Stanley Crouch is a one-man race conversation – a sex, class and culture conversation as well, a sort of jam session of arguments that have taken the shape, now, of a novel. White girl singer from South Dakota in this story meets black tenor saxophone star from Texas: can they keep it together?
Jazz has been Stanley Crouch’s passion and his metaphor of an ideal America where solo expression lifts the whole band, where innovation acknowledges tradition, where democracy drives excellence. The melody under his riffs and rants over the years and his run-ins with black nationalism was the theme that black and white America – no matter the tensions – are unimaginable without each other; that Negroes made the nation and made an identity that’s American deeper down than it’s any one color.
The novel’s question, for white Carla and black Maxwell, is whether love and music can beat the skin game?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
Guests:
Stanley Crouch, author of Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome.