Stanley Crouch was famously fired from his critic’s job at JazzTimes. “Crouch’s position has less to do with color than it does with sound. He defines jazz within famously narrow limits—a music that doesn’t stray far from the blues or the techniques that have traditionally produced it, musicians who never, ever forget where and how the sound was born. One doesn’t have to be black to find a groove (though some critics have taken him to mean this), but one must be willing to bow to the “Negro aesthetic.” He is convinced that the white establishment resents a musical history from which it can’t help but feel alienated, and so champions jazz that sounds “white” instead of jazz that looks backward. In this view, the desire to innovate past swing is tantamount to fearing its origins and the people who created it. The lines between the advancement of a music and the rejection of its history become entangled in the vast mire of racial politics.”