Listen to the Music

Sound over sentiment. 

That's the mantra running through the latest issue of Brilliant Corners, a journal of jazz and literature. Critic and novelist Stanley Crouch makes the point emphatically in an interview with editor Sascha Feinstein. Crouch argues that most jazz writers don't really understand the music, focusing instead on its political context and outsized personas. 

When Feinstein asks why jazz critics tend to be white, Crouch, an African-American who's tackled the subject in books such as The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity, gives a typically dispassionate answer: "The first thing is, you don't have much of an aesthetic set of concerns in black American culture. When it does take place, it's usually overly influenced by sociology and politics and stuff like that." He responds in kind when asked about the mainly white audience for jazz: "if it had been left to black people, the music wouldn't even exist. It's that simple. The audience that has supported jazz as an art for the majority of time has been a white audience." 

Some may dispute that contention, for all I know (my parents weren't even conceived when bebop hit its stride) but Crouch raises a necessary question. Has the genre survived in our consumer culture because its power shakes listeners--moneyed and not--out of their haze? Or has it simply become another commodity for elites across the political spectrum? Crouch seems to think that the best jazz artists can reach anyone willing to study the aesthetic. 

And the strongest contributors in this issue have done their homework. They reference jazz artists without valorizing them. The sounds have impacted the writers, to the point where the following lines make perfect sense: "Someone's picked lettuce from sunlight" (poet Tina Barr, "Blue Rose"), "How can the present be decadent? There's so little of it" (poet Richard Lyons, "Bird Phonetics and Jazz Scat"), "In the empty house, she hears it too, feels his solitary flight" (Xu Xi, in her story "Jazz Wife). These authors recognize that jazz often frames an individual vision, as opposed to a group ethos. 

Some of the other contributors fall prey to "sociology and politics and stuff like that." Neil Shepard is the chief offender with his poem "Joe Louis and the Duke." He riffs on the 1938 fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, bombarding readers with cliché: "and everybody turned.../and up/ came Duke's horns, up the drum roll, up the piano's segregated/ white and black notes..." These lines are emblematic of the lesser pieces in Brilliant Corners. They're reductive, with the Man peddling bad things like segregation, and the masses fighting back with a funky group catharsis, which the jazzman gladly provides--in the proper context, of course; can't have those horns disrupting a faculty meeting. 

Generally, though, the contributors have fresh things to say about the relationship between jazz and literature, character and crescendo. And it's always great to find a journal with such a concrete focus (if I see another masthead touting something like "experimental poetry capturing the heart of the south," I'll go nuts). Of the fourteen contributors in this issue, eight list teaching credentials. Two others mention painting and singing gigs, while the remaining four disclose only their publications. Most have at least one or two books to their credit. There's even a former Poet Laureate in the mix who shall remain nameless, in keeping with the most compelling feature of jazz.

The element of surprise.