Parker was one of those people. Coltrane was also but through his process and in his case a God he found, he was able to stop using in 1957 - although as we know the after effects from his active addiction which was probably liver cancer from untreated hepatitis C killed him 10 years later. Well that's a lot more insightful than Crouch's response!

Then again, didn't Parker say Heroin addiction was like rolling over all your problems into ONE big problem.

And what about the connection between being a Black man in America at the time and addiction? the reality is that as long as what are refered to or thought of as 'hard drugs' have been available or used in this country - they have been distrubuted through and from more blighted areas which have been predominately populated by black/monorities.

I think this says as much and then and now about the connection/relationship between African Americans and addiction as anything.

My experience is that the disease of addiction does NOT discriminate base don color/age/religion/background/family background, upbringing or whatever.

addicts are addicts - that's really as deep as it gets. I know Doctors/Lawyers/homeless/homeowner/nice guys/scumbags - I know all sorts. Sure addiction occurs across all types of socio-economic divide. But to dismiss the reasons some people fall into addiction and some people not, as purely to do with some kind of physical or genetic predisposition - as you seem to be implying - seems a rather quaint and old fashioned perspective. And out of synch with contemporary evidence based drug and alcohol knowledge. But if that's the story you want to tell yourself then well and good.

It's actually one of my favorite subjects. I appreciate you engaging me on this topic.

I actually do not believe it has anything to do with genetics or a physical pre-disposition. No one including myself knows for sure if some of us are born as an addict although some do believe that this is the case. I tend to see this as a bit much.

My experience and belief is that with some of us, our drug addiction is based on an emotional or even a spiritual void if you will (although to this day, I'm wary of confusing people by using that misunderstood word) and subsequent ongoing pain that can only be filled with whatever brand of drug that works for us - works for us to temporarily eliminate that pain and fill that void.

At some point, the solution becomes the problem but by that point, no matter what the substance is, we cannot stop as we are now physically, emotionally and mentally in the grips of drug addiction and we cannot stop using, We use against our will, and we see no way out. It doesn't matter what the substance is - however at the latter stages of addiction a great many addicts end up using substances like heroin, crack, methamphetimine - drugs that are widely considered highly addictive, dangerous and destructive - all of which is true - or a combination of those drugs supplemented and complemented with pain pills, alcohol, marijuana.

The reality is that many people try pot, ecstasy (or molly), K, cocaine or even crack and heroin - and despite the fact that these drugs are all addictive to varying degrees - many of those people do not turn into drug addicts - therefore there is something different about some of us who do become addicts with the same background as friends or brothers or sisters who started out doing some of the same things - who did NOT become drug addicts.

Recovery replaces active addiction with a solution that varies in kind from one recovering addict to another. The relaity is that in the 1940's and 1950's there was very little hop for an addict to recover - and today it is different although from a standpoint of how many people recover from the disease of addiction, it is still very, very low - as still most addicts are destined to die a using addict death - and befopre that will suffer via degradation, institutions, depravity, desparation and sometime insanity.

I'm not engaging you so much per se, although your post does give a worthy insight on drug use from the individual perspective. I'm more thinking of using as it relates to Parker and the Jazz community of the day, and how much Heroin use in the Black jazz community reflected Heroin use in the Black non-Jazz community. And how much this determined the choices and the circumstances that were presented or forced upon Parker. For instance, 9 out of 10 Black musicians were using/addicts, so how particular was that to the wider Black community of the time? Obviously most White Jazz players of the time were users too, but using was an anomaly in non-Jazz White America.

So with all the ragging on Crouch, I would expect him to have a greater understanding of how Heroin was a part of Black Jazz life - in the particular, and how this related to Black life in more general circumstances, because of his own connection to the Black American past as well as the access this gives to a more intimate oral history.

People on this board can pick scabs at the supposed over dramatisation or weakness in Crouch as a writer, but in seeing Crouch as a Social Historian of the music, I would rather read his research than a White person attempting something similar. I think the 'anti-Marsalisism card' gives many on here a so called ideological higher ground when it comes to receiving books like this.

good to read your comments. I don't know that the 9 out of 10 figure as far as how many jazz musicians (whate and/or black) were using Heroin at that time (early to mid 40's to mid to late 60's? or beyond?) is accurate. Do you have a source for this? I would be very interested.

Next thing I know is many people then, today and in the future will end up physcially addicted to opiates. Today it is very common for people to start using oxycontin, percocet, vicodin for legitimate reason and end up "addicted".

However being physically addicted does NOT necessarily mean that that perosn is an addict. Many can break that addiction and then not suffer from the obsession and compulsion to use other drugs as a replacement - and often end up using heroin or morphine or dilautin or any of the pain pills I mentioned above - AGAIN. And they do it again after repeated withdrawels and person devastation, degradation, etc. That is a true drug addict.

