Man of letters, influential jazz critic dead at 74
NEW YORK — 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 back 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, and an aficionado of baseball and American folklore.
At home, he read, wrote and listened to music. Away from home, he might turn up anywhere — dining with thenVice 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.”
Asmathic and often in poor health as a child, 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.