Jazz critic Stanley Crouch was fired from JazzTimes magazine last month, and he says there’s much wrong with the field of jazz criticism today. “There is such consistency in the jazz press, and its predilections, that it represents a virtual conspiracy?not one that includes clandestine meetings or muttering in code?but a conspiracy of consensus based in modernist European ideas of avant gardism. It?s stapled to concepts that Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg pushed into the art world during the 1940s and 1950s, championing the narrows of Abstract Expressionism as ‘advanced’ because they ignored the body of basic classical skills in the interest of autobiographical methods devised by the painters themselves. But right now, while mouthing those theories, jazz criticism is actually dominated by an adolescent vision of rebellion that arrives from the world of pop music, rock in particular. That is why I was fired last month from JazzTimes.”