Stanley Crouch Parker biography reviewed

[Larry Kart]

Link (I hope it works) to David Hajdu's very favorable review of the Crouch Parker bio in the NYTBR:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/08/books/review/kansas-city-lightning-and-bird.html?_r=0

Interesting (at least to me) that Hajdu toward the end of his review singles out for praise -- "[Crouch] effectively presents the whole history of jazz in one dizzying sentence" -- a passage that I quoted in post #154 on this thread as an example of Crouch's overwriting at or near its worst:

“First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulled them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust.”

I agree -- dizzying. Then, after quoting that passage, Hadju concludes: "If writing like that takes three decades to do, I'm willing to wait another 30 years for Crouch to finish his work on Charlie Parker."

BTW, Freelancer -- believe it or not, it's not Crouch's racial views, such as they are, that bother me. Rather, what I don't like about Crouch is his IMO bad writing, his arguably retrograde musical views, and the role he has played over the years in puffing Wynton Marsalis.

[Face of the Bass]

If that sentence really presented the whole history of jazz, then I'd have zero interest in listening to the music.

[AllenLowe]

I got stuck on the girls' bloomers.

but seriously, that's a disgustingly sexist image, I think, sort of a Crouchian/Wyntonian neo-porn fantasy. Crouch really has no shame.

Edited December 8, 2013 by AllenLowe

[Fer Urbina]

“pelvic swing of the black marching bands”

Not being facetious, but did they really swang their pelvises while marching?

F

[Larry Kart]

“pelvic swing of the black marching bands”

Not being facetious, but did they really swang their pelvises while marching?

F

Could be wrong, but I don't think he means that the music of the black marching bands was being made by players who were themselves swinging their pelvises. Rather it was a music that led those listening to swing their pelvises, just as, when "pulled together," the various strains of early jazz fused into a "music that purported ... to soak the bloomers of listening girls."

BTW, aside from everything else, isn't there something a bit off there language-wise? The music couldn't have soaked, or purported to have soaked, those bloomers; only the girls could have done that. What Crouch meant to say, I think -- and let's get rid off "purported" -- was something like "a music ... that would make listening girls soak their bloomers" etc.

Freelance editing available for no fee on request.

[colinmce]

Hajdu's another one ...

[JSngry]

If one cannot hear a shared DNA between this and On The Corner (just hum whistle, or otherwise vibrate "Black Satin" over that drum line and tell me if it ever does not fit like a freakin' glove), I do not know what to tell one, then, although it goes back further and deeper than any of just one of these things.

That's what the gist of it is, although truth is just too damn simple for people once money gets involved, what with truth being and making you free and all that. Yes, you Herman Lubinsky, yes, you Stanley Crouch, and yes all the other people who know who they are but won't know it.

[AllenLowe]

I'm thinking, Larry, that if the music was low enough to the ground - maybe coming from a 78 player that was mid-waist, then maybe the music COULD -

oh, never mind.

[ATR]

Still waiting for Outlaws and Gladiators.

[Chuck Nessa]

Still waiting for Outlaws and Gladiators.

[medjuck]

Hajdu's another one ...

Another what? I like his writings but he's not one to let nuance get in the way of a good story. I especially feel this about Lush Life.

[colinmce]

Hajdu's another one ...

Another what? I like his writings but he's not one to let nuance get in the way of a good story. I especially feel this about Lush Life.

Another mainstream jazz commentator/historian with a troubled record of, as you alluded to, working off of reductions, cliches and suppositions. I also find him to be crotchety and rather dull.

[ATR]

Still waiting for Outlaws and Gladiators.

Is that your 'Crouch Opinion'?

[fasstrack]

Well, sir, my reserve at the library arrived today, and I find myself well nigh page 70. In view of all the dishing re Stanley's overstuffed prose, I haven't found that to be the case. (OK, there's the fabled 'soak the bloomers' line but I was on the lookout for that. Not enough to sink the ship, I submit). The trick is to approach it as an historical novel, peppered with insights into the Kansas City of the Pendergast years. The story of McShann barmstorming the Savoy was well-handled, I thought, and read like breezy fiction-not ham-fisted at all. And now our hero is in that first romance with Rebecca and so it goes. Anyway, a pretty good read and though far be it for me to defend the other SC peccadiloes alluded to in this thread, as far as having a clotted prose style at least in this book some of you guys perhaps protest too much.

[marcello]

Keep reading, Joel.

[fasstrack]

Well, I finished it (with a lot of skipping ahead past SC's more tiresome digressions). My conclusion: despite the discursive writing style when on point the story of young Bird, his influences, his family life was well told. Interviews with people like Biddy Fleet, Bob Redcross, Joe Wilder, etc. were ones I've never seen in print. When the fat is cut away this is a valuable, if slim volume. Oh, and if I had a nickel for every time the word 'Negro' was used...

Edited December 26, 2013 by fasstrack

[AllenLowe]

personally I would like to just read the raw interviews; are they in any kind of coherent form in the book, or are they mixed with Crouch's interjections (I was going to say "Crouch's ejaculations", but I did not want to be misunderstood - or, really, maybe, understood)?

[fasstrack]

They're in coherent form, and the sources and dates annotated.

[medjuck]

I just finished the book. Sure he could have used a better editor but it's an easy read (got through it a lot faster than I did the Neil Young "autobiography") and had lot's of information I didn't know about Bird (and yes I've read other books about him). However can someone who's read the book explain what was going on when Rebecca found him with a handkerchief tied around his penis which leads to his mother taking him for a cure. Venereal disease?

[ArtSalt]

I actually like Crouch's forthright and opinionated positions, which on a television talking head level are engaging and certainly in the Burns documentary his was one of the best contributions in the series. From my perspective, here in Europe, he is not such a controversial figure as he seems to be presented in this topic.

My intention is to get the Parker biography, but I hate poetic novels pretending to be history, the last one I tried to read was You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of The Croon by Lenny Kaye which was totally unreadable. I'm not ordering it especially, I am waiting for it to turn up in the local bookshop, where I can flick through the pages and get a sense of Crouch's approach to Bird and then make a decision to purchase or not.

[flat5]

I've just started reading it. It reads like a novel.

[Larry Kart]

Whatever else, leave us not forget the Bering Strait to Tierra Del Fuego to Chow Mein riff:

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Strait, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

[gmonahan]

It's reviewed in the newest issue of Down Beat by Ted Panken. He gives it a mostly positive review, though he does refer to Crouch's "florid argot" and finishes the review by recommending "Gary Giddins' authoritative, more linear" _Celebrating Bird_ for "impatient observers looking for the entire picture now."

gregmo

[ArtSalt]

Whatever else, leave us not forget the Bering Strait to Tierra Del Fuego to Chow Mein riff:

“These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identify at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Strait, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra Del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.”

It's a riff all right - Hughes, Kerouac and McCarthy like. A grandiose train of thought, I like it.

[Larry Kart]

ba·thos

ˈbāTHäs/

noun

1. 1.

   (esp. in a work of literature) an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

If Kerouac had written that paragraph, he would have shot himself.