JAZZ-USA: Critics Say Lincoln Centre is Racist

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Dec 27 1994 (IPS) - The Lincoln Centre, the pre-eminent mainstream jazz institution, has come under criticism from critics as being racist — biased against white musicians.

Some critics argue that the Lincoln Centre’s jazz programme stresses black accomplishments, while avoiding white performers.

But to Wynton Marsalis, acknowledged as the top jazz trumpeter in the United States and the programme’s director, the charges are absurd.

In 1991, Marsalis inaugurated ‘Jazz at the Lincoln Centre,’ the first major programme launched to recognise jazz’s status as an established art form. Denigrated for decades because of its roots as black dance music, jazz entered the world of upper-class respectability conferred by the Lincoln Centre’s prestigious patronage of classical music and opera.

But this year, white critic Gene Lees has cried foul, writing a book, ‘Cats of Any Colour’, which accuses the black Marsalis of racism. The storm that this book set off has yet to abate.

Lees aimed his fire particularly at Marsalis’s friend, black political analyst Stanley Crouch, whom Lees said was unfair to the jazz contributions of such white musicians as arranger Gil Evans and pianist Bill Evans, both of whom played with Miles Davis.

Another critic, Gerge Kanzler, wrote in the ‘Newark Star- Ledger’ that the “unstated goals of the Lincoln Centre Jazz seems to be affirmative action culminating in an all-black jazz orchestra.”

For Marsalis – who has been blasted by his black peers for musical conservatism, not for anything approaching black nationalism – the charge is bizarre, and itself racist.

“I am not discriminating against musicians because they are white,” the trumpeter said in a public discussion last August. “That’s not the way a musician conducts himself.”

But, he argued, the programme is meant to offer audiences the best of the rich history of jazz. And that history, at its best, offers such black creators as Louis Armstrong, Edward Kennedy Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Birks, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

At root, essentially, is an age-old question: Will black creative accomplishments be appreciate in the United States? Or do they need – as in the case of rock music – an acceptably ‘white face’ to win acceptance? (MORE)

= 12270300 DAP0003