Octogenarian Doc Watson, sounding as good as ever, along with Alison Krauss and Ricky Skaggs.

If you’d like to hear a piece of orchestral music inspired by Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow–and why wouldn’t you?–go here and listen to David Heuser’s A Screaming Comes Across the Sky. You have the choice of listening to it entire or just hearing an excerpt–but the whole piece is only six minutes long, so try to deal.

April, it seems, is Jazz Appreciation Month. Didn’t know that until I found these spectacular photos at Slate.

In response to my post of a week or so ago about the Stanley Crouch articles on Miles Davis and John Coltrane, a UniBrowser writes:

I’ve had a hard time with Crouch, though, ever since I watched Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary, in which Crouch and Wynton marsalis both discounted the contribution of white musicians to jazz. What do you think of this? Crouch is highly vocal about a white establishment in the jazz world. No doubt, he would know. But I was disappointed in his dismissal in Burns’ work of jazz greats like Bix Beiderbecke and Jack Teagarden. Any thoughts?

I watched the Ken Burns documentary when it was broadcast some years ago, but I don’t recall what was said, by Crouch or any of the commentators, about white jazz musicians. (I do remember an airing of differences over who–Benny Goodman or Chick Webb–is more deserving of the title “King of Swing,” but I don’t think Crouch weighed in there.) If he dismissed Beiderbecke and Teagarden as you say, I’m disappointed as well. I do think that as a social critic and analyst of race relations, Crouch can be a crank and a button-pusher–or, in the tired accents of publisher marketing, a “contrarian” and “iconoclast.” But I’ve never read any of his books. I tend to see only his occasional pieces. When he’s sticking to the music itself I find him worthwhile.

Stanley Crouch is always worth reading when he’s writing about jazz. Here’s his review of My Funny Valentine, a newly issued recording of a live Miles Davis concert from 1964, that recently appeared in Slate. The performance dates from well before the (in my opinion) calamitous experiments with fusion that disfigured Davis’s late career.

Only a few days earlier, also in Slate, Crouch had a thoughtful piece about Coltrane occasioned by last year’s release of One Down, One Up, a 1965 radio-broadcast recording.

Take his advice in both cases.