The Buzz Board
Picks from the Inner Circle
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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 VIDEO BUZZ BOARD Author and critic Stanley Crouch raves about his latest obsession, Living With Jazz by Dan Morgenstern. Click here to watch. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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 Some noise is being made about Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff. It takes a rough look at the relationship between the consumption, packaging disposal of trash, all of which are usually hazardous to the environment. Using animation, it has become popular in public school settings and millions have see it on YouTube. Some say, of course, that it depicts corporations as bloodless but blood-spilling enemies of humanity and nature. They might be right, but the defining issue of American capitalism is always about bringing together ethics and the profit motive. That goal is too often forgotten: abolition was not about workers as such; it was about the owning of the people working. This short film is hard, simple, and true. It is an opening salvo of light needed in a time of pervasive darkness. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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Focused on Eros, the winter 2009 issue of Lapham's Quarterly offers especially brilliant pages that are bromides for our protracted adolescence regarding things erotic. We see that there is much more to intimate activities than pleasurable collisions between surfaces and genitals. This is quite an accomplishment because ours is a country not so much obsessed with sex as stupefied by it, primarily because most men seem to believe it is their right to remain adolescent in all things outside of business if they have become reasonably or unreasonably successful. This means that more women than we would like to think about have bad luck, even if it appears that they have had good luck: So many of their guys end up being 17-year-old 50- or 60-year-olds. So this issue of Lapham's Quarterly provides a long drink of our humanity, which is always the source and the solution to whatever blues we have. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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I recommend Dan Morgenstern's Living With Jazz, which is one of the very finest collections musical literature produced by any writer. Morgenstern is a whiz kid panting over the wonder of darkies. He actually likes jazz musicians as human beings and can see beyond their racial and class specifics to the universal qualities that made them great in their art or great off the bandstand under the pressure of life. This is one of the truly great books on American art and one of the most comprehensive readings of what Ornette Coleman calls "the human reason" behind aesthetic creation. You won't die if you miss reading this, you will simply be less conscious of life itself. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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Woefully short on political detail and the meaning of the wars fought with the House of Bush, HBO's House of Saddam is still uniquely worthy. Some feasible light is given an inscrutable man made of nothing but grotesque darkness, like Stalin and Hitler, both of whom he admired and studied. Here Saddam is not the overacted gargoyle to which we are accustomed in dramatized biographies of monsters. There is subtlety, force, wit, and variety to his characterization. We see him extend from simply cruel and ruthless behavior to controlled messianic delusions. His is a suffocatingly narcissistic world of great tension where all are in fear of pacific to destructive mood shifts. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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Those who wonder exactly why Katrina inspired so much feeling, should humble themselves by reading Tom Piazza's Why New Orleans Matters. Except for maybe the last few pages, which are overcome by the city's politics and specific recommendations to those in power, I think it is an instant classic. The book is affirmative, celebratory, and grateful for the unique humanity of New Orleans while remaining free of the sentimentality that usually ruins such efforts. I have never seen anything of the sort done in a better and more affecting way because it is both precise and magically free of precision in its perfect sentences and great poetic power. Those of you who have been taught how to read with any sophistication, will also notice how well it is constructed and how it sets out to prove with specific human examples everything that it claims for the importance of the city. Only one hundred percent fools will choose to miss this one. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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Since about 1972, Sonny Rollins has seemed intent on disproving the barely arguable fact that he is the finest saxophone improvisor since Charlie Parker. He has often played wonderfully in public but released mediocre to terrible recordings. Only those who have heard him when inspired know what he can do, which is make music seem the truest proof of harshly grand, witty, and wonderful things unseen. With the brand new cd Road Shows, Vol. 1 and the dvd Sonny Rollins Live in '65 & ‘68 we get the expected mix of the marvelous and the mediocre. But the performance from 1965 is veritably flawless. In his most formidable context--saxophone, bass, and drums--he proves himself a grand master of thematic variation, giving us heart, mind, and virtuoso technique while timelessly solving the age-old mind-body problem as all of our most truly gifted jazz musicians always have. |
Stanley Crouch
Info
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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When he died at 75 in 1974, Duke Ellington had led a big band—a jazz orchestra—for nearly fifty years. He was fully or partially responsible for between one and three thousand compositions that were distinguished at their best by his bringing the highest and most original aesthetic concerns to dance hall situations and, conversely, dance rhythms to concert halls. His greatness and the layered complexity of his world are made transparent on two DVDs. A PBS documentary not available for for over twenty years since it appeared, A Duke Named Ellington and Duke Ellington, Live in '58, a performance film from Quincy Jones's Jazz Icons series, provide grand human texture and the special delights of an inspired Holland concert. Ellington's music traversed mountain ranges of the hightest levels of American aesthetic achievement. It included original virtuosity, brilliance, sly as well as broad humor, romance, high-mindedness, and a deep, deep bucket of many different kinds of blues. The documentary pleasurably informs those who don't know and reminds those who do. The performance film shows what peerless quality the band presented night after night. Anyone who lacks these DVDs is missing something essential about American civilization and the bittersweet, recalcitrant joy with which jazz faced all of life's limitations. |
Stanley Crouch
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Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign. Journalist and artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and author of Considering Genius: Jazz Writings |
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We have become accustomed to the technology that renews the color and the sound of our classic films, but we are now becoming equally impressed by techniques that either renew or extend classic recordings far beyond what listeners heard when they were first released. Art Tatum's Piano Starts Here is a recording made during public performances in 1933 and 1949 by the very greatest virtuoso produced by jazz. It is music much more shockingly impressive now than when it was first released. A fully new land of sound and nuance, it is on Sony Classical and sits in the front row, equal in every way to whatever is gathered around it. |
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