Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Stanley Crouch challenged everything, and did it brilliantly. His acts of creation and destruction were purposeful and, more often than not, principled, from building up Jazz at Lincoln Center’s canon to knocking giants off pedestals in arts and culture. He hit and he missed. When he connected, he illuminated. Crouch was the epicenter of jazz criticism and combat at a time at the Village Voice, in the 1980s, when the village could have a distinct set of voices. But he also embodied something beyond his era—an independence of ideas, a fearless style of critique, and a pattern-matching memory that, long after an argument was done, kept you questioning. He lit into the “counterfeits” and the “charlatans” of the day, revering Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray while assailing Miles Davis as “the most brilliant sellout in the history of jazz” for having “turned his butt to the beautiful in order to genuflect before the commercial,” and “blurt[ing] a sound so decadent that it can no longer disguise the shriveling of its maker’s soul.”

Crouch was—until his death in September of an illness exacerbated by COVID-19—iconic. Your outrage never surprised him after each article. Beneath it, he wanted your engagement. His urge for combat, he told me, came from a need not to be read, but to be free—from the scriptures, orthodoxies, and assumptions of a society that would insist, always, that he live in lockstep with any group solely on the basis of race, class, or culture. Ellison praised him for it, while critics like Ishmael Reed weren’t having it, calling Crouch “a henchman for the establishment” long before Crouch co-founded Jazz at Lincoln Center and enshrined swing at its core, fencing it off in a battle between classicists and renegades.

I owe my first newspaper job to Crouch. He and Nat Hentoff helped me get hired at the Voice, a paper as insightful for their essays as for those of writers they feuded with, often on the same spread of pages. Crouch was fired after two assaults on co-workers. He split the lip of one in a fight over music and race. Some fights were public, others private, and it would be a dishonest sidestep to minimize, romanticize, or fall back on apologia for his assaults, as some writers still do. And some battles went national, including his fight with JazzTimes magazine editors over his accusations of racism in journalism.

JazzTimes infamously fired Crouch in 2003 after his blistering essay “Putting the White Man in Charge.” I first reported his firing in the Voice at Crouch’s request, siding with him, as I do now, against our mutual JazzTimes editors in a story that I think sheds light on one way to remember him.

In his essay, Crouch accused white critics of promoting white musicians “far beyond their abilities” to “make themselves feel more comfortable about evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.” He claimed that white critics have historically celebrated white musicians who can’t swing at the expense of Black musicians who can. Shortly after it, JazzTimes fired him:

Hi, Stanley—We’ve decided to end your column. You’ve made your point many times about what jazz is and who can play it, and we feel the column has now run its course. It’s time for us to move on. Thank you for your contributions to JazzTimes over the past year.

“He was also routinely late with copy,” JazzTimes editors told me. “His columns were becoming tedious, generally alternating between vitriolic rants and celebrations of his buddies.”

“Sure, I was late, but then I ceased to be late,” Crouch said. “How does my article constitute a ‘vitriolic rant’? Because I challenge ideas without holding your hand?”

The magazine’s president also emailed him: “Industry folks…felt you were ‘over the top’ in your editorials.”

Crouch was manifestly right: Editors have fired critics for too plainly and knowledgeably naming industry interests and disparities in journalism. “Saying that my friendship with [Wynton] Marsalis prevents me from writing a column critically is really a smokescreen for something else, which is that I stepped out of the proverbial box and JazzTimes didn’t like that.”

“‘Celebrating his buddies’? What does that mean?” Hentoff told me in agreement with Crouch. “Either you think Stanley has a singular voice and raises questions or you don’t. I think it is absolutely stupid to have done that. If JazzTimes is a magazine devoted to freedom of expression like the very music it represents, what are they thinking?”

Amiri Baraka agreed, siding with Crouch in rare solidarity against the “one enemy” greater than each other: left-of-center editors. “If editors can’t stand the stuff I’m saying because of my Marxist overtones, I didn’t think they were going to stand for Stanley’s straight-up ‘white people this’ and ‘white people that,’” Baraka told me. “As much as I disagree with Stanley, about everything, music is the one thing he knows something about, so I hope he does make a stink. The funny fucked-up thing is that Stanley’s a right-wing son of a bitch, but he’s got the right to say some of the backward shit other people are saying.”

“Stanley’s ridiculous. He’s totally unfounded,” DownBeat’s editor told me at the time. “It’s absurd to think there’s a white critical establishment.” (All editors at JazzTimes, DownBeat, and JazzIz that year were white.)

“Stanley’s thing about the white critical establishment? You’ve got to be kidding—of course there is one,” countered Mark Ruffin, a DownBeat contributor in Chicago. “There has never been a single full-time Black music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times or the Tribune, and I’ve been paying very close attention,” he said in 2003.

“It strikes me as curious that Stanley was let go following this article,” said Willard Jenkins, a JazzTimes contributor, “when he had written many things before that have deeply angered many in the African American community and was never taken to task. But now that he offends many in the white jazz establishment, he’s out.”

“There’s definitely a deeper story here,” agreed John Murph, another JazzTimes contributor, who told me, “Sometimes white editors do oppressive things they don’t know they’re doing…I share in [Stanley’s] frustrations.”

The archives agree: Dan Morgenstern, DownBeat’s editor-in-chief in the late ’60s, told me that DownBeat’s then-publisher, John Maher, “used to say he didn’t want too many Black people on the cover. I remember when we put Thad Jones on the cover, and [Maher] said, ‘Do we have to put him on there? He’s so dark.’”