So if a very high percentage of jazz musicians of that a time or *a* time were using heroin, that doesn't mean they were drug addicts. It is my belief after reading the wonderful biography of Thelonious Monk by Robin Kelley that Monk was not an addict - although he did suffer from various mental ailments and tended to drink too much from time to time and tended to smoke quite a bit of pot - but to my knowledge/recollection according to the book and other things I have read over the years, although he used many other drugs, including heroin, he was never one of thwese guys like Sonny Clark or Ernie Henry who would die from the disease of addiction, and die young - or like Hank Mobley - or Art Pepper - who would suffer and die at a slighly older age - both of whom were addicts. Or Stan Getz - who apparently finally got clean in his late 50's or early 60's - a few years before he died of cancer? An addict - sure but were they all? I tend to doubt it - often people go through phases when they are younger and are able to not cross that line as they are simply not addicts.

Was Sonny Rollins and addict or was he just addicted when he was young? And how about the other well known jazz musicians who seemed to surve and advance - fascinating subject for me

[Quasimado]

C'mon you guys reading here with a critical agenda - what's wrong? Why so quiet after so much noise?

Q

[Larry Kart]

C'mon you guys reading here with a critical agenda - what's wrong? Why so quiet after so much noise?

Q

Having finished the book the other day, I've got a good deal to say, but I need time to type it all up. Lots of passages that need to be quoted at length, so it seems to me.

[Larry Kart]

As I said before, I especially like the extensive interview material with Parker’s first wife Rebecca Ruffin, though I think it amounts more to an interesting, touching portrait of her than of the young Charlie Parker. And some of the other interviews are nice, though again I don’t recall any of the interview subjects saying anything about Parker that one didn’t already know.

Otherwise the book strikes me as heavily padded, a pile of sludge -- full of repetitive, windy disquisitions about the Machine Age and such, some of them hardly to be believed, and oodles of what strikes me as worked-up atmosphere (for examples of both, see the highly selective list below -- I could have typed out entire pages).

(p. 45): “They [Parker and his childhood acquaintances] played mumblety-peg; they rolled hoops removed from the wheels of old wagons; they shot marbles; they rode sleds in the winter. There were railroad tracks, a box factory, and coal yards in walking distance, which allowed for playing in boxcars, climbing in the box factory’s bins, and getting filthy with coal dust. But their bib overalls were strong enough to stand up to the pressure of boys out for squealing joy.”

That last sentence is semi-goofy, no?

p. 61: “First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulled them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust.”

Speaking of kicking up dust. Also, why “purported to” (i.e. “professed,” “be intended to seem”) instead of just “soothed” etc.? As for the soaked bloomers of those “listening girls,” YMMV.

p. 67: “Everybody was looking for fun, for a vacation from Depressions conditions, for a thrill and a laugh. Many went in search of distractions -- tranquilizer or stimulants, spiritual or chemical -- until the country seemed slowly to become dependent on them. Especially so when faced with unpleasant realities, such as feature films, cartoons, and other entertainments that relied on the century-old tenets of minstrelsy as away to tell the truth and create laughter at the same time.”

This passage is quite tangled up IMO. That is, “unpleasant realities, such as” is followed by “feature films, cartoons, and other entertainments that relied on the century-old tenets of minstrelsy” etc., but those things are not in apposition to “unpleasant realities,” as the structure of the sentence dictates, but are some of the “distractions” referred to in the previous sentence. Or am I missing something?

p.147: “For Charlie Parker, confronting Simpson’s death [Robert Simpson, a close childhood friend] was like drinking a cup of blues made of razor blades.”

Oh, those razor blades again.

p. 151: “Basie’s music traced the roller-coaster fate of the human heart: rising, high, falling low, singing, joking, sobbing, reminiscing, dreaming, cursing, bragging, praying. Everything was IN THERE.” (Italics in original for “in there.”)

p. 187: [buster Smith] had the sound of the Southwest in his quick speech, a swift way of talking that almost duplicated the zip of his saxophone playing, and that was punctuated by the gallows wit and Olympian laughter so often heard from those Negroes closest to the tragi-comic sensibility of the culture, a perfect human mirror of the democratic soul of American life.”

p. 189: “You had to be able [to become successful as a musician] to soothe the people or insinuate them into reverie; you had to be able to make them rise up, stomp, kick, spin, and caress; you had to remind them that the sandpaper facts of human life could be smoothed over if met in the close quarters of courtship or celebration, where the sun going down at the arrival of evening promised recognition of something far inside the soul and right under the skin.”

