Late in his life Amiri Baraka once mused that he knew he was old because he’d begun to feel sad when his enemies died. Their obits reminded him of passionate struggles in his past and made the present seem like a diminished thing. Baraka didn’t outlive Stanley Crouch but I bet he’d’ve felt bummed to know another one of his contras had split. In the case of Crouch, though, Baraka’s sadness might’ve been deepened since Crouch offered him more than an olive branch before both of them departed.
Not that cultural powers-that-be took that in…
Back in 2014 Baraka’s Times obit claimed “among reviewers there was no consensus about Baraka’s literary merit.” It quoted Stanley Crouch speaking for negos. And it’s true Crouch bashed Baraka (and took blows back) for decades. But in a 2007 interview he gave the lie to the Times take on Baraka’s “literary merit.” Crouch copped then to how much he’d learned from “studying Whitney Balliett and LeRoi Jones [AKA Baraka], each of whom invented a style that was celebratory in its very eloquence.” And Crouch went on:
When I was a younger guy, I would read his essays in Black Music over and over, and became intrigued with many of people he talked about. In fact, the essay in [Crouch’s volume] Considering Genius about Thelonious Monk, “At the Five Spot,” is in direct response to the essay “Recent Monk” in Black Music. I was determined to outdo him, since he has HIS foot so firmly on the gas in that one. Wow! I thought the highest performance level (that I had seen) of “writing an essay about Thelonious Monk” had been achieved by LeRoi Jones. He made you feel like you were at the club.
Crouch could’ve tried harder to let Times types know that even Baraka’s greatest hater confirmed the man set the standard for jazz appreciators. If he’d done so much earlier, Baraka himself might’ve been more likely to reflect on Crouch’s criticism, rather than reflexively punching back. Still the Times’ failure to pick up on Crouch’s late tribute to Baraka is a reminder of how often the culture/publicity system promotes blankness about black lives and history.
With help from my comrade Eric Lott (who was then a grad student) I tried to chip away at that system in the mid-80s by organizing a series of talks on black music at Columbia (under the rubric, “Start Making Sense”) that included Crouch and Baraka along with Robert Farris Thompson—scholar of Black Atlantic arts—and Albert Murray[1], jazz writer and cultural critic.
Crouch delivered more than good sense when he walked parallel lines in his talk, tracing the history of Jazz and Renaissance painting. He brought us what we always need: imagination. I remember him announcing he was going to play the greatest note of the century. That was his intro to an Armstrong record and some bodies in the audience got guttural when they thought Papa-dip hit it. “Not yet,” Crouch said. A moment later Armstrong played Gabriel. I always meant to ask Crouch the title of the track with the Note. (Lost in the miracle, I forgot its name.)
Not to worry, though, many of Crouch’s steers stuck. Try Johnny Hodges with Billy Strayhorn and his Orchestra! And he gave me more than givens like Armstrong and Ellingtonians. Back in the 80s, I lucked into hearing pianist Don Pullen who became my favorite jazz player. Crouch evoked Pullen’s technique gracefully back in 1984:
Pullen is able to get effects that resemble what one would expect of a percussive harp, since he has invented for himself ways of stroking the keyboard for splashes of ideas that nearly fuse the notes together, making his variations into bursts of sound… As you listen to Pullen you become aware of how much he knows about giving each note the color he wants it to have. If he wants a note to ping, it pings; when he wants a floating, song-like quality, the note rises from the string and curves in the air.
Pullen left his initiates hanging when he died (young) in 1995. His music wasn’t widely known while he was alive so it was gratifying when NYC’s Jazz Gallery honored him in 1999 with an exhibit and solo concert series (“From Gospel to the Globe”) that affirmed Pullen was the piano player of his generation. The Gallery’s exhibit highlighted Crouch’s judgment – “Pullen has probably done more than any other musician associated with the so-called avant-garde to make the most adventurous harmonic combinations and flat out blocks of clustered notes…work within the forms of songs.” Crouch’s ear was confirmatory for me—he knew the tradition, I was just a rock ‘n’ roller—but I shouldn’t overstate our accord. When Pullen put together his last band, which featured a Senegalese percussionist as well as a Brazilian drummer and bassist, the music they made swirled out of Crouch’s anti-Black Atlantic comfort zone. I shouldn’t have been surprised but Crouch brought me up short one time when I brought up Pullen’s African-Brazilian Connection – “You like that Afro crap?” He must have avoided the Connection’s live shows because that band could turn anyone around.[2]
More in a hot second on what we didn’t share, but I’m just now recalling another unobvious consonance. After The Clash played their first show in NYC, Crouch allowed he was struck by how loud they sounded but also by the fact the group seemed to be on top of their noise rather than at its mercy. He could hear a band at work even if their sound was alien.
That Punky Stanley moment, though, began to seem pretty far gone as he headed toward wealth and fame. By the 90s, his art-life was more class-bound. Back then, I took a shot at clocking his progress in the course of a manuscript (called “Hear in the City”). My swatch on Crouch centered on a public dispute I had with him about rap music. I began by linking Fernand Leger’s post-Cubist painting, “The City,” with rap songs like Ice Cube’s “The Product,” which jumped off with a fatal macho vision:
I didn’t witness the whole act
In and out was the movement of the bozack
It was hot and sweaty and lots of pushing
Then the nut came gushing
And it was hell trying to bail to the ovary
With nothing by the Lord looking over me
I was white with a tale
But when I hit the finish line
YOUNG BLACK MALE
I talked up Ice Cube’s creative conception, without downplaying his “downpressing determinism.” Having taken in Ralph Ellison’s insight that pitiable characters in fictions by black authors were rarely as complex or resilient as the authors who created them, I averred Ellison’s point was on point in the hip hop era. Then it was on to Stanley Crouch…
Right now, though, Ice Cube’s reductive moves are less off-putting than indulgences of black intellectuals who are determined to distance themselves from the Street. A recent Times piece by Stanley Crouch is symptomatic. Crouch comes on as a Big Apple booster, offering a list of metro-entertainments that mixes high culture with Black Bourgeois hedonism:
I can sit through the mesmerizing “Ring” Cycle as conductor James Levine stitches the epic together with the tip of his baton, watch Charles Dutton change the weight of the air in August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson”, maybe later sip champagne among the pulchritudinous dazzle and handsomeness of the crowd at B. Smith’s.
If pleasure is its own justification, then Crouch shouldn’t apologize for having a swinging time in Swill City. He’s gotta right to hum the “Ring.” But he goes out of his way to avoid art that lights up darker New York nights. Treating aesthetic experience as an urbane excursion, he risks trivializing his own smarts. He could probably fit Leger’s “City” into his lambent tour because he’s fifty years—and a continent away—from the painter’s radical political commitments. But rap music’s pop modernists are verboten because they talk listeners into a black and going on struggle.
Crouch is always ready to grouch about hip hop. Jazz, in his tales of the city, once provided a soundtrack for organic urban community. Rap is nasty atomizing noise. Last fall, after he took time out from a talk (where he hammered jazz into Americana) for one of his rants on rap, I ended up talking back to him.
I didn’t make a case for hip hop. (There wasn’t enough time, I was the wrong messenger and any ghetto culture is a mixed bag.) But I pointed out Crouch never listened to what he was propounding against. Which meant his rap criticism was crap. We went back and forth a couple times and Crouch’s replies proved he didn’t know one rapper from the next. They all sounded alike to him. His audience of jazzbos didn’t know from rap either. But they seemed to sense his insult comedy wasn’t going to help them get it. He began to lose them when he mugged Malcom X, claiming Malcolm had provided a kind of prototype for gangster rappers – “He was never a real gangster like he claimed, just a petty hoodlum.” As if Malcolm had spent a lot of time pretending he’d been tight with Bumpy Johnson.
