James Mtume Destroys Jazz Critic Stanley Crouch in a Debate about Miles Davis
Big_Chan
5,088 Posts
This is good.......
Big_Chan
5,088 Posts
Comments
I got the impression that Crouch's comments may have been edited in order to make Mtume's responses to them come across more effectively, although he showed himself up as a snob when he said he was neither familiar with, nor interested in, the music coming out of Europe that Miles' 70s music had influenced. I noticed Mtume jump on that briefly too, but he let Crouch off the hook.
All the same, an interesting debate. Thanks for posting it.
Why isnt Ornette Coleman ostracized the way Miles is for his branching out?
I cant imagine that Miles was the only big figure to try and get beyond the Jazz palette.
This debate is an OLD joint, that still persists amongst the old(and new) Jazz guard.
Reading a recent Jazz Times they are now hightlighting other acts of the Fusion era that are connected to the Miles Davis circle.
Is it Jazz though?
Well, Crouch isn't a huge fan of free jazz either, which strikes me as a bit odd given that he was good friends with David Murray at some point. Don't know what his opinion on Ornette specifically is. FWIW, Crouch strikes me as being way too trad jazz-focused, and his opinions on stuff outside of his narrow area of interest aren't really worth the time it takes to find them.
I think he comes from the school of " that aint Jazz". Which i kinda sympathize with.
Crouch is just coming from an old school purist angle.
I'm not a big fan of the artists that the "Tears In Heaven" era Clapton influenced.
apparently he was an awful free-jazz drummer in the 70's.
A while back in a thread about something completely different, the one HarveyCanal and I managed to come to some kind of agreement about the approximately equal educational uselessness of both the ivory-tower academic who is disconnected from ground-level experience and the ground-level participant who is unable to express their experience in any meaningful way.
In these clips, Crouch presents better, but his arguments are hung on ghosts. Mtume is obviously closer to the spirit of the thing, but he doesn't seem able to say what he really means. So I'm calling it a draw.
The one quote from Miles Davis that I really like is the one where he says that he would always rather hear inferior music that was of its time than superior music that belonged to another time. I think about that a lot.
How can you be a bad free jazz drummer? You mean he couldn't not keep time ?
He came across to me as knowing exactly what he wanted to say especially concerning technology - the bit about a saxophone being no more or less a piece of technology than a synthesizer and that a true artists takes it to its limits and then moves on.
Yeah, this.
And not wanting to be the guy that says, "yeah, this" and nothing else, I'll have some more fully formed thoughts later. But as little as I agree with Crouch and as much as I wanted late yesterday to see Teh Jazz Smack Down I couldn't totally get with it.
I reality doesn't this mean that he would rather hear Lady Gaga in 2010 then something like....say....vintage Miles Davis?
What's so strange about that? Seems you may just be projecting your own value judgements onto Miles there, and that's a mistake a lot of people make. Musicians tend to look at music in a very different way from that of their audience, which often assumes that the musician shares the same values/prejudices as them. Not always so. Many years ago, when I used to occasionally lurk on the Living Legends messageboard, I remember Murs causing an outrage amongst the assembled company when he went on there to say Jay-Z's Hard Knock Life tour was the best show he'd ever seen. His fans were aghast at the thought of Murs listening to (*gasp!*) a mainstream rapper who was actually popular.
As for Miles, well, this is a guy who happily covered Cyndi Lauper and Scritti Politti during the 80s, so he clearly had no serious issues with pop, or at least, no enduring ones. And whilst it would surprise me if a still-around Miles were to cover Lady Gaga (and only because there's so little there to get your teeth into, musically), it wouldn't surprise me much. Robin Thicke's Lost Without You, or Kanye's Heard 'Em Say, on the other hand? Yep, I could totally hear Miles doing something like that.
I didn't say it was strange...nor was I projecting any/my values.....just putting his statement into perspective.
"I am not one of these hip-hop hippies, complaining about the culture..." MURS was always frustrated by those attitudes.
I mean, don't confuse that with me saying that in 2010 I would necessarily rather listen to Lady Gaga over vintage Miles Davis, but current popular music will always have more to say about culture--more engagement with it and more bearing on it--than throwback head music will.
For the most part, the Lady Gagas and the Waka Flockas are not really for me, but yeah, as someone who's interested in seeing culture continue on, I would much rather turn on the radio and hear "Toot It And Boot It" than hear some atavistic approximation of Kind Of Blue.
Miles's last album before he died was a poppy (albeit misguided) hip-hop effort. Do you really think that were he around today he'd have the slightest interest in pursuing "vintage" anything?
Using Lady Gaga as an example of inferior music is probably a valid one, but it's inferior to LOTS of music that is being made today too.
Personally, I'd rather spend my time finding today's music that is superior to it's pop counterparts and can't see the value of actually listening to Wacka Flocka even though I recognize it's value in the scheme of pop culture.
Using this method no one would have listened to Miles Davis back in the day, they would have been jamming to Fabian and Chubby Checker instead.
not to go off on pointless tangent but yeah crouch was exactly the type of half-assed, wannabe musician that miles derided. in that quincy troupe book miles talks about some dudes (like crouch) who simply got into free jazz because they didn't do their homework, couldn't play anything straight up without clams and just wanted to grandstand and pose as "artists".
i am not a free-jazz afficiando but guys like ronald shannon jackson, warren smith, milford graves, etc.. have actual deep skills and knowledge, they don't just bash away at shit like 4-year olds (apologizes to denardo coleman).
not sure i see the connection there at all but i guess my point is crouch was a bad musician, bad spoken word artist and a hack academic whose oppressive, bitter, snarky cynical musical criticism has been retrograde and destructive.
and the ironic part is that crouch has such a think skin himself. he is the kind of guy that would hunt down a dude who gave him a neg. review and try to pummel him...
"I'd rather play shit than the same old shit."
- Miles Davis
And to me, more ironic/tragic than Crouch's thin-skindedness is that a disciple of the mighty Albert Murray would end up with a style so fussy and effete.
I very much enjoyed Mtume's commentary on what he and Miles were trying to accomplish at that time. It makes a lot of sense what he is saying about using technology to break through into new spheres of creativity. It's sad that their art was just not that good. But sit happens what are you gonna do.
Incorrect.
I didn't agree with what J. Mtume said about instruments having technological limitations or whatever
musically speaking it's just not pertinent or relevant, a musical work's identity/value is not determined by the mere range of sounds it uses but by the purpose and effect their usage reveals
it's like saying no one can paint something no one had ever imagined just because all the elements of a certain group of colors have already been used and reused again and again before
rather listen to a daptone record than an alston record. And Gaga.