Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch (December 14, 1945 – September 16, 2020) was born in Los Angeles. He was an American music and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, and novelist.
Stanley Crouch has delighted and enraged readers with his two-fisted
observations of American culture. In books like The All-American Skin Game”
and Notes of a Hanging Judge,” as well as in commentaries and columns in the
New York Daily News and the New Republic, he has attacked the excesses of
black nationalism, feminism and the gay rights movement and bemoaned the
sentimentality that guides so much of American social policy. In the
process, Crouch has carved out a niche as one of the country’s most
controversial, outspoken and independent-minded critics.
Crouch is an unabashed admirer of old-style civil rights, jazz, Jewish
intellectuals, authors Ralph+Ellison and
Albert Murray and black success stories like
Johnnie Cochran
and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown. And he’s not afraid to do battle
with the current trend of separatism that defines black politics today.
Crouch is a self-taught drummer who started playing in 1966 to accompany
poet Jayne Cortez. In 1967,
he formed a quartet with alto Arthur Blythe and trumpeter Bobby Bradford. In
the early ‘70s he taught drama at Claremont College and led the Black Music
Infinity Orchestra that included James Newton (flute), David Murray (tenor
saxophone) and Mark Dresser (bass). In 1975, he moved to New York,
contributing to Alan Douglas’s celebrated WILDFLOWERS anthologies. Gradually
his career as a critic eclipsed his work on the drums.
Jazz, however, remains Stanley Crouch’s passion and his metaphor of an ideal
America, where solo expression lifts the whole band, where innovation
acknowledges tradition, where democracy drives excellence. The melody under
his riffs and rants over the years about black nationalism is the theme that
black and white America—no matter the tensions—are unimaginable without
each other; Negroes made the nation, and they made an identity that is more
American deeper down than it is any one color.
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