Cold Fusion

Stanley Crouch wages jazz by other means

Kerry Howley | June 27, 2003

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For now, the jazz community remains largely divorced from Crouch's ideals. The European scene, far removed from Birdland and The Village Vanguard, is in many ways more vibrant than that of the United States. This week's JVC jazz festival in New York City featured acts as diverse as the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, Wayne Shorter, and Dave Brubeck.

Is Stanley Crouch good for jazz? Yes, if only because his love for the traditional can't prevent the onslaught of the modern. Jazz and the musicians who shape it will continue along their many paths of innovation, some of which will lead to dead ends—as did much of the stunningly bad jazz-rock fusion of the 70s. The hard bop revival that followed was a much-needed reminder of a time when the music projected authentic feeling and technical virtuosity rather than tired sentimentality and self-importance. It also illustrated a primary value of Crouch's critique: Back-to-basics movements are frequently more innovative than free-form experimentation. Should jazz lose itself again, critics like Crouch will be around to preach the basics of the blues, to agitate for jazz education, to remind musicians of an aesthetic black in its origins but colorless in its appeal.

Jazz's most exacting critic knows too much about the music's history to worry about its future. "Jazz is always in crisis," he said. " If people want to go out there and play electric music, it doesn't make any difference. Twenty years from now people aren't even going to know that they ever played anything."

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.