"Our democratic richness arrives when we're able to comprehend our collective humanity accurately." -- Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch (born December 14, 1945, Los Angeles) is an American music and cultural critic, syndicated columnist, and novelist, perhaps best known for his jazz criticism, and his novel Don't the Moon Look Lonesome?
"All of us are made up of the stories that we listen to, the ones we disagree with and the ones that we agree with.""As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.""Big business, for all its lobbying, is often put in line by investigative reporting, public scandals and multi-million-dollar judgments in court against those who put products on the market that are dangerous to their buyers.""But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.""Everybody has to be reminded that there's another way to be. Another more mysterious, unpredictable way to be that's not necessarily based upon contrivances.""Getting to the pint where the other is not the enemy is a big leap.""I also wanted to do something that I hadn't really seen in almost any black novels, which was a complex love story in which both people were extremely intelligent and talented and understood a lot of things and were still at odds getting it together.""I don't know any women who don't think about what they look like, and I don't know any men who don't think about what women look like.""I wanted to get to that aesthetic proposition that comes out of learning the human elements of a world, so that those notes and rhythms mean something to you besides just the academic way in which they fall in place.""If there's an intellectual highway, there's also an intellectual subway.""In America, we have to learn to be patient enough to figure out what somebody is saying. Somebody might actually be saying something.""Louis Armstrong, who learned to be in exquisite dress, came from the bottom, and he's not a trash can.""Now the writing in the head, I definitely do every day, thinking about how I want to phrase something or how I'd like to rephrase something I've already written.""Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.""Our society has gotten to the point where we might soon become less and less shocked by any kind of violence.""People don't really think other people are the same.""Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA.""Rap actually comes out of punk rock, not black music.""The discussion of ideas as opposed to the American narcissistic obsession with what's going on with the self, that's the general thing people are talking about.""The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.""The high point of civilization is that you can hate me and I can hate you but we develop an etiquette that allows us to deal with each other because if we acted solely upon our impulse we'd probably go to war.""Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.""Unfortunately, I'm not a person that's always capable of living up to the Boy Scout philosophy.""What we need in America is a renaissance. We need to go forward by going backward.""When a violent minority that crosses color lines comes to believe that killing those you know or do not know is a reasonable solution to problems, we are in need of another vision.""When people conclude that all is futile, then the absurd becomes the norm.""When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present.""You can meet a young person who goes to school and is really enthusiastic, but if a sufficiently strong personality convinces them that this is a waste of time, that person might flunk out.""You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.""Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity."
During the early 1970s, Crouch moved from California to New York City, where he shared a loft with tenor saxophonist David Murray above an East Village club called the Tin Palace. While working as a drummer, Crouch conducted the booking for an avant-garde jazz series at the club, as well as organizing occasional concert events at the Ladies' Fort.
Since the early 1980s, Crouch has become critical of the more progressive forms of jazz and has been associated with the opinions of Albert Murray. An ardent proselytizer for the music of Wynton Marsalis, Crouch writes the liner notes for all the trumpeter's albums. Crouch was fired from JazzTimes following his controversial article "Putting the White Man in Charge", in which he asserted that white critics elevate white jazz musicians beyond their abilities.
Crouch appeared in Ken Burns' 2001 documentary Jazz and served on the film's advisory board. He also appeared in Ken Burns' 2004 documentary The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson.
Crouch has reacted violently to critics and detractors. At the First Annual Jazz Awards, Crouch was invited to present an award. While reading the nominees, he made disparaging comments about two of them: trumpeter Dave Douglas and pianist Matthew Shipp. After the show, jazz critic Howard Mandel, who was chiefly responsible for creating and organizing the Jazz Awards, confronted Crouch about his earlier comments. After a short argument, Crouch punched Mandel and then was confronted by Shipp, who called Crouch "an Uncle Tom and a fucking loser". However, the two were quickly separated and a brawl was avoided. All About Jazz - The Definitive Resource for Jazz Music
Crouch dismisses free jazz and jazz fusion as irrelevant parts of the jazz canon, the styles not being "real jazz." As the major theoretical/historical influence on Wynton Marsalis, the central advisor to Ken Burns for his jazz documentary, Crouch was instrumental in the lack of in-depth coverage for those styles in that production, and their invisibility in the programming to Jazz at Lincoln Center. He also maintains that white musicians have made no significant contribution to the development of jazz, and emphasizes immersion in blues as an exclusively African-American experience and an essential component to jazz technique and expression.
Crouch is a fierce critic of gangsta rap music, noting it promotes violence, criminal lifestyles and degrading attitudes toward women. With this viewpoint, he has defended Bill Cosby's remarks (see the "Pound Cake Speech") and praised a women's group at Spelman College for speaking out against rap music. Recently several of his syndicated columns have been dedicated to these subjects.
Crouch was invited to a panel of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award, a $25,000 award designed to protect speech as it applies to the written word.
His syndicated column for the New York Daily News frequently challenges prominent members of the African American community. Crouch has criticised, among others, author Alex Haley, the author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and The Saga of an American Family; community leader Al Sharpton; filmmaker Spike Lee, scholar Cornel West and playwright Amiri Baraka, as well as Tupac Shakur, in reference to whom he wrote "What dredged-up scum you are willing to pay for is what scum you get, on or off stage." Crouch's controversial work has won him critical acclaim from some quarters. [Citation Needed]
In 2005, he was selected as one of the inaugural fellows by the Fletcher Foundation, which awards annual fellowships to people working on issues of race and civil rights. The fellowship program is directed by Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. of Harvard University.
In the remastered version of Ken Burns' landmark PBS documentary series, The Civil War, issued on DVD in 2002, Crouch appears in the extra features section, making several penetrating and insightful comments on U.S. history and the Confederacy. His judgment of the military acumen of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, is particularly negative.
