Opinion: The Problem With Jazz Criticism

I bought none of that. Jazz has a very solid base of Afro-American fundamentals that exclude no one of talent, regardless of color, anymore than the Italian and German fundamentals of opera do. These fundamentals remained in place from the music's beginnings in New Orleans to, literally, yesterday. Those fundamentals are 4/4 swing (or swing in any meter), blues, the romantic or meditative ballad, and what Jelly Roll Morton called "the Spanish tinge," meaning Latin rhythms. All major directions in jazz have resulted from reimagining those fundamentals, not avoiding them.

Taking such positions occasioned much heated mail to JazzTimes in which I was accused of everything from provincialism and nostalgia to being a racist, which should not have surprised me since my criticism of various established Negroes over the years has been interpreted as the boot-licking of an Uncle Tom neoconservative. In keeping with the latter identity, my JazzTimes writing also attacked the ganster-rap wing of hip-hop for reiterating a kind of minstrelsy in which black youth was defined as truly "authentic" in the most illiterate, vulgar, anarchic and ignorant manifestations. I concluded that such material was popular among whites because such "authentic" Negroes, however hip-hopped up, were aggressively reinstituting the folklore of white supremacy since such black people were surely inferior to those outside of their world.

Since all of my opinions went against the consensus and called out the racial politics, I was fired, more for the first problem, which was questioning an establishment that pretends it does not exist. An e-mail for in-house perusal but mistakenly sent to me by the president of JazzTimes talks of "industry" pressure to remove me, which was later denied publicly. The public explanation, however, claims that my material was too predictably full of diatribes and promotion of my friends. Covering the controversy that arose following my firing, Adam Shatz wrote in The Nation that if JazzTimes applied such standards across the board the magazine would immediately have to cease publication. Shatz also claimed that a heated argument over definition is going on in the world of jazz criticism. An interesting observation. As the single voice of diversity in a world opposed to serious debate, I would like him to show me where it exists.

The critic, novelist and social commentator Stanley Crouch's most recent book is "Reconsidering the Souls of Black Folk" (Running Press). He is also an editorial columnist for the New York Daily News.

© 2003