Jazz Alone
May 2003 By Stanley Crouch
Piano Prodigy
What is actually going on out in the jazz world is very different from what one usually reads about in jazz magazines or what one would conclude from taking critics’polls seriously. There are musicians out here who not only can play but who have continued...
April 2003 By Stanley Crouch
Putting the White Man In Charge
Because Negroes invented jazz, and because the very best players have so often been Negroes, the art has always been a junction for color trouble in the world of evaluation and promotion. By the end of the ’20s, Duke Ellington was trying to get his buddies...
December 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Avant-Garde Roots Music
In 1959, when Ornette Coleman arrived in New York and opened on the Bowery with the quartet that included Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins, there was no talk of a harmolodic system. He spoke of playing with natural raw feeling instead of technical...
November 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Jazz’s Own Sweet Time
Jazz drumming has no precedent in music history. It is an original way of putting together and playing drums and cymbals, which introduced a new kind of virtuosity demanding independent coordination of all four limbs. The swinging time jazz drummers keep—whether...
October 2002 By Stanley Crouch
The Negro Aesthetic of Jazz
Jazz has always been a hybrid. A mix of African, European, Caribbean and Afro-Hispanic elements. But the distinct results of that mix, which distinguished jazz as one of the new arts of the 20th century, are now under assault by those who would love to make...
September 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Coltrane Derailed
With McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, John Coltrane found new ways to swing, play blues and ballads and use Afro-Latin grooves—the essential elements of jazz. But there are persistent questions buried deep in the John Coltrane mythos, ones that...
July/August 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Invisible American Music
With the exception of Ralph Ellison, John Kouwenhoven and Albert Murray, few major American intellectuals have routinely taken on the subject of jazz. One would think that a music as important to the definition and the achievement of this society would have...
June 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Maximum Roach
Max Roach is the most highly regarded drummer in the history of jazz, which he should be. At 78—and variously claiming now that he might not be playing again, or that he might be playing again, or that he is tired of playing, or that he has some new stuff...
May 2002 By Stanley Crouch
Festivals of Riches Gone By
It was so much easier to put on a noteworthy jazz festival in the past. In 1958, when George Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival had taken off, one of the world’s great impresarios had the option to present nearly the entire history of this still-young music. The...
April 2002 By Stanley Crouch
The Place of the Bass
In 1947,George Pal made a classic puppetoon called “Tubby the Tuba,”which was the story of a tuba that wanted to go beyond oom-pahing all night and get the front-line attention given to those horns that played the melody. Dismissed as foolish by a class...
