Stanley Crouch Considering Genius

I posted yesterday on the passing of Stanley Crouch.

Today I thought I’d show why he is worth memorializing and reading.

Below is from his introduction to Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. It’s a wonderful, wonderful and in these times clarifying book.

An excerpt:

“My friends and I had that same appreciation for the art because it made us think of things beyond the simpleminded concerns of adolescence, which were dominated by the desire for popularity and a ready willingness to submit to the dictates and tastes of peer pressure. Our hormones were as hot as those of other young men and we were as obsessed with the females who were evolving from girls into women, but there was also a poetic feeling that was taking an ever-larger role in our collective sensibility. No matter how much we might identify with the adolescent thirst for release that we heard in the sincere rhythm and blues singing of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, we realized that there was another quality of feeling being expressed by Miles Davis on Sketches of Spain or Charles Mingus on Alice in Wonderland.”

“…In rhythm and blues, we never felt that we went beyond being teenagers, but in the world of jazz, we heard the thoughts and passions of men and women who traveled the country and who had been to Europe, or even Japan. We didn’t really grasp what they were saying, but we did know that they were referring to bigger things and that those things just might have been better than anything we presently knew. That was the shared feeling.”

“…Part of my belief in the power of words came through having read about Holiday and the various moods she created when singing. Those descriptions allowed me to know, without a doubt, when I first heard her on the radio, “that must be Billie Holiday.” As the disc jockey announced her name I think I realized then that if a writer was good enough, he could prepare a listener to recognize the sound of an artist on first hearing. That might apply to certain singers but I don’t really believe that is true of instrumentalists. Even so, it always remains a goal.”

“…It appeared that the idea of violent black revolution was no longer just a lot of fat-mouthing. Looking at the television all those miles away in New York made it seem possible, and from that irrational sense of possibility came a tribal politics that so seriously retarded the intellectuals of the black community, most of whom have yet to recover from the harm done to them by uncritical worshipping of Africa, embracing the contrivances of separatism, and attempting to disconnect themselves from the fundamental presence of Western thought and Western ways, both of which have bloomed in the Black American sensibility over the last three and a half centuries or so and are now as essential as air is to the lungs. For all of the influence of Marxist ideology on these misinformed proceedings, Hegel’s dialectic was not applied to American culture, where it might have done the most good. There it would have led the most serious to what Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray realized profoundly: America is a land of synthesis in which every ethnic or religious group tends, over time, to become part of every other.”

I’ve probably pushed the edges of fair use, but to feel it, I have to show it.

To feel it more deeply, you must read it.