Stanley Crouch

Stanley Crouch (born December 14, 1945, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died September 16, 2020, New York City, New York) was an American journalist and critic noted for his range of interests and for his outspoken essays on African American arts, politics, and culture.

Crouch grew up in Los Angeles, where he attended two junior colleges and was an actor-playwright in the Studio Watts company (1965–67). While teaching at the Claremont Colleges (1968–75), he also wrote poetry and played drums. He was initially active in the civil rights movement but abandoned it for a more militant viewpoint. In 1975 he moved to New York City, where he promoted jazz performances and then became a staff writer for the Village Voice (1979–88). The racially themed poetry collection Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight (1972) referenced the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles in its title.

Writers Ralph Ellison and, especially, Albert Murray crucially influenced major changes in Crouch’s thinking. Like Murray, he criticized politicians and writers who viewed Black people as victims and Black culture as deprived. He came to oppose Black nationalism, accusing it of narrowness of vision, even of racism; separatist leaders such as Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael, according to Crouch, vitiated the civil rights movement. Although he was an enthusiastic admirer of what he considered avant-garde jazz in the 1970s, he opposed the music in the ’80s, when he became a spokesman and mentor for popular jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The objects of Crouch’s published attacks included many forms of racism as well as filmmaker Spike Lee, novelist Toni Morrison, and rap music. He wrote columns for The New Republic and the New York Daily News and articles for publications such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, and JazzTimes. In 1987, with Marsalis, Crouch helped to establish a program of jazz concerts at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan. The program was enshrined as an official department, Jazz at Lincoln Center, in 1991.

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Crouch was the author of the essay collections Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990), The All-American Skin Game; or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and Short of It, 1990–1994 (1995), Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995–1997 (1998), and The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity (2004). Reconsidering The Souls of Black Folk: Thoughts on the Groundbreaking Classic Work of W.E.B. DuBois (2002; with Playthell Benjamin) was written in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Crouch introduced the photography collection One Shot Harris: The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris (2002), which selected images from 40 years of Harris’s work in Pittsburgh’s African American neighbourhood the Hill. Considering Genius (2006) drew on Crouch’s lengthy catalogue of essays on jazz.

Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome (2000), generally poorly reviewed, was his first attempt at fiction; it chronicled a love affair between a white jazz singer and her Black jazz trumpeter boyfriend. Better received was Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (2013), a wide-ranging desultory biography of the jazz saxophone player. Crouch appeared frequently on television as a commentator and was among the contributors to Ken Burns’s documentary Jazz (2001). For his work as a jazz historian and critic, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in 2019.