From the pre-eminent - and always controversial - jazz critic and intellectual firebrand Stanley Crouch, this is the long-awaited collection of essential essays on the great music and performers of the jazz world. Stanley Crouch has been writing about jazz and jazz artists for over thirty years. His reputation for controversy is exceeded only by a universal respect for his intellect and passion: even Amiri Baraka, a long-time Crouch combatant and target of his wrath, has said, "As much as I disagree with Stanley, about everything, music is the one thing he knows something about." And Gary Giddons notes: "Stanley may be the only jazz writer out there with the kind of rhinoceros hide necessary to provoke and outrage and then withstand the fulminations that come back." Now, in a long-awaited collection, Crouch collects fifteen of his best loved, most influential, and most controversial pieces (published in "Jazz Times", "The New Yorker", "The Village Voice", and elsewhere), and throws in two new essays as well. The pieces range from the introspective "Jazz Criticism and its Effect on the Art Form" to a rollicking debate with Baraka, to vivid, intimate portraits of the legendary performers Crouch has known. The first, an autobiographical essay reflecting on his life in jazz as a drummer, a promoter, a critic, and most of all a lover of this quintessentially American art form, offers the perfect introduction to the jazz world, for a novice or an old hand. And the closing essay, about a young Italian saxophonist, expresses undaunted optimism for the worldwide vibrancy of jazz. Throughout, Crouch's work reminds us not only of why he is one of the world's most important living jazz critics - always sought out for commentary by the likes of Ken Burns and Tavis Smiley - but of why jazz itself remains, against all odds, an elemental component of our cultural identity.