Ich denke, das hier ist der am besten geeignete Faden, um auf den Nachruf auf Stanley Crouch (1945-2020) hinzuweisen, den Ethan Iverson geschrieben hat. Dieser verdeutlicht all das, was an Crouch Respekt verdient und das, was ihn zu einer für viele (auch mich) äusserst ambivalenten Figur machte:
After publicly renouncing Black Nationalism in 1979, Crouch strove to place himself in the tradition of Ralph Ellison and, especially, Albert Murray, thinkers through which the idea of embracing Blackness and embracing American-ness became one and the same. Crouch felt he was extending Ellison’s and Murray’s work when attacking important artists, such as Spike Lee and Toni Morrison, for „doing the race thing.“ At the same time, Crouch fought for what he considered a Black aesthetic in jazz, and his 2003 JazzTimes essay „Putting the White Man in Charge“ pairs neatly with Amiri Baraka’s famous 1960 polemic, „Jazz and the White Critic.“ His outsized opinions were rendered in scalding, pugilistic prose – he even acquired a reputation for being willing to literally fight someone for disagreeing with him.
Die Zeit von Crouch ist ja auch wiederum die Zeit, die wir in den letzten Monaten oft gestreift haben – sein Aufstieg als Instanz der Jazzkritik (und davor seine kürzere Laufbahn als Schlagzeuger in der Loft-Szene mit David Murray usw. – eine Szene, die er später teilweise ablehnte) fällt in dieselbe Zeit, in der Jazz allmählich institutionalisiert wurde. Das ist eine Entwicklung, die wiederum nicht nach dem (unsinnigen) Dogma der „Farbenblindheit“ betrachtet werden darf.
There’s the music of jazz, and there’s the text about jazz. It’s always been a complex and unsatisfying relationship. The wonderful (and white) guitarist John Scofield apprenticed with great Black musicians; Scofield told me recently, „The Black musicians completely bypassed critics. That was ‚Whitey‘ stuff: what did the critics know?“
During the great postwar era of small-group jazz, successful Black musicians mentored worthy young musicians into the profession, without much interaction with the critics one way or the other. (Some inscrutable form of internal gatekeeping kept giving notable talents a proper chance.) But, eventually, more and more words concerning the art penetrated into the music itself. Thanks to the rise of jazz education in the ’70s, the market was flooded by basic instructional manuals coming from white institutions that had no racial awareness whatsoever. At the same time, novice critics found avant-garde jazz much easier to celebrate in print than music rooted in more traditional values.
Ein sehr erhellender und durchaus auch berührender Text:
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913619163/stanley-crouch-towering-jazz-critic-dead-at-74
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #151: Neuheiten aus dem Archiv – 09.04., 22:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba