Jazz critic made friends, enemies

STANLEY CROUCH

Stanley Crouch, 74, was a columnist, author and self-taught Renaissance man.

Stanley Crouch, a contentious and influential critic, columnist and selftaught 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 NixonCrouch, 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 to the 1960s, 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 Amiri Baraka.

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 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.

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. He saw his country, his work and his life as intertwined, advancing “through argument, through contradiction, through reinterpretation,” grounded and graced by a spirit of “tragic optimism.” In his 2007 biography of Charlie Parker, “Kansas City Lightning,” he presents the great saxophonist in his early days as not just a revolutionary musician but a kind of exemplary citizen.

Crouch championed new ideas but was deeply immersed in the past and in some ways preferred it — scorning fusion and other more recent incarnations of jazz.

Warm words from Crouch were savored if only for the ferocity, even extremity, of his scorn. He called Lee a “middle-class wouldbe 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 Crouch in 1995, the poet called Crouch “a backwards, asinine person” and hung up the phone.

Crouch is survived by his wife, a daughter and granddaughter.