James Mtume Takes on Stanley Crouch #MilesDavis

Billie!

Half a century after her death, Billie Holiday's music remains a cornerstone of the American songbook.

A Song for Lady Day
by Stanley Crouch

“Billie Holiday was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last 20 years.”

—Frank Sinatra, 1958

Life is ultimately mysterious and indifferent about whom it gives much and from whom it expects a measure equal to its gifts. Those gifts are passed out with the same careless precision as handfuls of chicken feed hurled into a high wind.

Billie Holiday was obviously given much more than most, and her talent revealed itself through her intensity, her phrasing and her control of nuance more so than the conventional strengths of big sound, great range and stunning projection. Her voice was small, and her range was equally small. Standing next to most singers, she would never get you to put your money on her, unless you knew in advance that her emotional force and her ability to summon pathos, joy and melancholy with naked precision would demolish almost anyone intent on making a contest out of a hazardous moment on the bandstand with her.

There the story of one performance with super virtuoso Sarah Vaughan. Vaughan was so profoundly endowed with a superior instrument that she sometimes could not avoid strutting her stuff to the point of obnoxiousness. But the ax fell. When Vaughan called up “I Cried For You,” Holiday whispered, “You done screwed up now, bitch. That’s my song.”

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Premature Autopsies for the Race Man

from Critical Noir @ Vibe.com

"Premature Autopsies" for the Unrepentant Race Man (ver. 1.0)
by Mark Anthony Neal

On his 1989 recording, Majesty of the Blues, Grammy Award-winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis paid tribute to the legacy of New Orleans Jazz. The centerpiece of the recording was a three-part suite called "The New Orleans Function." Arranged as a traditional New Orleans funeral on the occasion of "The Death of Jazz," the suite features a 16-minute sermon aptly titled "Premature Autopsies." Though "Premature Autopsies" was written by noted Jazz critic and curmudgeon Stanley Crouch, it is none other than the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. who delivers the sermon on the recording. While Reverend Wright was largely unknown to most in America only two months ago, at the time he recorded "Premature Autopsies" he was already regarded among the black cultural vanguard as one of Black America's--if not America's--greatest preachers.

Like the music that Marsalis "recreated" for Majesty of the Blues, Reverend Wright's preaching was the embodiment of what some might call "classical" Black American Culture--easily recalling examples like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Louis Armstrong, Mahailia Jackson, Bessie Smith, Katherine Dunham, Langston Hughes, and Duke Ellington, the latter whom serves as the primary referent throughout "Premature Autopsies." Crouch composed "Premature Autopsies," in response the sense that classical Black American Culture was under assault in the marketplace and by a dismissive generation of young Americans. The sermon gives the strongest inkling to what drives Crouch's very public criticisms of rap music and hip-hop culture. But I also submit that the passion with which Reverend Wright delivers the sermon also explains the sense of indignity that was on display during the Q&A portion of Wright's recent talk at the National Press Club.

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