Criticism
In 1956, when the band returned from its European trip, the Critics Poll in Down Beat reflected victories by black musicians in virtually every category. The Kenton band was playing in Ontario, Canada, at the time, and Kenton dispatched a telegram which lamented "a new minority, white jazz musicians," and stated his "disgust literary geniuses of jazz." Jazz critic Leonard Feather, alone of all the critics, responded in the October 3, 1956, issue with an open letter which questioned Kenton's racial views. Feather implied that Kenton's failure to win the Critics Poll was probably the real reason for the complaint, and wondered if racial prejudice was involved.
Fellow DownBeat critic Ralph J. Gleason wrote that Feather's verdict was passed on Kenton "...without, unfortunately, any real forethought or public statement from the only musicians really in a position to know.” Jazz writer Jack McKinney stated that the night Kenton wrote the telegram, there were two African-Americans trombonists touring with him. Previous to Feather's letter, in the December 16, 1953, issue of Down Beat, critic Nat Hentoff had written that ". . . Stan is as free from prejudice of any kind as any man I know."
Feather's allegation of prejudice ignored Kenton's well-known close friendships with Duke Ellington and Count Basie. In July to September, 1955, the year before Feather's letter, Kenton hosted the CBS summer replacement, Music 55, for which he invited Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Louis Jordan, Cab Calloway, and many other African-American artists to participate. He toured with Basie and his Orchestra in Fall, 1960, and released a single with the Nat King Cole Trio in 1962 that included Orange Colored Sky.
McKinney wrote further, in 1965, that "All points except the last were based on conjecture, and events preceding and following Feather's complaint have shown how ridiculous they were." He further pointed out that many budding African-American jazz musicians, such as Art Tatum and Charlie Parker, were given more exposure on Kenton-sponsored tours than elsewhere. One Kenton band member, trumpeter Donald Byrd, in discussing Kenton's hands-on college and university music program, said, "My experience with the Stan Kenton clinic at the National Band Camp has left me in complete ecstasy ... The camp was interracial, both in the teaching faculty and the student body..."
Feather himself realized his error, and in August, 1960, apologized for the letter he then claimed was a "result of sorrow." Kenton later lamented of Feather's apology, "I think it was on the back page of the Pittsburg Inquirer." Kenton reportedly felt that Feather had created a great ill feeling toward him by African-American musicians, and no matter how apologetic Feather would be, much of that "prejudice-in-reverse" would remain.
Read more about this topic: Stan Kenton
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)