Because understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand yet another business book, on the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, we commit to reading, dissecting, and analyzing the great books of the Western canon. You know, those books from Jane Austen to Shakespeare and everything else in between that you might have fallen asleep trying to read in
high school. We do this for our listeners, the owner, the entrepreneur, the manager, or the civic leader who doesn't have the time to read, dissect, analyze, and leverage insights from literature to execute leadership best practices in the confusing and chaotic postmodern world we all now inhabit. Welcome to the rescuing of Western civilization at the intersection of literature and leadership. Welcome to the leadership lessons from the great books podcast.
Hello. My name is Hazon Sorells and this is the leadership lessons from the great books podcast episode number one forty four men of colones how was I evil Oedipus cast his blind eye upon the men of Athens and blamed the blamed them, not himself, for the sins he committed. He blamed the city state. He blamed the rulers. He blamed the elders. He blamed everybody but himself.
Twenty five hundred years later, the French writer and political philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau declared mightily on the cusp of the French Revolution that, quote, man is born free, yet everywhere he is in
chains. From these two philosophical and cultural traditions in the West springs the idea in constant tension with its Apollonian opposite that men in their natural organic state are free, and society serves to shackle them with needless conventions, arbitrary rules meaningless traditions and endless orders of course forcing them into a state of rebellion against their natural goodness And then well, and then art comes along intertwined with sexual mores and filled with innuendos
designed, as art always is, to channel men's natural chthonic impulses into Apollonian order without them really knowing or at the very least to coax them to release so that the act of sexual union itself because art is at the bottom of it about sex the sexual union itself can be more pleasurable if this sounds weird for the opening of a literature and leadership podcast today that's because well, that's because of the book we are covering today.
Unusual for this show, it is a book that critiques, analyzes, and examines the untidy and unpredictable nature of one of the most unlikely genres of art, that is music, to ever be created by modern man. This book, unblinkingly traces the history and the twists and the turns of improvisation, chaos, and its manifestation in earthy reality in a place that can only exist that we in The United States call, well,
jazz. Today, we will extract as many leadership lessons as we can from a book written by a man whose name tends to be intoned with the likes of Pauline Kael or Toby Tobias. Considering Genius Writings on Jazz by Stanley Crouch. Leaders, here at the end of the fourth turning, improvisation will be the key to solving some of the hardest problems remaining in what is left of our benighted twenty first century.
And we are going to open our episode today with the essay, the Negro aesthetic of jazz, by Stanley Crouch. And I quote, jazz has always been a hybrid, a mix of African, European, Caribbean, and Afro Hispanic elements, but the distinct results of that mix, which distinguished jazz as one of the new arts of the twentieth century, are now under assault by those who would love to make jazz no more than an, quote, improvised music, unquote, free of definition.
They would like to remove those elements that are essential to jazz and that came from the Negro, Troublesome person, that Negro. Through the creation of blues and swing, the Negro discovered two invaluable things. With the blues, a fresh melodic could be framed within a short form of three chords that added a new feeling to Western music and inspired endless variations. In swing, it was a unique way of phrasing that provided an equally singular pulsation.
These two innovations were neither African nor European nor Asian nor Australian nor Latin or South American. They were Negro American. Though the through the grandsier, Louis Armstrong, swinging and playing the blues moved to the high ground. After Armstrong straightened everyone out and indisputably pointed to the way, there was a hierarchy in jazz and that hierarchy was inarguably Negroid. So much so that many assumed Negro
genius came from the skin and the blood, not from the mind. That is why one white musician brought a recording to the white New Orleans Rhythm Kings to Bix Beider Cricker and excitedly told him that they sounded, quote, unquote, like real niggers. So the issue was one of aesthetic skill, not color, not blood. That white musician understood exactly what every black concert musician rely realized upon truly meeting the criteria of instrumental or vocal performance.
At some point, perhaps even at the start, Leotyne Prince learned that being black and from Laurel, Mississippi did not shut her off from the art of Schubert, Wagner, or Puccini, no matter how far their European social worlds were from hers in terms of history and geography. Nor did Price's becoming a master change those works, she's saying, into German Negro or Italian Negro vocal art.
They remain German and Italian and European, but were obviously available to anyone who could meet the measure of the music. Hierarchy has always given Americans trouble. We believe that records are made to be broken or to be broken free of, which is why, along with that pesky skin color, the Negroid elements central to
jazz were rebelled against as soon as possible. Martin Williams, the late great jazz critic and himself a white southerner, told me once that there used to be a group of white jazz musicians who would say when there were only white guys around, quote, Louis Armstrong and those people had a nice little primitive thing going, but we really didn't have what we now call jazz until Jack Teagarden, Bix, Trumper, and their gang gave it some sophistication. Bix is the one who introduced
introspection to jazz. Without him, you would have no Lester Young and no Miles Davis, close quote. In such instances, Beiderbecher ceases to be a great musician and becomes a pawn in the ongoing attempt to deny the blues its primary identity as Negro developed introspective music, which is about coming to understand oneself
and the world through contemplation. To recognize that would be to recognize the possibility of the Negro having a mind and one that could conceive an aesthetic overview that distinguished the music as a whole. Troublesome person, that Negro, especially one with an aesthetic. Stanley Lawrence Crouch, born 12/14/1945, died 09/16/2020 just before the
launch of this podcast. He was a American poet, music, and cultural critic, a syndicated columnist who had a long running column, novelist, and biographer, in particular, a jazz biographer. Stanley was born in Los Angeles, the son of James and Emma Bay Ford Crouch. Crouch said that his father was a, quote, unquote, criminal and that he once met the boxer, Jack Johnson.
As a child, Stanley was a voracious reader, having read the complete works of Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, f Scott Fitzgerald, and many of the other classics, many of which we have covered on this podcast, of American literature by the time he finished high school. Stanley came from a and was born in the pre civil rights era of America. During the time that he was in high school, Crouch was active as a jazz
drummer. And at the end of his high school career, together with David Murray, he formed a musical group, the black music infinity. During the time he was wandering through his twenties and into his thirties, Crouch befriended Ralph Ellison and, of course, the great Albert Murray who influenced his thinking in a direction less centered on race. He stated regarding Murray's influence, quote, I
saw how important it is to free yourself from ideology. When you look at things solely in terms of race or class, you miss what is really going on. As a writer for The Voice from 1980 to 1988, he was known for his blunt criticisms of his targets and his tendency to excoriate their
participants. It was during this period that he became a friend and intellectual mentor to the jazz great, Wynton Marsalis, and became an advocate of the neotraditionalist movement that he saw as reviving the core values of jazz. Just like Pauline Kael in film, it could be argued that Stanley Crouch oh, and Toby Tobias, who I mentioned in the opening as well in dance, was one of the great jazz critics and music critics of the last half of the twentieth century.
Speaking of Stanley Crouch and his understanding of jazz, we have to look at, when we think about jazz music, one of the greats of the twentieth century, Louis Armstrong. And Stanley Crouch had quite a bit to say about Louis Armstrong, and we're going to take a look at some of those things that he had to say as we head back to the book, Back to considering genius, writings on jazz by Stanley Crouch. We're going to look at the essay, Papa Dip, Crescent City Conquistador and
Sacrificial Hero. And I quote, for all the grandeur, mirth, and joy that Louis Armstrong, Papa Dip, gave to the world, he was essentially a sacrificial hero. Though he had contributed to the essential success that made jazz the most sophisticated performing art in Western history. By the bebop era, the middle aged innovator was frequently dismissed as no more than a wide smiling entertainer and Uncle Tom, even a walking
aesthetic cadaver. But as long as an old lion has teeth and claws, it isn't safe to stick an arm in his cage. Armstrong was such a lion. His technique was pared down by the time and by his fantastic exhibitions of stamina and bravura playing in the nineteen thirties when nothing was too difficult or too dangerous to try. Consequently, would be hip listeners and musicians who focused on obvious virtuosity
missed the new things that he had to offer. The wisdom and depth of experience of his later years was vastly different from the rebellious longing and the exhilaration of conquest heard when he was a young innovator. One reason Armstrong's best late work is often overlooked is that his early achievements were so monumental. A quintessential twentieth century man, Armstrong created a body of work that interacted perfectly with the technology of the age when human motion
was literally reproduced rather than described. Through the phonograph, the radio, and film, his artistic action was captured as he took on convention and won a well documented battle. He defeated the greatest gift, the ultimate measure, and the inevitable enemy, time. A character of Jean Luc Godard's The Mired Woman states an understandable European vision when she says in a discussion about memory, the past, and discerning truth, quote, I prefer the present because I
have no control over it, close quote. That woman would have been shocked to realize what Louis Armstrong had been doing all those years ordering the present in the context of ensemble improvisation. As Albert Murray has pointed out, the phonograph record gave musical artists the opportunity to leave truly accurate scores. We don't have to surmise intent. We could hear coherence and achievement or confusion and failure. In that respect, technology transcended the written manuscript in the
same way the jazz that the jazz musician transcended the present. When Papa Dip was a youth, a flame with fresh musical with a fresh musical world in his very cells, his recordings provided a master class. Aspiring jazzmen and songwriters played Armstrong's discs over and over in order to learn how artistic expression worked on the hoof and what the particulars of his transforming logic were.
Then we're going to move forward a little bit. As maturity increases the speed of perception and experience becomes denser, fewer details are needed to recognize essential meanings. While the younger person is still contemplating, the old master has moved on to the next point, digesting through the shorthand made possible by the passage of many moons. In art, that law allows the individual
gesture to take on greater resonance. The best of Louis Armstrong's work after 50 proves that his expressive ideas didn't reach their peak until he was nearly 60. By the middle nineteen fifties, Armstrong could shade a single pitch with a greater swell of nobility, a deeper sense of tragedy, a stoic nostalgia shaped by the facts, and a bittersweet richness born of the lessons he had learned about victory,
ambivalence, and loss. Four collections that prove my point are Louis Armstrong plays WC Handy, nineteen fifty four, Satch plays Fats, nineteen fifty five, Satchmo, a musical autobiography, 1956, '50 '7, and Echoes of an Era, the Duke Ellington Louis Armstrong years, 1961. He was then like Escudero, the Spaniard who Ralph Ellison described as growing to a point that he could reduce the entire vocabulary of his tradition to a few compelling twists of his fingers.
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was a hundred and 20 years old when he died. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated. Close quote. Louis Armstrong was quite possibly the greatest jazz musician, the greatest jazz improviser of the twentieth century, as Stanley Crouch makes his argument here in his essay in Writings
on Jazz. He was different than Duke Ellington, who was more of a classically inclined man, who took jazz in the direction higher than it started in nor was he Miles Davis who eventually, became the very thing that he fought against. Louis Armstrong was not John Coltrane or Charlie Parker, both of whom struggled with drugs. Louis Armstrong just was a force that rolled on and on. He was the Moses of
twentieth century jazz. His emotional force came through his music, his desire not only to love and to be loved, but to also make a dent in the world not by dent of who he was, but by dent of what his talent could achieve. Where does power and influence really come from? Does it come from the well of the emotional force that a person brings to it? Does it come from our internal forces or does it come from our external circumstances? Is a leader's locus of control internal or
external? Is it what comes out of a man that is more influential, or is it what goes into a man? Louis Armstrong was a sacrificial hero as all heroes are. He placed himself on
the altar of jazz. He placed himself on the altar of the twentieth century and allowed himself to be, to be the thing that would be fought against, to the thing that would be contended against, to the thing that would be pushed against, the rock such as it were that the later water of all jazz musicians and all jazz of the twentieth century would break itself against. There's a lesson for leaders in the life of Louis Armstrong. And the lesson is this. Do you wanna go out with eyes
undimmed and force unabated? Or do you wanna go out leaving everything on the floor? Speaking of Miles Davis, let's get back to the book. Back to Considering Genius, the collected writings on jazz by Stanley Crouch. We're gonna pick up here with a little commentary on Miles Davis from On the Corner, the sellout of Miles Davis. And I quote, the contemporary Miles Davis, when one hears his music or watches him perform, deserves the description that Nietzsche gave of Wagner, the greatest
example of self violation in the history of art. Davis made much fine music for the first half of his professional life and represented for many the uncompromising Afro American artist contemptuous of Uncle Tom, but he has fallen from grace and been celebrated for it. As usual, the fall from grace has been a form of success.
Desperate to maintain his position at the forefront of the modern music scene to sustain his financial position to be admired for the hipness of his purported innovations, Davis turned butt to the beautiful in order to genuflect before the commercial. Once given to exquisite dress, Davis now comes on the bandstand draped in the
expensive bad taste of rock and roll. He walks about the stage, touches foreheads with the saxophonist as they play a duet, bends over and remains in that ridiculous position for long stretches as he blows at the floor, invites his white female percussionist to come midriff bare down a ramp and do a jungle movie dance as she accompanies herself with a talking drum, sticks out his tongue at his photographer's, leads to the din of electronic cliches with arm signals, and trumpets the
many facets of his own force with amplification that blurts forth the sound so decadent that it can no longer disguise the shriveling of its maker's soul. Beyond the terrible performances and the terrible recordings, Davis has also become the most remarkable liquor of money boots in the music business, willing now to pimp himself as he once
pimped women when he was a drug addict. He could be seen on television talking about the greatness of Prince or claiming in his new autobiography, Miles, that the Minneapolis, Bulgarian, and borderline dragon drag queen, quote, can be the new Duke Ellington of our time if he just
keeps at it, close quote. Once nicknamed Inky for his dark complexion, Davis now hides behind the murky fluid of his octopus fear of being old hat and claims that he is now only doing what he has always done, moving ahead, taking music forward, submitting to the personal curse that is his need for change, the same need that brought him to New York from Saint Louis in 1944 in search
of Charlie Parker. Before he was intimidated into mining the fool's gold of rock and roll, Davis's achievements was large and complex as a trumpet player and an improvisor. Though he was never of the order of Armstrong, Young, Parker, or Monk, the sound that came to identify him was as original as any in the history of jazz. His technical limitations were never as great as commonly assumed, except when he was strung out on
drugs and didn't practice. By January 1949, when he recorded overtime with Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro, he was taking a back seat to nobody in execution. By May 1949, when he traveled to France and was recorded in performance, he was muscling his way across the horn in molten homage to Navarro and
Gillespie, the two leading technicians of the bebop era. He was three weeks short of his 20 birthday and already had benefited from big hand experience and big band experience with Billy Eckstein and Gillespie, already had stood next to Charlie Parker night after night on bandstands and in studios.
The conventional idea that Davis discovered that he couldn't play like Gillespie and proceeded to develop a style of of stark, hesitant, even blushing lyricism that provided a contrast to Parker's flood of virtuosic inventions is only partially true. A methodical musician, Davis systematically worked through the things that were of interest to him. Eventually, he personalized the levels of declamation, nuance, melodic fury, and pathos that are heard, for example, in
Parker's bird of paradise. But first, he examined Gillespie's fleet approach and harmonic intricacy, which shaped the dominant approach to bebop trumpet. From Gillespie, he learned bebop
harmony and was also encouraged to use the keyboard to solve problems. He even took from Gillespie an aspect of timbral piquancy that settled beneath the surface of his sound, but Davis rejected the basic nature of Gillespie's tone, which few found as rich or as attractive as the idiomatic achievements of the deejoid race brass vocabulary that had preceded the innovations of bebop. Davis grasped musical power that comes from having a sound that is itself a musical expression.
The life and career of Miles Davis proves the maxim that one, well, not even one, that everybody, right, wants to rule the world, but once everybody has it, no one, or at least very few, can keep it. Stanley Crouch seems to have objected to Miles Davis selling out, and there's something to be said, I guess, for not selling out, whatever that may mean.
But the slam or the critique that artists sell out has been leveled ever since artists began getting paid for their work in more than just claps and maybe a few scraps of bread. Improvisation and selling out in the world of jazz seem to be at odds with each other, but this is because Pache, Stanley Crouch, the audience gets to determine what is, quote, unquote, selling out and not the critic.
Sure. The critic can point the way, and the critic can point out the spots along the road to selling out, but the critic the critic does not get the final word word. The market does, and the market got the final word on miles Davis being a critical darling, and eschewing the audience or not leading the audience, doesn't lead to market
wealth. But on the plus side, it does lead to less confusion When you're a critical darling, that means you're on purpose difficult for the audience to maintain or for the audience to even get a hold of or for the audience to even appreciate. I see this in the writing of my books, and I see this in content and things that we see on the Internet. Should books as the final best end of technology to transmit wisdom across time be
difficult? Should they be easy? Should their covers be inviting or should their covers be closed off? Should the content be invigorating and uplifting? Does it really matter if it's self published or traditionally published? Does it have more weight, more gravitas, more meaning if I spent five years trying to get a book deal for an idea that expired ten minutes ago that I could have blogged about two days ago? Being a critical darling doesn't lead to market wealth, but it does lead to less
confusion. These are the kinds of decisions that talent has to make, and talent is the other part of the dynamic here. Miles Davis had talent. Even Stanley Crouch will admit that. Everybody would admit that. Heck, I was just in a conversation the other day with somebody and I mentioned to them, when they were asking me about my music preferences, what I thought of jazz, and I said, well, Miles Davis in Kind of Blue is quite possibly the best jazz album of the twentieth
century. Miles Davis had talent. Talent is mercurial and transitory, the muse, such as it were, particularly if it's not appropriately sacrificed to on the part of human beings. No one really can describe what the particular sacrifices are that must be made in order to honor talent. Those are too individualistic and gossamer like based on your talent and your abilities. The sacrifices that a carpenter will have to make aren't the same as
the sacrifices that a jazz musician will have to make. The sacrifices that a business person or an entrepreneur will have to make aren't the same as the sacrifices that a civic leader will have to make, and, of course, the sacrifices that a mother or a father, a parent, or even a grandparent will have to make aren't the same as the types of sacrifices that a person who has no children will have to make. But talent does require sacrifice.
We all know this, by the way. And in the case of art, the sacrifice always involves the artist making decisions, some of them intentional, most of them intuitive about improvisation, about what is selling out and what is not, and about how to lead the audience. And this is the big lesson that leaders can take from the life and times of Miles Davis. The sacrifice always involves making decisions, especially if you want the rule of the world, and you want to keep it.
As we round the corner here today, I want to quote from Albert Murray in his great essay, the Omni Americans, talking about the blues idiom and the mainstream. I'm gonna read a couple of passages here for you. The creation of an art style is, as most anthropologists would no doubt agree, a major cultural achievement. In fact, it is perhaps the highest as well
as the most comprehensive fulfillment of culture. For an art style, after all, reflects nothing so much as the ultimate synthesis and refinement of a lifestyle. Art is by definition a process of stylization and what it stylizes is experience. What it objectifies, embodies, abstracts, expresses, and symbolizes is a sense of life.
Accordingly, what is represented in the music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture of a given group of people in a particular time, place, and circumstance is a conception of the essential nature and purpose of human existence itself. More specifically, an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk, or communion of faith embodies its basic attitudes towards experience. Then I'm gonna
skip down a little bit and go to this. Kenneth Burke has equated stylization with a strat with strategy. To extend the military metaphor, one can say stylization is the is the estimate become maneuver. In such a frame of reference, style is not only insight but disposition and gesture. Not only calculation and estimation become execution as in engineering, but also motive and estimation become method and occupation.
It is a way of sizing up the world and so ultimately and beyond all else, a mode and medium of survival. And then a little bit later on, he notes this, indeed the blues idiom represents a major American innovation of universal significance and potential because it fulfills, among other things, precisely that fundamental function that
Constance Rourke describes to the comedy. The irreverent wisdom, the sudden changes, and adroit adaptations she found in the folk genre of the Yankee backwoodsman Negro of the era of Andrew Jackson. It provokes it provides, quote, emblems for pioneer people who require resilience as a prime trait, close quote from Albert Murray in his essay, The Omni Americans. As we close here today, I wanna get to the core of why we're here in
this short episode about well, about jazz. I don't have to talk about music on this podcast, and it doesn't frequently show up as a genre that we do talk about because music is so emotional, so personal, so specific to the individual that the notions and the ideas that I might have about music can very rarely successfully be scaled up to leadership.
But there's something there in what Albert Murray is getting at and there's something here in what Stanley Crouch is getting at in his writings on jazz and there's something here I think that is beneficial for leaders in the jazz medium as it comes out of America in and of itself here at the end of the fourth turning. At the end of chaos, how do you move into building for the future?
I used to, way back when I first started my first business, I used to have a hashtag that I would post everything on and you could find it still, I'm sure, on the Internet and on social media platforms unless it's been scrubbed or retconned or just forgotten by the Internet. And the hashtag was buildingforthefuture because I believed that with every blog post, with every training, with every social
media post, I was somehow building for the future. I was somehow building for a better tomorrow today. There's many, many reasons why I stopped using that hashtag, but one of the big ones is that improvisation didn't factor in to how I thought about building for the future. Jazz shows the way towards improvisation. Jazz is the
way towards improvisation. Jazz is improvisation in and of itself, and it's the uniquely Yankee backwoodsman Negro version of jazz that will guide us out of the chaos of the fourth turning and into a new, I hesitate to say this, but a new golden age. On this one third of the continent, as leaders, we must encourage people to continue the process of mixing and mingling our unique natures, perspectives, humanities, and experiences, and pouring out the gumbo onto the ground that comes out of that.
By the way, in every first turning, the unresolved chaos is the unresolved problems, the unresolved conflicts and tensions that were present and evident in that fourth turning. In a first turning, typically, those things are subsumed. Those things lay fallow. Now they may have some flare ups here and there, but in general, over the next twenty five years, what will be prioritized will be leaders who will have the resolve and who will be able to resolve the conflicts of the first
turning. Those conflicts will be more Louis Armstrong than Miles Davis. But either way, they are going to need they are going to require, they are going to demand the unique perspective that the unique well, the most unique form of music on the planet provides. They are going to need the perspective of those who think, who act, and who feel, well, feel like jazz. I know this one was tenuous and so I would encourage you
to go and listen to your favorite jazz album. If you've never listened to jazz before, I would encourage you to start with Louis Armstrong and move yourself into Charlie Parker, then take on Thelonious Monk, and finally end with Davis and Coltrane. That's my only advice to you as a leader on this episode today, because that will allow you to stay on the path in a much more intuitive and improvisational way. And, well, that's it for me.
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