Whew. Also, while “sandpaper facts” are obviously rough, isn’t it careless to use that phrase when you say in the next breath that those sandpaper facts “could be smoothed over”?After all, sandpaper is commonly used to make things smoother.

p. 196-7: Too long to quote, but there’s an oddly obtuse passage about arranging, and the contrast between New Orleans polyphony and the stock band arrangements that Buster Smith encountered in the ‘20s. E.g.: “In these professional arrangments [i.e. the stock arrangements that Buster Smith studied], the horns were not only playing different lines they were also playing different notes.” Uh-huh.

p. 199: One of several passages quoted from Ralph Ellison about Southwestern jazz. Ellison is clearly one of Crouch’s models, but what a difference there is.

(From an unnumbered page, a passage that begins on the second page of the italicized intro to Part IV, as Parker was riding the rails to Chicago:

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

Perhaps my favorite paragraph in the book. Holy chow mein! The bathos is remarkable.

How all that I’ve quoted above will strike others, I can’t say. To me, again, it’s a pile of sludge.

[JSngry]

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

You made that up, didn't you.

[gmonahan]

I edit reviews for an academic on-line site, and all I can say from reading Larry's excepts is that I would really have *hated* to be Crouch's editor.

gregmo

[Larry Kart]

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

You made that up, didn't you.

I'm not nearly that inventive.

[paul secor]

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

You made that up, didn't you.

I'm not nearly that inventive.

You have to be a "genius" to think and write that way, Larry.

[Larry Kart]

Another effusion:

"Eldridge's playing combined ease with urgency, lending the motion of his lines a fresh, shimmering energy. His work echoed the industrial confidence of the culture, the disdain for heights that led to the skyscrapers, the energy that laid the railroad tracks, that dug the subways, that rolled car after car off the assembly lines, that lit the American night."

BTW, "disdain for heights"? The skyscrapers arose from an aesthetic and economically driven taste FOR tall buildings. I think what Crouch meant by "disdain for heights" was a relative lack of fear of heights on the part of the iron workers who actually built those buildings, but writers do need to be careful when they say X and it can readily be taken as Y.

[Larry Kart]

Also, on p. 353, a contribution from Wynton on Parker's use of the upper intervals of chords:

"Louis Armstong, Coleman, Hawkins, Art Tatum and others [also] played on the upper intervals of chords. What Charlie Parker did has happened perhaps only once in Western music. After figuring out how to double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm, which no one before him had done, he heard his improvised melodies at high speed and was able to hear Tatumesque harmonies at that velocity on a single instrument! This can be heard in Chopin and Liszt, but they are considered light composers. Bird aspired to make melody on a heavyweight level....."

"...double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm" -- what "shuffle rhythm"? I thought that shuffle rhythm was the compulsive doubled-up but arguably mechanical time feel popularized by the Jan Savitt band, not anything that had to do with Charlie Parker:

And who the heck considers Chopin and Liszt to be "light composers"?

[JSngry]

Ok, enough with razor-bladed skyscrapers running on industrialized trains while eating Chines food. Is there a rumination on chicken?

Seriously - has anybody done a jazz bio that "examined" all the aspects of the artist's world and looked at chicken?

I am not at all unfamiliar with the chicken, nor am I oblivious to impact that it has made on peoples' lives, not just as something to eat when convenient, but as primal image maker, from the rooster to the coop to the wire to the eggs to the yard-birdian (pun inevitable but not intentional) pecking around they yard all day to the wringing of the neck and/or the running around of the chicken with its head cut off, one could go on to the near-sacredness given to anybody who can really throw down with the fried variety, how people can damn near go to war over stuff like that, etcetectec - does Crouch or ANYBODY ever talk about chicken? No? Just razors and blues in a cup?

There's bullshit, and then there's chickshit. Stanley Crouch - CONFRONT, motherfucker, CONFRONT!!!

OTOH, by "shuffle", I'm pretty sure that Wynton is referring to the easy walking downbeat-answered-by-upbeat swing thing, not Jan Savitt. That word comes from (and goes to) a lot of different places. Even at that, what he says is spuruldubious at best. However, I know what I think he thinks he means. If I were this book (and if I could write a bell), that would be the least of my worries.

And yet/but - still...

[AllenLowe]

thank you Larry, for doing the suffering so I don't have to (why, you're a regular Jewish Jesus Christ, as Lenny Bruce might say, being mindful of the redundancy).

I wonder if anyone wlll write an honest review of this dreck.

[danasgoodstuff]

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

OMFG! How did Stanley get out of high school writin' incoherent, empty, posturing drivel like that?! That this got published is truly a crime against nature, as in the unjustified killin' of trees...

[JSngry]

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Straight, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

OMFG! How did Stanley get out of high school writin' incoherent, empty, posturing drivel like that?! That this got published is truly a crime against nature, as in the unjustified killin' of trees...

I mean, I get what he's saying, but jesus, as "literature" it's hilarious and as "poetry" it's even hilariouser. All the wondermous human socio-genetic bobbing & weaving over the eons, and it all ends up as Kansas City Chinese food? That's the way the world ends? Not with a bang but a #4 w/fried rice?

Perhaps Cab Calloway was right, then? Does Mister Crouch make that tie-in? If not, allow me:

Just as Charlie Parker was nick(there's the razor again!)-named "Yardbird" because of his love of chicken, so was Be-Bop called "Chinese music" because of his love of Chinese food.

[danasgoodstuff]

and The Yardbirds went to get a curry and dug what the sitar playing at the takeaway was putting down, and he was Nora's dad-to-be and...makes about as much sense as anything Crouch has to say. Chicken tika tock, free me from the tyranny of measured time!

[Big Beat Steve]

thank you Larry, for doing the suffering so I don't have to (why, you're a regular Jewish Jesus Christ, as Lenny Bruce might say, being mindful of the redundancy).

I wonder if anyone wlll write an honest review of this dreck.

+1

Some rather favorable comments here made me consider getting this eventually (for the new research findings) after all but Larry thankfully has set things straigtht.

No doubt there are nuggets hidden in there but I don't feel like wading through THAT much pompousness trying to dig for them. Just not an even tradeoff IMO ...

Priestley and/or Haddix, you can have my money ...

[PHILLYQ]

Stanley Grouch does pompous every week in the NY Daily News, he has a regular column!

[marcello]

I've been reading this book, and so far, Ross Russell is a better historical fiction writer than Crouch.

[Ken Dryden]

He'll probably take a swing at any NYC-based reviewed who trashes it in a review.

[JSngry]

Swing?

[sgcim]

Also, on p. 353, a contribution from Wynton on Parker's use of the upper intervals of chords:

"Louis Armstong, Coleman, Hawkins, Art Tatum and others [also] played on the upper intervals of chords. What Charlie Parker did has happened perhaps only once in Western music. After figuring out how to double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm, which no one before him had done, he heard his improvised melodies at high speed and was able to hear Tatumesque harmonies at that velocity on a single instrument! This can be heard in Chopin and Liszt, but they are considered light composers. Bird aspired to make melody on a heavyweight level....."

"...double the velocity of the shuffle rhythm" -- what "shuffle rhythm"? I thought that shuffle rhythm was the compulsive doubled-up but arguably mechanical time feel popularized by the Jan Savitt band, not anything that had to do with Charlie Parker:

And who the heck considers Chopin and Liszt to be "light composers"?

I had to sit through an entire speech of WM's where he just mindlessly made comments like the one about Chopin and Liszt.

I just started muttering curses out loud in disbelief. Even though the audience was composed of NYC Music and Art teachers, I don't think any of them understood what BS he was laying down. Between Crouch, Marsalis and Bloomberg, NYC has turned into a steaming pile of.....

[Face of the Bass]

Yeah, as I kept reading this my opinion kept going down. It kind of feels like an essay that's been excessively padded, and his writing on American culture is really quite inane after awhile. It's a big disappointment.

[AllenLowe]

I'll tell you, since he won the MacArthur, most of Stanely's writing has been like padded essays; he's always been intellectually lazy, and now I don't think he really cares; he had an article in last years Oxford American annual music issue on New Orleans, and I swear it was all 10 years of cut and paste, just a bad compendium of stuff he found in his drawers (pun intended).

[Lazaro Vega]

For what it's worth there's another new biography of Parker by a K.C. historian named Chuck Haddix called "The Life and Music of Bird." Interesting story there about Bird as a teen going out to a hit at the Lake of the Ozarks and on the way the car was in an accident and rolled several times. They took Bird back to K.C. and what did the doctor give him for pain? Heroin.

[Face of the Bass]

I'll tell you, since he won the MacArthur, most of Stanely's writing has been like padded essays; he's always been intellectually lazy, and now I don't think he really cares; he had an article in last years Oxford American annual music issue on New Orleans, and I swear it was all 10 years of cut and paste, just a bad compendium of stuff he found in his drawers (pun intended).

I'm just amazed that somebody could claim to be working on a biography for this many decades and then produce something that, with the exception of the included interviews, could have been written in a couple months. It's not necessarily that it's bad, it's that a definitive biography of Parker should not spend much space regurgitating things like Birth of a Nation or Jack Johnson.