| Contents |
Prologue: jazz me blues -- Miles Davis in the fever of spring, 1961 -- Bird land: Charlie Parker, Clint Eastwood, and America -- Papa dip: Crescent City conquistador and sacrificial hero Louis Armstrong -- Not so dizzy -- At the Five Spot Thelonious Monk -- Ahmad Jamal -- Himself when he was real: the art of Charles Mingus -- Blues for the space age Ornette Coleman -- Titan of the blues John Coltrane -- Andrew Hill's alternative avant-garde -- Rooster Ben: king of romance Ben Webster -- The last of the great bandleaders Sun Ra -- Don't ask the critics : ask Wallace Roney's peers -- Duke Ellington: transcontinental swing -- Martin's tempo -- The late, late blues: jazz modernism -- Blues to be constitutional -- Body and soul -- JazzTimes columns: introduction -- Jazz tradition is not innovation -- The Negro aesthetic of jazz -- Coltrane derailed -- Jazz criticism and its effect on the art form -- Jazz's own sweet time -- Putting the white man in charge -- Piano prodigy -- On the corner: the sellout of Miles Davis -- Come Sunday Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson -- The presence is always the point -- Live at the village vanguard Wynton Marsalis. |
| Abstract |
Stanley Crouch--MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, National Book Award nominee, and perennial bull in the china shop of black intelligentsia--has been writing about jazz and jazz artists for more than thirty years. His reputation for controversy is exceeded only by a universal respect for his intellect and passion. As Gary Giddons notes: "Stanley may be the only jazz writer out there with the kind of rhinoceros hide necessary to provoke and outrage and then withstand the fulminations that come back." The author collects some of his best loved, most influential, and most controversial pieces (published in Jazz Times, The New Yorker, the Village Voice, and elsewhere), together with two new essays. The pieces range from the introspective "Jazz Criticism and Its Effect on the Art Form" to a rollicking debate with Amiri Baraka, to vivid, intimate portraits of the legendary performers Crouch has known. |
