Birthdays and Transitions

Stanley Crouch is 66 today!  It’s too bad everyone can’t spend an evening hanging on his every word as he goes from jazz to the renaissance to race to Harold Bloom to Ralph Ellison to everything else.

All of Crouch is worth reading, but my standard recommendation is The All-American Skin Game, or The Decoy of Race, a sensational collection of wide-ranging essays full of poetic vigor.  Tarantino tapped Stanley to accept his Best Director award at the National Board of Review awards after reading "Eggplant Blues: The Miscegenated Cinema of Quentin Tarantino."  I can understand why: It’s some of the best film criticism I’ve seen.

Like his mentor Ellison, Stanley sees all Americans as Americans first, other ethnicities second.  Still, all good American art has race in it somehow, and no one talks about this more eloquently than Stanley.  Of course, one of the major influences in the African-American experience.  (Stanley would say Negro experience, but I'm not quite there yet.)

Stanley’s time here has been full of extraordinary occasions.  Eventually a talented biographer will fashion an essential story from his life, a life that -- perhaps even more than his great writing -- is his wild and wooly art.

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When the emphasis on traditional values stormed jazz in the 80’s, Stanley was a major force.   Ironically, at this point, Stanley knows more about avant-garde jazz than many of the musicians who followed the Young Lions’s lead.  After all, Stanley was there:  he heard Archie Shepp and the Art Ensemble of Chicago at their height.  He adores Jimmy Lyons and Julius Hemphill.   And he recommends all drummers check out Sunny Murray on Albert Ayler’s Witches and Devils.

I’ve been thinking about the scope of Stanley’s interests since learning that Adrian Ellis is stepping down as Jazz at Lincoln Center’s executive director.   I met with Ellis once and thought he was a really good guy, although that didn't stop me from tweaking JALC’s nose in “Can White Cats Play Jazz?”

In response to my DTM interviews with Wynton and Stanley Crouch, the heads of JALC invited me to a meeting last year.  I immediately demanded that JALC give avant-garde masters more gigs, arguing that they are under an ethical responsibility to present and document the music at its best, even if it wasn’t going to fill seats or be popular with staff.   And plenty of older avant-garde masters need the gigs!   Crouch loves Bobby Bradford:  why the hell hasn’t Bradford been celebrated at JALC? 

My demands haven’t been met yet, but these things take a while.  After they read this blog entry maybe I’ll get another phone call.  (UPDATE: Adrian Ellis emailed to say, "We are working on it, honest!")

I got an email from Yulun Wang of Pi Recordings last night:

Seth Rosner and I recently had a really good meeting with Adrian Ellis to discuss possibilities for JALC to widen the purview of their programming. Your name came up as someone with whom they recently had a very similar conversation. Adrian was quite encouraging, saying that they have for some time been internally discussing the possibility of converting one of their existing spaces into a venue for alternative programming. 

Wang and I are both worried that with Ellis stepping down, any momentum to get more avant-garde music a hearing at JALC will be lost.

I finally worked at JALC for the first time last week, in Billy Hart’s quartet with Mark Turner and Ben Street at Dizzy’s. It was really great: the staff were sweethearts and the soundmen were pros. It’s fabulous that JALC is there. (The day that Stanley Crouch met Rudy Giuliani and asked that New York have a major home for jazz will be a good chapter in that biography.)

Props to Will Friedwald of the Wall Street Journal for reviewing several jazz gigs a week, old-school style. Friedwald wrote of our gig, “This is some of the deepest, heaviest, most profound music I've ever heard at Dizzy's—in fact, were it not for the Christmas wreaths on the bandstand, I might have thought I was at the Vanguard or some venue even further downtown.”

That’s a dream pull quote, although I’ve regularly heard some really profound music at Dizzy’s -- Cedar Walton, Frank Wess, Mulgrew Miller, others.  The point is that the Billy Hart band played experimental music every set, and the reviewer noticed.  It’s only going to help JALC the more they open their doors to all kinds of jazz.

As JALC looks to find a new executive director, let them know on blogs and in print that it is both their ethical responsibility and in their best interest to program new music.

12/14/2011

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