Stanley Croucha controversial and influential writer, columnist and self-taught Renaissance guy who’s in fiction and nonfiction was motivated by his expertise and love of jazz and blues and his urge to step over the line, died Wednesday (Sept. 16) in age 74.
His wife, Gloria Nixon-Crouch, told The Associated Press he died at a hospice in Nyc. He was in poor health recently later suffering a stroke. In a career dating back to the 1960s,” Crouch was a columnist for your Village Voice along with also the New York Daily News, a guest on NPR along with Charlie Rose’s show, also a jazz drummer, also a founder of what became marginal at Lincoln Center and mentor into Wynton Marsalis and several younger artists and writers, an aficionado of American and baseball folklore and scourge of Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Amira Baraka amongst others.
Away from the home, he could turn up everywhere — dining room with then-Vice President Al Gore, conversing musicians up in the Village Vanguard or creating a special look at a service to the National Board of Review awards, even when he admitted a trophy on behalf of Quentin Tarantino, who also valued Crouch’s compliments for Pulp Fiction.
He’s also a popular of movie maker Ken Burns, his comment emerging in Jazz along with The Civil War amongst other movies. Crouch’s job was a mix of high art and street conversation, the prose version of that which he believed that the deep flames of jazz. He saw his nation, his job and his life intertwined, progressing”through debate, through contradictionthrough reinterpretation,” grounded and awakened by a soul of”tragic desperation.” In his 2007 biography of Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightninghe gifts the wonderful saxophonist in his own early days rather than only a groundbreaking musician, however, a sort of exemplary citizen.
“The 21-year-old Parker was owned by his own songs — with a ravenous have to improvise, to find out new songs, to discover new methods of getting during the harmonies with substances that could liberate him out of cliches,” Crouch wrote. “Parker appeared to get a crying spirit, a soul as bothered by the character of life since it wa capable of nearly unlimited party” Crouch championed new thoughts, but had been deeply immersed before and in certain ways chosen it — scorning combination and other newer incarnations of jazz, to this point at which he and Marsalis were criticized for shaping Burns’ jazz movie, also differentiating with the word”Negro” over African American.
Even a deep-voiced, bulky guy who slapped the surface of a widow who’d panned his book Do not the Moon Look Lonesome, he had been equally strong whether rhapsodizing over Duke Ellington or even Charlie Parker, disparaging gangsta rap (”`Birth of a Nation’ using a backbeat”) or admiring Barack Obama (“a rhythm and blues man”). Artificial words in Crouch were savored if just for the ferocity, actually extremity, of the scorn. He telephoned Lee a”middle-class would-be road Negro” and Morrison a {} “evidenced with ideology,” turning out”bath corn liquor”
He also Baraka so loathed each other when New Yorker author Robert Boynton known as Baraka to get a narrative on Crouch at 1995the poet named Crouch”a backward, asinine man” and hung up on the telephone. ” Crouch includes a nearly insatiable appetite for controversy,” Boynton wrote. Crouch’s complaint was gathered into Notes of a Hanging Judge, The All-American Skin Game and additional novels. He was working on another Parker quantity, but couldn’t finish it due to his health.
His features included a Whiting Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize and also being called a Jazz Master in 2019 from the National Endowment for the Arts. He had been also a visiting professor at Columbia University and president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Crouch is survived by his wife, a daughter and granddaughter.
Asmathic as well as in poor health for a young kid, Crouch was elevated in Los Angeles by his mother and so are excited to find out about new worlds, even studying William Faulkner, Mark Twain and other canonical authors and teaching himself the way to drum. He had been also a civil rights activist from the 1960s that had been radicalized by the 1965 Watts riots but turned from Black nationalism. Crouch became the heir to the intellectual heritage of these fellow Black authors as Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, advocating the spontaneity and inclusiveness of jazz since the best attributes of”this quilt named America.”
At a 2011 Daily News pillar {} savored”those optimistic, good-time American minutes capable of surpassing one-dimensional materialism.” “This is the heart of jazz in all of its fashions and is the ongoing character of Americana when dwelt with the potent energy,” he wrote,”the shirt and the base mixed to a smooth liquidity of several tastes, all known for its light of the deeply human resources.”
