A courageous voice who confronted truth
Stanley Crouch was not afraid. He proclaimed out loud what others dared not whisper. He confronted his uncounted critics with sober truths they did not wish to hear. He yielded not an inch to the intellectual fashions of the day.
So though anyone who values his singular voice grieves his death Sept. 16 at age 74, Crouch’s writings on jazz, Black culture and American life — three inseparable subjects — will continue to point the way.
I first met Crouch in his New York apartment in 1994 to discuss a fraught subject: Why were some white critics accusing Jazz at Lincoln Center — then and now the country’s foremost jazz organization — of racism? Crouch and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, among others, had founded JALC in 1991 to give jazz the kind of institutional support routinely accorded classical music but not an art form rooted in the Black experience.
In response to JALC’s celebration of jazz progenitors such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton, some white critics hurled charges of “reverse racism” and “anti-white racism,” a perilous argument considering that the music was born of African and African American cultural practices.
That debate may seem quaint today in light of this country’s current reckoning over racism and racial injustice. But it ignited the pages of jazz magazines, journals and major newspapers in the 1990s. To Crouch, who always saw the big picture, jazz was just the veneer for what the attacks were really about: the enormous impact of Black culture on American life.
“If you take the position that I take, which is that Fred Astaire is an Afro-American performer, people flip out,” Crouch told me. “They’ll say, What do you mean? Fred Astaire wasn’t a Black guy.
“And I say, that doesn’t matter. Because when you see Fred Astaire dancing in ‘Top Hat,’ you are seeing Afro-American art as individualized by him. When I say Afro-American art, I mean the way in which an Afro-American style was put into dance that Astaire took for himself.
“Now, Fred Astaire didn’t bite his tongue about (Black dancer) Bill Robinson and people like him. In other words, if you’re dealing with swing, tap dance, any kind of music with a backbeat, a trap set, any kind of guitar that is traceable back to blues guitar, then you’re dealing with an Afro-American set of stylizations.
“That doesn’t preclude or make it any less possible for a white person to do that than a Black one,” continued Crouch. “Puccini’s Italian origins didn’t stop Leontyne Price from becoming who she is as an artist. The fact that so often the Afro-American version is the one that appeals in the United States, (that) the Afro-American version so often becomes the national lingua franca, is something that a lot of people just can’t deal with.”
But the centrality of Black influence on American culture was just one of Crouch’s primary themes. He also took flak over his views on pop music, calling Tupac Shakur a “thug minstrel” and lamenting the musical inanities that millions consumed.
He did so explicitly in his New
York Daily News columns and metaphorically in “A Fiddler’s Tale,” in which he and Marsalis reimagined Igor Stravinsky’s classic “L’Histoire du Soldat” (“The Soldier’s Tale”). For while Stravinsky’s 1918 original chronicles the fate of a World War I soldier who loses everything, “A Fiddler’s Tale” transposed the story to the world of contemporary pop music.
The title character is an accomplished female musician who suffers a fate common to those who try to maintain the highest artistic standards: tiny audiences and little money. This makes her vulnerable to the devil, who in Crouch’s libretto is a record producer. The executive promises the fiddler vast success and huge audiences, but at a steep price: She has to dumb down her music for the masses, losing her soul in more ways than one.
It was classic Crouch, delivered with lacerating wit.
Yet just when you thought you had Crouch’s positions pegged, he’d surprise you with a book such as “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome” (2000), his lyrical debut novel. In its 546 pages, Crouch told his story from the perspective of a white female jazz singer from South Dakota — the antithesis of jazz stereotype and quite a stretch from Crouch’s own persona. This daring novel of the inner self offered few twists of plot, instead chronicling the protagonist’s interior life in vast stream-of-consciousness passages. Through Carla, Crouch’s heroine, Crouch sounded off on Thomas Jefferson, liberal hypocrisy, conservative hypocrisy, pandering hip-hop, American cultural nihilism, New Orleans jazz and Chicago blues, among other topics.
Part of what made Crouch so compelling in all his writings, whether flame-throwing journalism or essay collections such as “The All-American Skin Game” and “Notes of a Hanging Judge,” was his way of writing. He was a poet in prose, as in this passage from “Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker” (2013).
“He needed pitches that came out of the horn quicker, that were as blunt as snapping fingers when the inspiration demanded,” wrote Crouch of Bird. “His tone was absolutely unorthodox, as much like a snare drum or a bongo as a voice. It was assertive, at times comic or cavalier, and though often sweet, it could also sound almost devoid of pity. One trumpeter thought it sounded like knives being thrown into the audience.”
One more endearing Crouch idiosyncrasy: He revered jazz, blues and other art made in Chicago and championed this city’s culture in his writings and interviews.
Of Chicago vocalist Tammy McCann, he said, “She’s probably the best singer I have heard since the emergence of Dianne Reeves. There are so few people who can do what she can do.”
When music aficionados advocated in the 1990s for Symphony Center to have a resident jazz ensemble, Crouch weighed in with a letter to the editor in the Tribune.
“It has come to my attention that Chicago is contemplating putting together a permanent position for a jazz orchestra, which would add yet another layer to the already formidable array of programs and institutions that have given Chicago such an important position in the art of this country,” Crouch wrote in the letter, published Sept. 25, 1997.
“As one who has been involved in these kinds of projects for quite some time, I unequivocally support this idea, especially if William Russo and his wonderful band (the Chicago Jazz Ensemble) are given the job to do in a formal and professional situation, which is what they have been doing with such quality within the context of Columbia College. There are no more talented, experienced, respected or knowledgeable musicians, composers and conductors than Mr. Russo, whose contributions to the contemporary language of the big band are indisputable.”
And when “Prisoner of Her Past,” the Kartemquin Films documentary about my mother’s unspoken Holocaust childhood, was about to have its New York premiere in 2011, Crouch devoted a New York Daily News column to the film.
“One of the remaining wonders of our technological time is the power of the documentary to refute propaganda and deal with the true tragedies of history,” wrote Crouch. “Be brave to sit for an hour. You will never forget it.”
Filmmakers, writers, musicians and others owe deep thanks to Crouch, whose words still burn up the page.