I generally like and respect author, jazz critic and pugnacious bomb-thrower, Stanley Crouch. Anyone who speaks truth to power as lustily as he does is my dog. However, that doesn’t mean I always buy into his polemics. For instance, as opposed to the acoustic and straight-ahead jazz Crouch favors seemingly to the exclusion of all other schools, I listen to and enjoy both smooth, or C (contemporary) jazz as Watercolors refers to it, in addition to post bop (straight-ahead), with an especial nod to hard bop (it’s a generational thing).
But speaking of the redoubtable Mr. Crouch, take a gander sometime at his hard-headed collection of music and culture essays, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. This volume includes his famously (or infamously) erudite takedowns of those dual deities, Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Trane takes grief for the unresolved harmonic hyperbolism of his later offerings and how they tended to chase yowling patrons out of jazz clubs coast to coast. Miles’ sin was bound up in the “costumes” (Crouch’s word) he wore on stage and his deep, commercial bow to electronic music after the epochal Bitches Brew release. Fallen angels, both (again, according to Crouch), they were divinities who unwisely bartered their halos for filthy lucre and miserly self-indulgence.
Doesn’t matter. Miles and Trane were serious, blues-drenched jazzmen dealing with serious issues. These were no popsicle pimps. Stanley’s fidelity, writ large, to the blues-truths habitually hauled up by these oracles is undeniable and barely contained. He can’t fool me.
So, the question here: Smooth jazz or straight-ahead, the jazz equivalent of whither Ginger or Mary Ann? Certainly worthy of much harrumphing and debate, with a proper sound track of course and a taste or two of Gentleman Jack within easy reach. I suggest why not both – jazz and straight-ahead? However, stentorian Mr. Crouch trucks no such weaselly equivocation, sternly rejoining: “But the - see, the only thing I'm interested in is trying to get people to address what it seems to me is actual jazz. I mean, I think that fusion is some kind of an offshoot of jazz, but I don't think it's jazz. But at the same time, I don't think that anybody should be horse whipped for listening to fusion.” Thank God!
In the broader sense, doesn’t it simply boil down to a matter of taste and choice? I mean I say either you say I-ther, whichever prevails we successfully get down the road. Because I dig Ornette Coleman’s, Free Jazz, and Chris Standring’s, A Method To The Madness, doesn’t mean the sun will suddenly begin rising in the west. Frankly, music playlists are safe from any such inimical programming and the sun will assuredly continue to rise in the east, as accustomed.
But I digress. I’m like Mikey in the old Life cereal commercial. “He’ll eat anything.” I am no less proletarian in my music choices. Make mine a sax with an equal allowance of Mobley or Whalum if you please. We don’t discriminate here.
Look, when it comes to culture and the music jazz people are nothing if not passionate. Don’t believe me? Mr. Crouch once bitch slapped book critic Dale Peck and on another occasion up and slugged fellow jazz critic, Howard Mandel, who dared reproach him for his disparagements made while presenting nominees, pianist Matthew Shipp and trumpeter Dave Douglas, at the First Annual Jazz Awards. And these are just a couple of badass Stanley’s more choleric outbursts. I’m surprised that by now he hasn’t taken a shillelagh upside someone’s head.
But wait, you think that is something. Multiple Grammy Award winning guitarist, Pat Metheny, had this to say in a raucous, much reprinted post regarding Kenny G’s saccharine brand of music: “But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician.” But Metheny wasn’t finished. He tidied up with this measure of online battery. “Everything I said here is exactly the same as what I would say to Gorelick if I ever saw him in person. And if I ever DO see him anywhere, at any function – he WILL get a piece of my mind (and maybe a guitar wrapped around his head).” I say Pat should treat with his guitar more discerningly and consider instead taking a shillelagh upside Kenneth’s head.
“They need to leave Kenny alone,” uber-regarded tenor man, Branford Marsalis, admonished in a Jazziz magazine interview. “He’s not stealing jazz. The audience he has wouldn’t be caught dead at a real jazz concert or club.” And dammit if that’s not the point after all. Really.
The great improvisers dominate the stage doing for bop and modal what Halle Berry does for any movie she appears in – makes it bettah! At the risk of vexing our man Stan, in a similar vein, how does Boney James, Norman Brown, Najee, Rick Braun, et al make it bettah? The hackneyed cliché is that smooth jazz is nothing more than slightly hipper muzak, worrying the silence at doctor’s offices and your voguish steakhouse. Believe me, it is no crime to like contemporary jazz. No one’s man (or woman’s) card is at risk of confiscation if you do.
The leitmotif of smooth jazz intentionally shares little in common to what many agree serves as orthodoxy. Poppish in origin or rooted in soul/rhythm & blues, it exhibits licks, even now, not far removed conceptually and thematically from those examined by one of the signal progenitors of the school, Grover Washington, Jr. And yet when it works it really works.
Let me make this point abundantly clear. As accepting of contemporary jazz as I am, I am not suggesting the best of smooth equates to the best of straight-ahead in every instance – in many instances for that matter, however, have you considered just how many smooth jazz cats attended and matriculated from institutions such as Juilliard or the prestigious Berklee College of Music? At its best smooth is played at a very high level by extremely well schooled, highly skilled artists. It’s okay to say that out loud. Put it this way: You have a migraine and find yourself in a dark room (or voguish steakhouse), whom do you prefer: Cecil Taylor or David Benoit? I thought so.
This age’s zeitgeist suggests certain predicates, not the least of which being the efficacy of three squares a day and a roof over one’s head. I ain’t mad at anyone seeking to earn an honest living, even if that someone is a committed artist. These guys put in up to 10-12 hours a day perfecting their craft. Sober-minded straight-ahead is not necessarily the hat that fits everyone’s head. As the Joker’s father said prior to slicing a permanent smile on his son’s face: “Why so serious?”
Even the most facile contemporary jazz dished up by the least empathetic player can bare a witness that offers value. If it simply makes you feel good or you purely dig the groove, that may be enough to scratch the itch. We reap our satisfaction where we find it. I find mine when lost within the exotic freedom of Pharaoh Sanders,’ Let Us Go Into The House Of The Lord, mollified by the frothy groove of Pete Belasco’s Love Train.
Yes, I get it. That, in and of itself may be just enough to incent irascible Stanley Crouch to want to take a shillelagh upside my head. I’m ducking! I’m ducking!
