Herb Alpert visiting professor Stanley Crouch mixes commentary and advice.

March 29, 2007

	Stanley Crouch
	Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Author, musician, and jazz critic Stanley Crouch recently paid a visit to Berklee as a Herb Alpert visiting professor, waxing about myriad topics, including African American music; race and film; and creative writing.

Crouch donned his various hats—columnist, novelist, essayist, critic, and television commentator—and shared insights with students and faculty during a full schedule of classes and lectures the week of March 5–8.

He also gave a radio interview to Berklee students and read from his works of fiction and nonfiction, including his forthcoming biography of Charlie Parker.

The following are excerpts from Crouch's visit to Berklee.

Speaking in Matt Glaser's Music Survey course

On the appeal of earlier eras of jazz:

"I believe that one of the reasons why so many people are attracted to older music is—it's not because they hate young people—but they hate the sound of machinery. . . . also, when the music is extremely loud, it doesn't have air, that is, it doesn't let you in. It tells you what to do. It doesn't allow you to come into the sound. It just imposes an experience upon the listener."

"[Faculty member] Kenwood Dennard was telling me that when he went to see some band, they were playing so loud he started having strange physical responses, like the sound was hitting his body in a physical way. There is something wrong if you are starting to feel physically assaulted by music."

Advice for young musicians:

"The challenge that lies before you all is, in your own styles or whatever genre or school of music you get into, how to make the humanity of what you play the dominant message of the music. Whatever happens in the world, whatever the economic system is, the dominant religion, the human quality is always going to be the final thing that you can rely on, and you can rely on it to be everything. You can rely on it to be screwed up, you can rely on it to be narcissistic, to be brave, to be passionate."

Speaking in Lori Landay's Language of Film class and Amy Merrill's College Writing 2

On Quentin Tarantino and the complexity of race relations in the United States:

"Part of what Tarantino is after is the extremely complex relationship of black people to white people in the United States. People are so unaccustomed to discussing the complexity of race relations in the United States that they either ignore it or tend to accept everything. . . . The ethnic complexity that is in the middle of much of Tarantino's work is often ignored because people don't often see the complexity of meaning in the context of the country or international situations."

Crouch referenced the opening scene of Pulp Fiction, which features actors Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta having a conversation in a diner. "There's a sort of natural quality that you almost never see in a movie regarding [conversations and interactions between] black and white people. It's usually corny or contrived."

Herb Alpert visiting professor Stanley Crouch speaks to Matt Glaser's Music Survey class. Photo by Phil Farnsworth

Speaking at the college-wide lecture The Arts and Diversity

On John Coltrane:

"It was a very volatile time that he was playing in and a lot of people thought that part of their role was to reject Western music. So some people stopped using harmony because they thought that there was another identity for a person who wasn't European in origin. I'm not going to say Coltrane thought like that. But he probably did, because he was affected by Malcolm X and other things that went on at the time. Plus, John Coltrane was a country negro from North Carolina. What the white man had put on him when he was a kid, I don't think he ever forgot that. . . . Then you add LSD, which he took a lot of in the last three to four years of his life . . . and you end up getting his later music, which is just, for me, noise."

On technology as art:

"Technology can always be used artistically. Because in fact if you're not talking about people just clapping their hands . . . every instrument is a machine. The demand is always made of an artist to reduce the distance between him and the audience that the machine could intensify."

On the definition of jazz:

"There is an ambition in the jazz community to remove any definition of jazz. . . . Underneath the idea that jazz cannot be defined is the idea that how dare these darkies have the audacity to tell the rest of us that there is a way that you either do or don't play jazz. No one would say there's no definition of Indian music. You'll never hear a bunch of white guys foaming at the mouth at the idea that Indians say you have to use sitars, you have to use tables, you have to count in twos and threes. But when that American negro says that there is an aesthetic basis—that is not about color—for an idiom, then everybody gets hot. No one said only black people can play jazz, and people who ate a certain amount of collard greens and chitlins and ham hocks by the age of 12. Anybody who can play can play. . . . No ethnic group has an aesthetic ownership of anything. But idioms do have defining rules. . . . Firstly, it's not improvising. That has nothing to do with it. Because they do improvise in Indian music. . . . Secondarily, jazz is not African music. Jazz has components of African music, but it's an American music primarily because it has a very unusual relationship between harmony and percussion that developed over a certain period of time. . . . If you just want to improvise and sound like Bartók or Schoenberg, go ahead. . . . But I don't know why you want to connect yourself to Louis Armstrong."

On rap and MTV:

"It's so obvious to an objective viewer like myself [laughter] that something is being presented to you repeatedly that always says the same thing, which is that black people are inarticulate, they have terrible taste, they are crude and materialistic, they are misogynist, they are thugs, and most of all, they are under us and we will celebrate them as long as they remain there."

This article was compiled by Rob Hochschild, Lesley Mahoney, and Brenda Pike.