STANLEY CROUCH
MONK AT TOWN HALL, 1959: A TALK
Friday, 10/12/07, 7 pm
Nasher Museum Auditorium
Free To the Public
Stanley Crouch won a MacArthur “Genius” award and co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center; he’s been nominated for a National Book Award and has made pronouncements on race and music that have scandalized more polite critics for over 30 years.
Controversial, confrontational, and fiercely learned about jazz, Crouch bowls into Durham for the Following Monk festival ready to break down the piano genius’s legendary 1959 concert at New York’s Town Hall. Crouch will detail Monk’s famous appearance, where the jazz great collaborated with the Juilliard arranger Hall Overton in an outrageously ambitious show that brought Monk back after two years of being barred from performing in New York.
Tracing the comeback show of a blackballed genius, Crouch’s riff on Monk and Hall Overton’s monumental collaboration will draw on insights from the critic’s new book, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz.
“What made [Monk] avant-garde was his determination to sustain the power of the tradition rather than reduce it to clichés, trends, novelties, or uninformed parodies.”
—Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz
Funded, in part, by the Duke Department of African and African American Studies, Duke Department of Music, and the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture.