Contentious, influential N.Y. critic, columnist
NEW YORK — Stanley Crouch, a contentious and influential critic, columnist and self-taught Renaissance man who in fiction and nonfiction was inspired by his knowledge and love of blues and jazz and his impulse to step over the line, died Wednesday at age 74.
His wife, Gloria Nixon-Crouch, told The Associated Press that he died at a hospice in New York City. He had been in poor health in recent years after suffering a stroke.
In a career dating back to the 1960s, Mr. Crouch was a columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Daily News, a guest on NPR and Charlie Rose’s show, a jazz drummer, a founder of what became Jazz at Lincoln Center and mentor to Wynton Marsalis and many younger writers and musicians, an aficionado of baseball and American folklore and scourge of Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Amira Baraka among others.
At home, he read, wrote and listened to music. Away from home, he might turn up anywhere — dining with then-Vice President Al Gore, chatting up musicians at the Village Vanguard or making a special appearance at a ceremony for the National Board of Review awards, when he accepted a prize on behalf of Quentin Tarantino, who appreciated Mr. Crouch’s praise for “Pulp Fiction.” He was also a favorite of documentary maker Ken Burns, his commentary appearing in “Jazz” and “The Civil War” among other films.
Asmathic and often in poor health as a child, Mr. Crouch was raised in Los Angeles by his mother and was eager to learn about new worlds, reading William Faulkner, Mark Twain and other canonical writers and teaching himself how to drum. He was a civil rights activist in the 1960s who was radicalized by the 1965 Watts riots but later turned against Black nationalism.
Mr. Crouch’s work was ever a blend of high art and street talk, the prose version of what he considered the profound democracy of jazz.
Warm words from Mr. Crouch were savored if only for the ferocity, even extremity, of his scorn. He called Lee a “middle-class would-be street Negro” and Morrison a writer “perforated by ideology,” turning out “bathtub corn liquor.” He and Baraka so despised each other that when New Yorker writer Robert Boynton called Baraka for a story on Mr. Crouch in 1995, the poet called Mr. Crouch “a backwards, asinine person” and hung up the phone.
“Crouch has a virtually insatiable appetite for controversy,” Boynton wrote.
Mr. Crouch is survived by his wife, a daughter and granddaughter.