Crouch didn’t blow up during our public dust-up, but when I ran into him in the men’s room afterwards, he was steaming. “I’ve been black for 50 years. I wrote those little doggerel rhymes when I was a child. You trying to tell me I could learn something from that trash.” I tried to say something about hip hop’s wit and guts but he was too angry to listen. I don’t think I was wrong but I didn’t feel alright.
Crouch had taken my talk-back as a betrayal and, at that moment, his emotion meant more than my reasons. Years before I’d let him know I liked pop music, but until our rap on rap, he ID’ed me chiefly as a fan of jazz and his own work. (For my sins, I once hid a copy of The Aesthetics of Rock when I bumped into him at the bar in a jazz club.) I’d known we were in different camps, but it wasn’t until he went off on me that I sussed just how far apart we’d always been. Head up in my face, his rage became a kind of entreaty. (Despite his rep for being punchy, there was no threat in his argufying.) I sensed his jazz triumphalism might be a happy evasion; a means of avoiding, for example, the compromising truth of Louis Armstrong’s too smiley image, but victory wasn’t always assured. His jazz avatars suffered terrible defeats. Crouch’s golden age was as illusory as the wackest Afro-centric visions. Like point men for those p.o.v.’s, Crouch’s keep-to-the-sunny-side historicizing hinted at a Black American hunger for cultural healing.
I need the music too but I’m more removed from its first imperatives. Roots deep is a stretch for me. Though I get to go wide. I can play Ghetto Girls or Sassy Vaughn, The Temptations Sing Smokey Robinson or Monk Plays Ellington, dancehall or Dancing in Your Head. And that’s not just my prerogative as a free man in New York City. It’s a sign of white skin privilege.
Of course there have always been Afro-Americans who get rangy over here. (Not to mention the Motherland where James Brown and the Country Gentlemen Jim Reeves have been beloved for decades.) Plenty of black folks rightly hear Africa at work in everything from Salsa to Bluegrass. Yet there may be more sectarians. Even within black pop life. Rap fans who won’t play R&B counter Luther Vandross lovers who won’t listen to that “chain-snatching music.”
Cultural infights separate Brothers and Sisters and have debilitating political consequences for the black nation. There are master-musicians, though, who fight against tight-thinking.
A couple months after my quarrel with Crouch, I went to see Max Roach talk hip hop with Public Enemy’s “media assassin” Harry Allen and rapper Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest. Crouch had been on the bill. The Hanging Judge was supposed to take them all on, but at the last minute he recused himself. (Crouch was always passionate about drummers and Roach was one of his heroes. I bet he canceled because he didn’t want to argue with an exemplar.) Roach teased Crouch in absentia and then laid down a sophisticated defense of rap—not as music or poetry—but as a hybrid form of theatre. With a little help from Q-Tip who mused that his Tribe, unlike past generations of Black city kids, hadn’t had easy access to instruments through school music programs, Roach gently pushed the panel—and the audience—past simpleminded hip hop hugging or hating.
On our way out, a Juilliard Jazz major asked me to “school” him about rap (though the white woman by his side bared her boredom). An acolyte of Crouch, Wynton Marsalis (and their mentor Albert Murray), he’d been swayed—slightly—by Roach and recalled I’d respectfully resisted Crouch’s attacks on hip hop a few months before. I pointed him to Armond White—author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture that Shook the World—the pop critic who’s probably most attuned to hip hop’s voices. White was right next to us, but the Juilliard guy kept coming at me. Apparently I had the look he felt more comfortable with. Warming to his appreciation, I missed a certain aversive quality in his turn away from White. (Best to avoid phenotypical explanations, but, after the fact, I wondered if it mattered my would-be tutee could’ve passed a paper bag test.) Once it was clear Juilliardy was stuck on me, White stepped off quickly.
I followed him into the smooze (rare air for me) and ended up talking with Q-Tip’s and Crouch/Marsalis’ handlers. They were above the rap vs. jazz battle. (Which I took as a tribute to their Sisterly wisdom, rather than as a sign of an occupational lack of principle.) They introduced me to Q-Tip, but I had more fun talking with Marsalis’ publicist—a (anorexic in retrospect) cutie who knew half the world and how to act entranced when boys talk. We flirted with the idea of going off to a party, but when I turned my head she was gone without a good-bye.
The next time I heard her voice was on an answering machine. My new girlfriend’s. We were making love when Wynton’s flack called with the skinny—“I just wanted to give you the word on white men.” My honey-dip looked down at me between her thighs and tried not to laugh. Until I did. Hell, if you can’t stand to be read, you better get out of the race.
Forgive me if that ender seems self-enrapt. (And, for the record, Don Juan DeMott I’m not. Not in the 90s or ever. The “new girlfriend” came along after a long drought and she’d kick me to the curb soonish.) Still I’m pretty sure that joke is apt. After all, Stanley Crouch, who liked to laugh—I can see the smile playing around his lips now—titled a 90s book of essays: The All-American Skin Game, or the Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It.
Notes
1 I loved how Albert Murray rode with the 20th C.’s first generations of great black American musicians, upholding them as culture-heroes. I was thrilled to meet him in the early 80s after a performance at Carnegie Hall by Modern Jazz Quartet and Betty Carter. My pop knew Murray a bit and did the honors. I’m recalling just now how my older brother and I marked Murray’s every word and gesture, which seemed nearly as compelling as the breathtaking, break-it-down slow version of “Bags Groove” that MJQ had played earlier in the evening. Meanwhile my pop drank a beer through a straw out of a paper bag without betraying a whit of ego as we lavished our attentions on another elder-writer. Hope he knew we had a clue what a cool daddy he was.
I’m not sure Murray had his own ego in check. I’m flashing on how nicely responsive Baraka and Crouch were when we invited them to participate in our paltry Columbia colloquium. Murray, OTOH, got grand on me, caviling at the fact Baraka would be part of the program. Maybe Murray really belonged at the Century Club (where he was one of the few black members), unlike, say, Baraka who would’ve been more at ease in the performance space in the basement of his Newark home, where he hosted “Kimako’s Blue People,” a black arts series of performances that ran for decades. Yet Baraka was also more of a citizen of the world than Murray who saw himself as an echt American—or, as he put it, an “omni-American.” Murray not only inspired Crouch’s All-Americanism, he provided an important template for Barack Obama’s way in the world. (Even if Murray, and Crouch, were alive to the distinction between Afro-Americans, ((like them)) and an African-American ((like Obama)).)
As the years went passing by, though, Murray’s high Americana began to seem less than vital and worse than hoary. Take his case for Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. Near the start of the novel Hemingway’s working class Harry locks on the N-word, laying it on one stranger—a Cuban Revolutionary who risks everything in a gun-fight. The fictional spectacle of this black outlier’s martyrdom lets Hemingway take another ironic pass at the slur: “Some nigger.” Maybe not the subtlest anti-racist tease, but not bad for the mid-30s. Murray, though, gave Hemingway much more than his due for that take-down of the N-word. And when it came to To Have and Have Not, he stopped too early. He failed to face up to a sequence late in the book where Hemingway’s Harry compares making love to a black woman to sleeping with a “nurse shark.” Please don’t understand me too quickly. I’m not implying Hemingway should be canceled. I’m just suggesting Albert Murray (and his old friend Ralph Ellison who was also a Papa idolator) might not be the best judges of Hem’s contribution to America—the land that has never been yet.
2 I should add that Baraka picked up on the wonder of Pullen too. Not in 1984, but in the 60s. And he stayed with the Don until the End. Baraka eulogized Pullen at a memorable celebration of the pianist’s life that took place at St. Peter’s Church on June 11, 1995. Crouch’s praise for Pullen was there in the program, but he was a no-show. More here on Pullen and Baraka/Crouch.