Stanley Crouch

Critic

• Born: December 14, 1945
• Birthplace: Los Angeles, California
• Died: September 16, 2020
• Place of death: New York City, New York

Journalist and musician

A music critic and social commentator, Crouch was known for his essays on jazz and his critiques on topics of culture and race. He courted controversy with his criticism of gangsta rap, his outspoken opposition to movements such as Black nationalism and Afrocentrism, and his dislike for the work of celebrated Black figures such as Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Malcolm X. Crouch was also a jazz drummer, actor, novelist, poet, and writer on many subjects.

Areas of achievement: Journalism and publishing; Music: jazz; Poetry; Theater

Early Life

Stanley Lawrence Crouch was born in Los Angeles on December 14, 1945, the youngest of three children born to James Crouch and Emma Bea Ford. James was incarcerated for a drug offense at the time of Crouch’s birth and rarely had contact with his son later in life. According to Crouch, he owed his education to his mother’s instruction and the no-nonsense attitudes of his public school teachers.

After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, Crouch attended Southwest College and East Los Angeles College but never finished a degree. In 1964, he worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but after experiencing the 1965 Watts riot he drifted toward black nationalist beliefs instead. In the 1970s, Crouch grew disillusioned with this movement as well; in his later writing, he would criticize its narrow view of race relations, and the “reverse racism” of Louis Farrakhan and other Black leaders would become a favorite topic in his columns.

Life’s Work

From 1965 to 1967, Crouch belonged to Studio Watts, a local repertory theater that occasionally performed plays he wrote. He contributed essays and poetry to such publications as the Journal of Black Poetry, the Liberator, and Black World, and in 1968 he became the poet in residence at Pitzer College, one of the Claremont Colleges. Crouch’s writing secured him a teaching position as the first faculty member in Claremont’s Black Studies Center, though he soon transitioned to Pomona College’s English department. He also directed, wrote, and acted in various stage plays put on by Claremont’s drama department.

Starting in 1975, Crouch performed as a jazz drummer in New York, leading bands that included such notable musicians as Arthur Blythe, Bobby Bradford, and David Murray. He organized concerts and events at the Tin Palace jazz club and at times worked as the club’s bouncer. Murray and Crouch roomed together in an apartment above the club.

By 1980, Crouch was working more steadily as a journalist than a performer, writing iconoclastic and provocative essays on jazz and race for the Village Voice. Though often critical of progressive trends in jazz, he was a steadfast supporter of his favorite musicians, particularly Wynton Marsalis. He often wrote about his admiration of jazz critic Albert Murray. One of Crouch’s most famous columns was a blistering attack on Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved (1987), which he saw as simplistic and crassly commercial. He was also critical of the “cult of victimization” he saw in Black political discourse, which he believed reinforced racial boundaries rather than eradicating them.

Many of these essays were later reprinted in the 1990 collection Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979–1989, Crouch’s best-known book. He released several collections in the subsequent decades, including The All-American Skin Game; or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990–1994 (1995), Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995–1997 (1998), The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity (2004), and Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006). He also wrote a well-received novel, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing (2000). In 2013 he published Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, the first of a planned two volumes on Parker's life and music, which he had worked on intermittently for more than three decades. Crouch appeared in debates on CBS’s 60 Minutes and PBS’s On Values and was a contributor to Ken Burns’s documentary Jazz (2001).

Crouch was also known for his short temper. He was fired from the Village Voice in 1988 for punching a colleague during an argument over rap music (and then later rehired on a contract basis), and he was involved in a similar incident when he struck Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) president Howard Mandel following the JJA's first annual Jazz Awards in 1998. He was fired from JazzTimes in 2003 for writing a column about what he saw as the unjust glorification of moderately talented White musicians by insecure White music critics. Nevertheless, he continued to write for other prominent publications through the 2000s and 2010s, including Harper's and the New Yorker, and wrote a regular column for the New York Daily News until 2014.

After his health had reportedly been failing for some time due to a protracted illness, Crouch died at a New York City hospital on September 16, 2020, at the age of seventy-four.

Significance

Crouch’s writing, although often controversial, has been celebrated by many organizations. In 1991, he won a Whiting Award for nonfiction, and in 1993 he received a MacArthur Fellowship for his essays. In 2004, he served as one of the judges for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for the protection of free speech, and the following year he was among the inaugural fellows of the Fletcher Foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting civil rights. In 2016, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University awarded him a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction; the prize, established by a 2011 gift from the estate of late novelist Donald Windham, is accompanied by an unrestricted $150,000 grant.

Crouch also helped establish the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, working as an artistic consultant alongside Marsalis, the program's artistic director. He was elected president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation in 2008 and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In further recognition of his advancement of jazz, in 2019 the National Endowment for the Arts honored him with the A. B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy.

Bibliography

Boynton, Robert S. “The Professor of Connection.” New Yorker 6 Nov. 1995: 95+. Print.

Crouch, Stanley. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. New York: Basic Civitas, 2006. Print.

Crouch, Stanley. Interview by Scott Walter. American Enterprise Mar. 2001: 12–15. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Pinsker, Sanford. “Climbing over the Ethnic Fence: Reflections on Stanley Crouch and Philip Roth.” Virginia Quarterly Review 78.3 (2002): 472–80. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

“President.” Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Louis Armstrong Foundation, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Roberts, Sam. "Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74." The New York Times, 16 Sept. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/obituaries/stanley-crouch-dead.html. Accessed 12 Oct. 2020.

“Stanley Crouch.” Windham-Campbell Prizes. Beinecke Rare Book & MS Lib., Yale U, 2016. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Walton, Peter. “Crouch, Stanley (1945–).” BlackPast.org. BlackPast.org, 2007–15. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.