Stanley Crouch, the provocative speaker, music and cultural critic, musician, and brilliant writer, has died, following nearly a decade of serious health issues. An announcement by his wife, Gloria Nixon-Crouch, said that he died at the Calvary Hospital in New York on Wednesday September 16, 2020.
Crouch was born in Los Angeles in 1945 and moved to the Carroll Gardens neighborhood of New York City in 1975 to play music in a band with his friend David Murray.
Crouch was a jazz drummer for a few years, but by his own admission he “couldn’t really play. Since I was doing this avant-garde stuff, I didn’t have to be all that good, but I was a real knucklehead.” He began his writing career as the cultural critic at the Village Voice and went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. This established Crouch as a force to be reckoned with. His books included a novel, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome? a well-received biography, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz, as well as many others, essays and poems. His honors included a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and a NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship.
Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis called Crouch “my best friend in the world” and “mentor.” Marsalis met Crouch when he was 17-years-old while attending the Juilliard School. They shared a close relationship, with Crouch writing the liner notes for several of Marsalis’ albums.
Crouch served on the advisory board for Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary Jazz along with Wynton Marsalis, who served a Senior Creative Consultant. Their participation in the documentary has led some critics to say that is why the film had an undue focus on traditional and straight-ahead jazz. Crouch was also the co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
In 2002 Crouch gave the keynote address to open the educational seminars at the Satchmo Summer Fest. OffBeat writer Geraldine Wyckoff interviewed him for OffBeat’s coverage of the event. When asked: What are the things that you hear in jazz every day that come specifically from Louis Armstrong? His response: “The rhythm—he influenced how everyone phrases and that influence is still solidly in place. Whenever you hear anybody get into that rhythm, that’s called swing, Armstrong is on the bandstand… Armstrong brought together all of those elements—the street music, the operas, the stuff that was left over from the plantations, the funeral parades—I mean everything that was central to the spirit and feeling of New Orleans. They were at the center of what he was doing. Just like everything that was going on in London was in what Shakespeare was doing. I think that’s the way most major artists are. They take all of the essences out of the place from which they come and they turn those into universally significant works.” The full interview can be read here.