In my search of archives at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago, I found that Paul Eduard Miller, a DownBeat editor in the 1920s through ’40s and Esquire’s jazz editor in the ’40s, compiled statistics on jazz coverage, available for study in his unpublished book. He found that Benny Goodman received 500 more article inches than Duke Ellington in the ’30s and that Gene Krupa took more than Louis Armstrong. Paul Whiteman received more than Fats Waller, Coleman Hawkins, and Count Basie, and in the following decade, Goodman got more than Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Max Roach combined.

“That’s totally ludicrous,” DownBeat’s then-editor told me in response to Crouch’s thesis. “Stanley is bringing us backwards. It’s an old-school way of thinking.”

This disagreement was nothing new in 2003. It had been roiling since the beginning of jazz. But it was hard to know if everyone saw the same elephant in the room or just heard talk of one. So JazzTimes even went to the trouble of trying to test for an elephant by commissioning Baraka to reexamine his 1961 essay “Jazz and the White Critic,” the music’s most acclaimed article on race relations.

But with telling irony, JazzTimes sat on his new essay, refusing to publish it, as I learned when JazzTimes’ then-publisher handed me a printout in his office, said he wouldn’t run it, and called Baraka’s prose “impenetrable.”

Baraka’s thesis is summed up—penetrably—in the lead of his new essay, a copy of which Baraka later gave me to publish excerpts of at the Voice while JazzTimes held it:

The fact that an oppressor nation could judge the creations of the people they oppress is not strange but is natural in the context of the relationship between ruler and ruled.

“I wrote ‘Jazz and the White Critic Revisited,’” Baraka told me, “and I asked [JazzTimes] what’s happening. They told me, ‘It doesn’t cover the things we want it to cover, it doesn’t say the things we want it to say.’”

“In Baraka’s case,” the magazine answered, “it was a combination of him turning in late copy and handing in pieces or reviews that didn’t fulfill the assignment.”

“But the point is this,” Baraka said. “If you can’t stand to hear different ideas, what business are you in?”

Baraka and Crouch were demonstrably right. JazzTimes silenced, at least in its pages, the most prominent (and only) critics willing to ask, precisely because they did ask, calling them “tedious” and “impenetrable” and in large measure validating their claims. By contrast, Crouch’s New York Daily News editor, Robert Laird, who’d edited him for a decade, told me Crouch was “always” open to edits: “I might debate subjects and points of view, but I’m concerned about the writing itself, if an idea is being clearly expressed, if he’s being consistent with what he’s written before. We’re not in the business of getting in the way of strong opinions.”

One point to parse is Laird’s last: Editors are in the business of getting in the way of strong opinions sometimes. But the best editors, like Laird and Robert Christgau—Crouch’s veterans—sharpen, not blunt, the strong opinions of critical columnists they disagree with. Firing Crouch from JazzTimes was asinine, short-sighted, and self-sabotaging. But there’s a greater lesson Crouch leaves us: Nothing about rejecting false neutrality in journalism requires publishing so narrowly, assigning so timidly, or making echo chambers so soundproof that publications protect readers from the very ideas they exist to learn from. At least in jazz.

Profound though he was, Crouch was also capable of meaningful and mundane cruelty. He outed the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor in a 1982 article, suggesting Taylor was incapable of swing because of his sexuality. Taylor later told me, with a look of slight amusement and seriousness, that “the name Stanley Crouch” was not to be spoken in his presence. Taylor didn’t respect him enough to begrudge, absolve, or need to forgive. “Do you think a three-letter word can cover the immensity of my personality?” Taylor told me. (Crouch wrote an essay 28 years later denouncing anti-gay bigotry of the kind he’d aimed at Taylor in the ’80s, though Crouch didn’t mention a connection. Whether his 2010 article was an effort to genuinely wrestle with his conscience, or settle a score with himself, for his ’80s writing is unclear. Crouch never told me. I never asked.)

When Crouch wasn’t swatting and obscuring, he was clarifying. “One thing Stanley does,” Ornette Coleman told me in 2005, “is he has an image of what existence is in relationship to creativity and intelligence that has to do with expression. He has devoted himself to finding out what stimulates those things that give him the right to exist. I respect everybody who analyzes something that has meaning.”

“Stanley Crouch, when he was at the Voice, was, I thought, the most challenging writer we have ever had,” Hentoff said.

“No critic, I believe, writing today, teaches us more about the subtleties and nuances of race in American culture than does Stanley Crouch,” Henry Louis Gates Jr. said.

At a memorial service for his colleague Martin Williams, in 1992, Crouch gave a eulogy for a writer who, like Crouch, was a towering jazz critic. To read it now is to hear words vivid enough, expansive enough, and enduring enough to evoke both writers at their best. Of his friend, Crouch said, “He was one who stood his ground against the Goliaths of contempt, of racism, of sloppiness, of disregard. He was dedicated and he was prickly, so knowing him could be inspirational one moment and similar to wrestling with a cactus at another.”

“Your intellectual progeny may be small,” Crouch said, “but then, so was the stone that felled Goliath. You understood the velocity of that stone and knew it was one of creation.”

Felling Goliath was a core method of Crouch’s career, but it wasn’t his organizing principle for life. Swing was, as music, metaphor, and a language for hearing the world, as well as his armor against its assumptions. When he wasn’t becoming Goliath himself—belittling and bullying—he was epic, historically informed, and profound. He wrote big, allegorical essays. They’re all worth reading.

That eulogy has another line that I think evokes Crouch as much as Williams, as well as Baraka, Hentoff, Taylor, and Coleman, each now gone: “For a music so given to individuality, it is perfect that he was here.”

Crouch’s papers are at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate