Tribute to Stanley Crouch
David Shasha
Stanley Crouch, American Democracy, and Racial Angst
It is hard to explain exactly how I felt when I saw on the New York Daily News website that the curmudgeon Stanley Crouch had died.
I have been reading his polemical articles on African-American culture for years, though I must say that when I was a teenager, I did not know anything about Jazz and sort of skipped his Village Voice work.
Would that I knew then what I know now!
My intense study of the music over the years has led me to better understand the situation of African-American culture and the vast complexity of its human insight and elegant mien.
The New York Times obituary and a 1995 profile from The Baltimore Sun emphasize Crouch’s prickly character and his confused place in the Neo-Con ideological world.
But I thought it important to make special note of him because of his abiding connection to the important work of Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and Wynton Marsalis.
I have included his notes to Marsalis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning epic “Blood on the Fields” in this tribute, as it reflects the best of Crouch’s vision; an expansive view of American Democracy that is an affirmation of racial integration in the context of the seminal African-American contribution(s) to our culture.
While many will likely focus on the arch polemicist name-caller, my suggestion would be to return to BOTF, and to the seminal literary works of Murray and Ellison, particularly their non-fiction.
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Fields-Wynton-Marsalis/dp/B0000029GF
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_on_the_Fields
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Essays-Ralph-Ellison-Classics/dp/0812968263
https://www.amazon.com/Albert-Murray-Collected-Omni-Americans-Stomping/dp/159853503X
In addition, there is Harold Cruse’s influential book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which has an introduction by Crouch:
https://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Negro-Intellectual-Historical-Leadership/dp/1590171357
You can read the complete introduction on the Amazon site.
Crouch was attacking Black Separatism many years before Ta-Nehisi Coates was cashing Ike Perlmutter’s “Black Panther” checks.
The Baltimore Sun article contains a troubling statement of praise from Cynthia Ozick, which makes things that much more complicated, as we continue to try and figure out what American civilization is, and where oppression fits into the larger scheme of things.
Crouch’s life and career presents us with the many complexities and complications of the Race issue and how ideology and partisan politics can subvert the values of Democracy.
It is not that Crouch stood aside when it came to that twisted political situation, but that at his best he was able to provide an explanation for what America was and how it so deeply reflected the universal human condition. While I often disagreed with his more reactionary assessments of people and trends, his voice remains valuable for those of us who continue to value cultural excellence and demand its rightful place in our society.
Given the bitterly conflicted nature of our society at the present moment, it is hard to know what Crouch’s legacy will be, and who will ally themselves to his anger and frustration over the Poptrash Idiocracy.
But we should very much pay attention to his learned discussions of Jazz and African-American literature, as those cultural movements represent crucial interventions against White Supremacy, pointing to a more hopeful future for those of us still willing to fight for this country and its promise of Freedom.
David Shasha
Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74
By: Sam Roberts
Stanley Crouch, the fiercely iconoclastic social critic who elevated the invention of jazz into a metaphor for the indelible contributions that Black people have made to American democracy, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx. He was 74.
His wife, Gloria Nixon Crouch, said the cause was complications of a long, unspecified illness.
Mr. Crouch defied easy categorization. A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.
All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.
Mr. Crouch proclaimed himself a “radical pragmatist,” defining it this way:
“I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race."
Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.
(Mr. Crouch disdained the expression African-American, saying: “I use Negro, black American, Afro-American. And I might throw brown American in eventually. I don’t use African-American because I have friends who are from Africa. But I do use Afro-American, because that means it’s derived but it’s not direct.”)
Mr. Crouch said he had largely taught himself to write by devouring books as a child and then drawing on an innate lyrical sensibility, which he expressed in poetry as well as in prose. He wrote of the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie:
“He rose from the position of an odd fish to a star surfer riding the high, high curving water of a trend, sank into the position of those miracles taken for granted, but periodically returned to view, dripping with new wisdoms, beckoning as others followed him on the thin boards of art and entertainment that those who make their name in jazz must ride, atop the roller coaster waves of public taste, swinging all our blues in a fickle brine where they are forever at peril.”
Mr. Crouch attended, though never graduated from, two community colleges, but his stature as a writer led to teaching positions at Pomona, Pitzer and Claremont Colleges, all of them in Claremont, Calif., east of Los Angeles, where he was known as a charismatic poet and teacher of English and theater in the late 1960s and early ’70s. (At Pomona, one of his students was George C. Wolfe, who became artistic director of the Public Theater in New York.)
At Claremont, he established Black Music Infinity, a band made up of young musicians from the area, all of whom went on to become noted avant-garde figures, among them the saxophonists David Murray and Arthur Blythe and the bassist Mark Dresser.
After transplanting himself to New York in 1975, Mr. Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.
“The two best things that have ever happened to me were being fired by The Voice and being hired by The Voice, in that order,” he told The New Yorker.
As a syndicated columnist he was long based at The Daily News in New York.
His anthologies included “Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989” (1990); “The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994” (1995); “Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995-1997” (1998); and “Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz” (2006).
He turned to fiction in 2000, with “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing,” and to biography in 2003, with “Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker.”
Mr. Crouch was a senior creative consultant for Ken Burns’s 10-part documentary series “Jazz,” broadcast in 2001. He received a Whiting Foundation Award for nonfiction in 1991 and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1993 for his work in musicology and ethnomusicology. In 2019 he was named a Jazz Master for jazz advocacy by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Stanley Lawrence Crouch was born on Dec. 14, 1945, in the South Central section of Los Angeles to James and Emma Bea (Ford) Crouch. His father was a heroin addict and hustler who was in jail when Stanley was born and didn’t meet his son until Stanley was 12. His mother was a housemaid who raised Stanley, his older sister, who became an accountant, and their younger brother, who died in 1980 of complications of gunshot wounds.
Mr. Crouch said his mother had been instrumental in his development as a writer, teaching him the alphabet and spelling before he enrolled in school, and introducing him to jazz. (She and her schoolmates had once greeted Duke Ellington at the Los Angeles railroad station.)
Frequently confined to his home with asthma, Stanley read voraciously, started a jazz club in high school and joined a local repertory theater called Studio Watts. He taught himself to play the drums freestyle, in sharp contrast to the jazz purist he later became (at one point famously lambasting Miles Davis for playing electric jazz-rock fusion).
“Since I was doing this avant-garde stuff, I didn’t have to be all that good, but I was a real knucklehead,” Mr. Crouch told The New Yorker. “If I hadn’t been so arrogant and had just spent a couple of years on rudiments, I’d have taken it over, man, no doubt about it.”
He was appointed poet-in-residence at Pitzer College, became the first full-time faculty member of the Claremont Colleges Black Studies Center, and joined the English department at Pomona when he was 22. Within five years he published a poetry collection, “Ain’t No Ambulances for No Nigguhs Tonight” (1972), taking the title from a remark reportedly made during the Watts riots.
After he and his first wife, a former Pomona student, moved to New York, they separated, and she returned to California with their daughter, Dawneen, who goes by Gaia. He married Gloria Nixon, a sculptor, in 1994. They lived in the West Village in Manhattan until recently, when they moved to Brooklyn.
In addition to his wife and his daughter, Gaia Scott-Crouch, he is survived by a granddaughter.
Mr. Crouch met Mr. Marsalis when the trumpeter was a teenager studying at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. He went on to write liner notes for Mr. Marsalis’s albums and become his primary artistic consultant in generating a neo-classicist movement in jazz and helping to establish Jazz at Lincoln Center.
“All young jazz musicians coming up today realize that they have to know blues and swing — which are at the core of all jazz, from Armstrong to Marsalis — and this simply wasn’t the case 15 years ago,” Peter Watrous, a former jazz critic for The New York Times, said. “Wynton and Stanley are responsible for that. Therein lies the whole story of the jazz renaissance.”
His writings on race often ran against the grain of liberal orthodoxies. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Deirdre English, a former editor of Mother Jones magazine, said that in the anthology “Notes of a Hanging Judge” Mr. Crouch “sets himself apart from and above the tides of current opinion, sternly hammering a gavel of righteousness — or sometimes only righteous indignation.”
She cited his “refusal to accept the notion that victimization and degradation are the defining motifs of African-American history,” which means ”abandoning any notion of African innocence or superiority” and denying “that white racism ever had the power to reduce the black race to a traumatized martyrdom.”
In exhorting Black people to shoulder responsibility and debate reasonably, she wrote, Mr. Crouch “comes off less like a hanging judge than a knowing and anxious father figure.”
He could be equally critical of his white counterparts. In 2003, he was dismissed by JazzTimes after publishing a column under the title “Putting the White Man in Charge,” in which he argued that white music critics were overly eager to promote jazz musicians of their own race, thus allowing themselves “to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.”
Mr. Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking.
“These people were on a mission,” he said of his teachers. “They had a perfect philosophy: You will learn this. If you came in there and said, ‘I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single-parent household,’ they would say, ‘Boy, I’m going to ask you again, What is 8 times 8?’
“When I was coming up,” he continued, “there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family. Eight times eight was going to be 64 whether your family was dysfunctional or not. It’s something you needed to know!”
Mr. Crouch ultimately wove together his celebration of jazz and his vision of American democracy. Jazz, he wrote, is “the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance.”
He added: “The demands on and the respect for the individual in the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action. The success of jazz is a victory for democracy, and a symbol of the aesthetic dignity, which is finally spiritual, that performers can achieve and express as they go about inventing music and meeting the challenge of the moment.”
Giovanni Russonello and Julia Carmel contributed reporting.
From The New York Times, September 16, 2020
Stanley Crouch: Visible Man Outspoken
By: Alice Steinbach
NEW YORK -- Stanley Crouch, as always, is running late. "Come back in 30 minutes," he booms out over the intercom from his third-floor Greenwich Village apartment. His disembodied voice is deep and musical, evoking visions of James Earl Jones delivering a sultry Barry White song, one that might be titled, given Mr. Crouch's passion for jazz and blues, something like: "I've Got the Come Back in 30 Minutes Blues."
Thirty minutes later, as promised, the body that goes with the voice appears at the doorway to his apartment. It matches perfectly the voice. He is a big man. Overweight, actually. But 50-year-old Stanley Crouch, impeccably dressed, carries the extra bulk gracefully. He looks like a man who's fast on his feet, a talent that's probably served him well over the years. He also looks powerful; the kind of guy you wouldn't want to take a swing at you, particularly given his reputation for engaging in, shall we say, physical contact.
But it is Stanley Crouch's written punches -- the ones he refuses to pull, no matter whom he's taking on -- that attract the most attention.
For more than two decades, Mr. Crouch, a bona fide intellectual and perhaps the best jazz critic in America, also has been turning out essays and columns that reflect his irreverent and controversial views on race and culture in American society.
To get an idea of just how controversial -- some say outrageous -- his views are, here's an introduction to the World According to Stanley Crouch:
On Louis Farrakhan and his Million Man March speech: "A cult lunatic who we'd be done with if he'd spent 15 more minutes talking on numerology."
On former NAACP director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.: "He's a con man and a fraud, a sleazy guy. And the fact that's he's hooked himself up with Louis Farrakhan means he's an absolute opportunist and, above all else, a totalitarian."
On Afrocentrism: "A hustle. Lately I've come to believe these people are ashamed of slavery, fundamentally. And so they want some fantasy past that they can point to and say, 'We weren't always like this.' But no group of people more perfectly proves out the Democratic ideal than Negro Americans. What they had done by 1900, after being off the plantation for only 35 years, that's unequaled. So to be concerned about Africa is a joke to me."
On novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison: "I wish she was a great writer. She's not. That's because her work has been perforated by ideology so that it doesn't hold water. She's a writer producing bottles of bathtub corn liquor."
On gangsta rap: "The basic problem is that it celebrates a barbaric, anti-social, ruthless way of living and tries to pretend that it's just reporting from the streets."
On filmmaker Spike Lee: "A middle-class would-be street Negro."
On his use of the word Negro and refusal to say African-American: "I use Negro, black American, Afro-American. And I might throw brown American in eventually. I don't use African-American because I have friends who are from Africa. But I do use Afro-American because that means it's derived but it's not direct."
Stanley Crouch, it seems fair to say, takes no prisoners in his critical skirmishes with the culture as he sees it.
All of the above opinions are delivered in Mr. Crouch's unique conversational style, one that draws heavily on two things: the jazz-like technique of free association where one improvisation leads to another; and the deployment of the vast reserves of knowledge, both wide-ranging and deep, he has stored in his intellectual arsenal. It is a method of conversing that involves taking many detours from the main thought and, consequently, many hours to complete; a style that ultimately leaves the listener, but not the speaker, in a state of exhaustion.
A typical Crouchian answer to a question might begin with a quote from Ralph Ellison, then detour to Found Art, John Ford's westerns, Faulkner, the Bible, James Joyce's "Ulysses" and, almost always, some reference to jazz or the blues.
His style of writing is similar to his style of speaking: It, too, draws on his diverse background as poet, playwright, actor, professor, jazz drummer and, not least of all, as the son of Emma Bea Crouch, who worked six days a week cleaning houses in Los Angeles to support her family.
It was his mother who taught young Stanley to read and spell before his first day of school. He was 12 when he first met his father -- a drug-addicted criminal who was in and out of prison when his son was growing up. But Emma Bea proved more than the equivalent of mother and father. She was also a teacher to her children and instilled in her son the idea that a man should think his own thoughts, free and clear of whatever anybody else was thinking.
"Perhaps her most important instruction was that I should always go in my own direction and make sure I never jumped off a cliff just because everybody else did," he writes in the introduction to a recently published collection of his essays, "The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race." The book follows his 'D award-winning 1990 essay collection, "Notes of a Hanging Judge," a title that is a clue to how Stanley Crouch sees his role as a cultural critic.
His mother's advice seems to have worked well. Her son is in demand as a guest on radio and television talk shows, and his opinion writing has earned him regular columns in the New Republic and the New York Daily News as well as a $296,000 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant. It has also earned him a reputation as -- depending on where you stand on the complex issues of race and class in America -- either an independent thinker who shuns ideology of any kind or a neoconservative, retro-assimilationist Uncle Tom.
In other words, some people like what Stanley Crouch is saying, and some people hate it. Few, however, are indifferent.
Co-conspirators
"I admire Stanley and his work very much," says Shelby Steele, author of the controversial 1990 collection of essays "The Content of Our Character." Both he and Mr. Crouch put forth the argument that black Americans have acted as co-conspirators in creating some of their own problems.
"Stanley has this combination of bravery and irreverence that is essential in a cultural critic," Mr. Steele says. "And he should get credit for that. Because there just isn't anyone else working today who takes on icons directly the way Stanley does. But people make the mistake when reading Stanley of thinking, 'Oh, I have to agree 100 percent with him.' That's not the point. The point of a cultural critic is to challenge. And Stanley does that."
More outraged than challenged by Stanley Crouch's views is Ronald Walters, who heads the political science department at Howard University. Calling Mr. Crouch's views "identical to a number of orthodox black conservatives like Shelby Steele, Tom Sowell and Walter Williams," Mr. Walters says the constituency for such ideas in the black community is "very, very small."
The real constituency for such ideas, he says, comes from the media, which gives such extraordinary attention to those expressing these views.
"People like Stanley Crouch really are the mouthpiece for the majority of whites' attitude about race," Mr. Walters says. "The views about race in the white community have become quite conservative. And it is far more efficient to have a black person out there saying those things than having a white person saying them."
Stanley Crouch scoffs at such a suggestion. "What I am," he says, "is a radical pragmatist."
He defines that phrase in the introduction to his new book, writing: "I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of resonating across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race."
Race, he argues, "is the big decoy in society. Because it causes us to assume that we know things that we don't know. What somebody thinks. What they know. How they would act under certain circumstances. What their politics may or may not be. What their artistic tastes are. What kind of food they like.
"Now, all white Southerners have suffered what I once wanted to call 'the burden of the accent.' That's when some white Northerner heard the accent and thought, 'Oh, I know what you are and I know what you think.' So we can't assume we know who somebody is when we go by all these little surface things. Because all these things are based on using the category to give us an easy answer."
And easy answers, his admirers say, are not what interest or engage the mind of Stanley Crouch.
"I know if I talk to Stanley I'm going to get a mind that's seriously trying to understand whatever cultural phenomenon is placing itself in front of him," says Charles Johnson, a prize-winning novelist and Mr. Crouch's longtime friend. "I'm not going to get a cliche, and I'm not going to get somebody else's perceived idea. Stanley has an intellectual independence. And I think that's crucial."
Crime and punishment
Stanley Crouch is sitting in his office -- or as he calls it, the "war room" -- talking about the effect of crime on poor, black communities. A jovial man who's easy to talk to, he is swiveling back and forth in a desk chair that he has placed directly in front of a blowing floor fan, which, in turn, is placed in front of an open window. From time to time he stops to take a swig of bottled water and occasionally, in a move reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, mops his brow with a large, white handkerchief.
And speaking of Louis Armstrong, here's a quote from that great musician, sung and delivered by the very musical Stanley Crouch. "Bop bi da, dop did da, dop di bop a do di di di bop bi bop bi bop bi da." Pause. "That's Louis Armstrong on George Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So.' "
From there it's directly on to the subject of crime in the poorer black communities. "The lower-class black community is overwhelmingly oppressed by street crime -- engendered by the drug trade, primarily, " he says. "And when you have that kind of rampant crime what happens is you get a crippling of the spirit and the reduction of individual liberty. If you're 60 years old and you have insomnia, you ought to be able to get up and walk outside of your house."
Which brings up the matter of crime and punishment, a subject that sets into motion a long Crouchian rap about the difficulties of getting street criminals to give up their lifestyles:
"Rehabilitation is an interesting idea, but I actually believe there is something better than rehabilitation. And that's total intimidation. Harsh means. See, people like having people being afraid of them. That's hard to give up. People don't give it up easily. If it were left to me, you'd have a very different crime problem in five years."
He swivels and swigs and something in his eyes tells you to fasten your seat belt before he goes on with his idea of how to treat criminals.
"See, I don't believe in prisons. First thing is, they cost too much money. No, my stuff is Spartan. POW-style camps, barracks, dogs, hard labor every day. And, when possible, assigned to do that hard labor in the community out of which the criminal comes -- so that when the kid who saw this guy with a bunch of dripping gold chains and diamond rings a few months ago when he was selling crack and was impressed by him, now that kid sees him out there from morning to night cleaning up behind horses and cleaning out lots covered with weeds and broken bottles and dog crap. See, that would, as they say today, send a message. I really believe you can achieve civilized behavior in either of two ways: by intimidation or by self-interest."
He pauses. Swig, swig. Mop, mop. Then he continues:
"But at the same time there's another thing we need in this society. And that is we need to seriously prosecute so-called white-collar crime. Because the cynicism that arrives in the lower class and in the middle class -- across race -- when somebody like Michael Milken can be convicted, get what is essentially a slap on the wrist and leave jail a billionaire, now, that's deep.
"There should be some kind of law where, if you get caught in that, we're just going to take everything. I mean, like that law where they were trying to confiscate everything that drug dealers have."
A knock on the door interrupts his thoughts. It's a neighbor from an upstairs apartment who's stopped by to deliver some mail. And, more to the point, to offer his opinion about the recent New Yorker profile of Stanley Crouch, one that included some rather strong statements, both pro and con, about the man and his work. The ensuing soliloquy delivered by Mr. Crouch's neighbor has all the elements of a New Yorker cartoon:
Upstairs neighbor to Stanley Crouch: "I rather liked the New Yorker profile. Some people were telling me they really tore you to shreds, but I don't think so. We know there are people out there who don't like you."
Ouch!
Such an assessment seems not to bother Stanley Crouch. He is known, of course, for his indifference to criticism. In fact, some say he goes out of his way to get attention of any kind. "A virtually insatiable appetite for controversy; he is happy only in the heat of a battle," is the way the New Yorker puts it.
And speaking of battles, stories of Stanley Crouch's physical engagements have taken on a mythic quality. Indeed, hardly an article goes by that doesn't describe his "brawls" over some point or another.
Several years ago he was fired from his critic's job at the Village Voice when an argument over, among other things, rap music -- which he despises -- ended with Mr. Crouch punching out another Voice critic.
"I have heard about the Village Voice incident and others as well," says Charles Johnson. "But Stanley's an old knife-fighter. If he believes something is true, he will fight to the death. We don't see that often. Many of our intellectuals tend to be timorous or just go along with a trend. That's not Stanley."
But there's a side to Stanley Crouch that many would find quite surprising, says his old friend Tom Piazza, a New Orleans-based fiction writer.
"I think people don't realize that criticisms maybe hurt him more than they like to think. He gives the impression of being an intellectual brawler -- which he is -- but that's because he cares very deeply about ideas and the culture. I've seen Stanley with his wife, his daughter, with his friends. I think people who only know the public battler side of him would be surprised at what a tender character he actually is."
Gloria Nixon-Crouch, a talented sculptor, married Stanley Crouch last New Year's Eve. His first marriage ended many years ago, and his daughter from that marriage, Dawneen, is now a college student in California. Ms. Nixon-Crouch met her husband-to-be at a party in Harlem about three years ago. She still remembers quite vividly her first impressions of him.
"I thought he was charming, absolutely charming. Of course, he was on his very best behavior," she says, laughing. "I thought he was very smart, very sweet, very attentive. All the things I respond to." She says she "more or less shares his view of the world and the culture."
As for living with him, well, it seems he's difficult sometimes. She laughs again. "I guess it's being as smart as he is. He's operating on levels and planes that I have yet to catch up with. Most of the time he's very, very sweet. There are other times when he can be a little difficult."
Difficulties
Of course, his wife may be the only person in America who would use the phrase "a little difficult" to describe Stanley Crouch. Provocateur, abrasive, polarizing, over-the-top; these are some of the words that often follow a mention of Stanley Crouch's name. Derrick Bell, a visiting professor at the New York University School of Law, knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of the Crouchian attack, and "difficult" is not how he describes Mr. Crouch.
In an essay titled "Dumb Bell Blues," Mr. Crouch takes aim at Professor Bell, who five years ago left Harvard Law School because there was no tenured black female on the faculty. Writes Mr. Crouch: "Bell's reputation has been built upon squawking about the supposed inevitability of racism. According him, black Americans will never get a fair chance because the racist tattoo on the white sensibility is irremovable."
Derrick Bell's response? "I'm shocked at some of Mr. Crouch's views on race and the causes of racism. He feels that if people aren't making it, people haven't worked hard enough, and it's their own fault. While you expect some whites to say that, it is unnerving when you hear that from blacks.
"I think that the frequent presence on radio and TV talk shows of black people like Mr. Crouch who hold these views reflects a very strong need in white society -- the need for blacks who are willing in one way or another to say: 'White folks, be comforted. It's not your fault.' My views on race are far more accusatory than comforting for the society."
One well-known white person who is a Stanley Crouch fan -- the respected writer Cynthia Ozick -- offers her response to Derrick Bell's view. "As a white person I don't think Stanley makes white people comfortable. But I'm also Jewish, and as a Jew I'm very, very glad for an African-American who makes me feel comfortable.
"But my admiration for Stanley is not based on black, white, Jew. It is the admiration for someone who thinks like a human being. He understands connection. That's what he stands for."
Inseparable agendas
What lies at the core of Stanley Crouch's way of looking at race and culture is this: a belief that the black agenda must be viewed as inseparable from the American agenda.
"That's the basic thing I'm trying to get at," he says. "See, we do know there is an Afro-American culture which is impossible without American culture. And American culture, as we understand it, is impossible without the Negro-American component."
He didn't always think this way, however. He came of age during the civil rights movement and was caught up in the black nationalist movement after the Watts riots of 1965.
It was during this period, he says now, that black Americans began to separate their agenda from that of white Americans. "I think that beginning with the black power movement, there was a shift in the discussion. And the shift was away from identification with the culture at large and the ideals of the culture at large to focus, instead, primarily on one's own group."
By 1970, however, Stanley Crouch had largely separated himself from black nationalism. Instead he found himself increasingly drawn to the thinking of Albert Murray and the late Ralph Ellison, two revered black writers whose fiction and nonfiction advanced a pluralistic vision of America as opposed to one of cultural separation.
He credits his ensuing friendship with the two older men as the shaping influence in his life; particularly Albert Murray, about whom he writes, "I have known Albert Murray for about twenty-five years and maintain an independent study with him that has had the largest single impact on my development. This great man is my mentor and far more my father than the fellow whose blood runs in my veins."
Stanley Crouch was 25 years old when he first met Albert Murray, then in his early 50s. Mr. Murray, now 79, recalls his first meeting and first impressions of Stanley this way:
"Well, he was brought up to see me by Larry Neal, the poet. If somebody impressed Larry very much, he would think they should meet me. When I look back at it, he only found two people he thought would impress me. One was Stanley Crouch and the other was Charles Fuller, who wrote 'A Soldier's Story.' I figured since Larry edited people that carefully, you had to pay attention when he brought somebody by.
"I thought Stanley was very, very smart and that he had a genuine interest in serious writing. The way I remember it, we never talked about black power but I had some awareness he was involved with that sort of thing. I thought he was too smart to be wasted on that kind of stuff. He always approached me as a literary person. We talked about books and what he was reading. He got a new insight on how to read Hemingway, Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Malraux. You don't hear any other Negro writer citing Mann, which Stanley does a lot."
Mr. Murray is well aware of the father-son aspect of his relationship with Stanley Crouch, including the kind of emotional hide-and-seek that sons often play with fathers.
"Part of being a father figure to him," Mr. Murray says, "means he kept a number of things from me, things that he would keep from a father. When he had that altercation at the Village Voice, it was probably six weeks or two months before I heard about it. After he got fired I would call him down there, and they would never tell me that he was fired -- they'd just say, 'He's not in.' "
They remain close, Mr. Murray says, and an interesting development has taken place. "Now Stanley's become like Larry Neal. If he meets someone he likes and thinks is smart, he'll want to bring them to me to see how impressed I will be with them."
One of the people brought around by Mr. Crouch was his close friend, musician Wynton Marsalis. Soon, Albert Murray had another protege.
Or as Albert Murray puts it: "If Stanley is my self-elected son, then Wynton is my self-elected grandson."
As for Ralph Ellison, author of "Invisible Man," a true American classic -- well, ask not what Stanley Crouch thinks of Ellison but what Ellison thought of Stanley Crouch: "He makes the most of his Americanness," Ellison told the New York Times shortly before he died in 1994. "He's irreverent. He questions the views of both liberals and conservatives and that's what critics should do."
Which is what Stanley Crouch, a very visible man, is doing right now. In the fifth hour of an interview, swiveling back and forth in his chair, eating soup from a plastic bowl, he's thinking. Still. Which leads to an observation: In the end, what Stanley Crouch seems to like best is not so much talking or writing but thinking.
It's what he's about: thinking.
Finally, the Thinker speaks: "See, one of the things I think is that as long as white people are so paternalistic about Negroes that they treat them like children -- spoiled children -- and let them do things they wouldn't let them do if they were white, then we may have a deepening of some of our problems.
"For instance, I was teaching at one campus and they said, 'Well, what do you think we ought [to] do with the problem of black students who want self-segregation and this and that, blah, blah, blah.' And I said, 'Look, the easiest way to do it is to pretend everybody's white. If you pretend everybody's white, then you treat everybody equally. So if you see somebody doing something dumb, then all you have to do is ask yourself, 'If the white kids were doing this, what would I do?'
"That is, no white kids could start a student organization in which only white kids could join. That could not be done. No white kids could have a table they could declare only white kids could sit at. No white kids could have a dormitory that only white kids could live in. Nobody would accept that."
Swig, Swig. Mop, mop. Stanley Crouch is off and running again.
From The Baltimore Sun, December 31, 1995
Program Notes to “Blood on the Fields”
By: Stanley Crouch
http://wyntonmarsalis.org/discography/title/blood-on-the-fields
WHOSE BLOOD, WHOSE FIELDS?
Sometimes it happens. A great thing rises before us and we all seem to know what it means at exactly the same time. This took place on the stage of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York City, a town where people work at not being impressed. Blood On The Fields. Uh oh. Something serious. The title tells you that. Something serious. Better get ready. Strap yourself in. The rhythm and tune of this ride might be rough. But it might also be beautiful.
Because of the historical importance of the premiere of Blood On The Fields, these liner notes contain an adaptation of the original program notes and the comments that Wynton Marsalis made on his bog work and its meaning. Nothing quite like it had ever been written, either by a jazz musician or one from another discipline. It was fitting that the opening was on April Fool’s Day, 1994, because Marsalis went beyond all that even those who most admired his writing expected of him. He reached a level of expression arrived at by only the very great artists, but the composer had achieved his new position through absolute contact with the mud and swamp water of the earth. At every turn, no matter how abstractly he might have handled his themes,, his rhythms, and his orchestration, there was always something inside the writing that was very old and very profound, something that drew upon the vitality of the Negro spirituals and the blues, those musics of spiritual concern in religious and secular contexts.
Blood On The Fields was sold out both of its two nights, with many standing outside the hall hoping they might convince others who had seats to sell one or two of their tickets. One would have thought money was being given away inside, so frantic were some of those trying to get in for a seat, for standing room only, for anything. That excitement put another layer of heat into the incipient spring night. The audience reflected the ethnic variety of Manhattan as well as the universal appeal of the music. As George Kanzler of the Newark Star Ledger reported, “It was one of those rare concerts where you knew something magnificent, even history-making, was taking place. At intermission, the audience was buzzing with excitement and by concert’s end there was a palpable feeling of awe, of being almost overwhelmed by the sheer power of the music.”
The epic length of the piece, nearly three hours, put it in a category beyond all other jazz composition. Where many had fumbled before him, either out of a lack of compositional skill or a tendency to pretension, Marsalis was showing how well all of the elements of jazz and its antecedents could work together. Marsalis used a jazz orchestra comprised of young musicians whom he had known almost since they began playing, musicians who were once no more than novices showing up at clinics or backstage following performances. They rehearsed long past frustration and technical obstacles, leaving one rehearsal daunted, another more confident. There was much nervousness before the band came out to let the audience judge. The ensemble executed an extremely demanding score with valor and precision. Marsalis also utilized the marvelous singing styles of Jon Hendricks, Cassandra Wilson, and Miles Griffith, each a representative of a specific era in jazz singing and jazz knowing. Hendricks, Wilson, and Griffith reached levels of swing, tragedy, stoic lyricism, and anger that were much deeper than what one is accustomed to in our time.
At 32, Marsalis was doing his own turn on the use of many different styles that was the central technique Duke Ellington brought to such high order for his 1943 historical masterpiece, Black, Brown, And Beige. But when Ellington was 32 in 1931, neither he nor anyone else had written a work this ambitious. It wasn’t possible. Marsalis, arriving in our culture when he did, was able to draw on everything that came before Ellington and all that came in his wake. The result was that Marsalis, who had been in pitched battle with the critical establishment, won the writers over just as he did the audiences that stood shouting and clapping when the piece ended. The New York Times reported, “Wynton Marsalis’s skills have grown as fast as his ambitions and he is the most ambitious younger composer in jazz … his music holds on to jazz fundamentals–blues and ballads, swing and Afro-Caribbean rhythms, call-and-response–while abstracting them into fast-mutating collages. With Blood On The Fields, he also proves he can write melodies that sound natural for singers … Mr. Marsalis’s ensembles bristle with polytonality, dissonance and jagged, jumpy lines and countermelodies, but the rhythm section pushes them along as if they were dance music … He comes up with elaborate structures and musicianly abstractions, but he also encourages old-fashioned jazz pleasures: snappy riffs, strutting syncopations, repartee between sections, competitive solos and the bedrock of the blues.”
Blood On The Fields was the sort of conquest across the board that signals fresh possibilities in American art because, in a time of so much disorder, so many cliches, and such cynicism, the listener is enobled by the experience of the music.
WHO AIN’T A SLAVE?
The evolution of Wynton Marsalis as a composer is one of the forces that defines the quality of our American art. His body of work now stands above that of all but the most important writers of jazz music. Marsalis has taken on such a large position in the writing of jazz music because he is in possession of a very rich talent and has no difficulty perceiving what kind of a Western music jazz is. He understands how it combines European harmony and African-derived ideas about percussion, drawing its primary melodic sources from the uniquely American line of the blues on one hand and Negro spirituals on the other. He is also aware of the impact that jazz, blues, and spirituals had on the music of Tin Pan Alley and the impact Tin Pan Alley had on jazz.
One of the reasons Marsalis is so clear on the elements that give his art its identity is that he has not only worked with jazz masters of every style but has had wide and successful experience in European concert music, performing everything from Bach to the avant garde of the twentieth century (the work of composers such as Stravinsky, Bartok, Stockhausen, Zwillich, and Ralph Shapey). That rich background has given Marsalis a strong and thorough grounding, not a superficial perception of what constitutes modern music. This technical education has allows Marsalis to grow ever stronger over the last fifteen years. The consistent growth of his mastery has been documented on nearly twenty albums, each addressing the basics of jazz with compositional variety and adventure. Over and over, one hears how clearly he has brought his own voice to the fundamentals that have given commonality to the highly individual work of the finest jazz musicians–4/4 swing (fast, medium, and slow), the blues, ballads, and Afro-Hispanic rhythms (what Jelly Roll Morton heard as an essential “Spanish tinge”).
In Blue Interlude, he went beyond even the best jazz writers of the fifties and the sixties to create a form for a small group that lasted nearly forty minutes but maintained cohesion through thematic and harmonic control. In Citi Movement, his ballet score for Garth Fagan, he wrote a three-movement symphony for seven pieces, a two-hour work that had no precedent. In This House/On This Morning was commissioned by Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1992 and found Marsalis working within a structure based on the Afro-American church service, exceeding in quality and complexity previous jazz pieces that built their foundations on the music of the Negro church. In This House was a whole work, not a group of pieces that had no formal relationship to each other. For a collaboration with the New York City Ballet, Marsalis wrote Jazz (Six Syncopated Movements). It used riotous dissonance, marches, railroad train onomatopoeia, ballroom lines, and ragtime to give another form to the composer’s epic understanding of American life and history.
Tonight, we will hear Marsalis’s first extended composition for large jazz band. He calls it Blood On The Fields and explains that American slavery is its subject. Slavery was the buzzard pecking at the liver of the Constitution, and its shadow, like a dark virus, infected everything it touched. It made America schizoid, touched off increasingly hostile debate, challenged the Christian underpinnings of universal humanism, inspired the abolition movement, and made visceral every national shortcoming. That is why Marsalis is convinced that much of our identity as Americans is the result of what slavery meant to our country–its social contract, its laws, its politics, its literature, its military history, its theater, its film. The issues surrounding slavery led to the Civil War, to Reconstruction, and the ninety-year-long struggle to take the Constitution south, resulting in the Civil Rights Movement, our second Civil War.
But the subject of American slavery is much more than a tale of racial degradation. To leave it there is to trivialize what it meant and should mean. No, American slavery isn’t the rhetorical football that sentimentalists, hysterics, and demagogues so easily kick around. It was a long, tragic condition that continues to loom larger than almost all that has been said about it by those other than slaves themselves. As a genuine tragedy, slavery is a prismatic metaphor through which we can see beyond color by seeing all colors. American issues of labor, of gender, of the exploitation of children, and, finally, of human rights within this society are traceable back to that phenomenon, for it defined every inadequacy that was allowed to exist within the United States. The “peculiar institution” raised high the central issue facing civilization under capitalism, which is bringing together morality and the profit motive. Slavery also found in its opponents a deeper understanding of the meaning of democracy and inspired actions that helped define the ethical grandeur of courage within our culture. It is, therefore, a metaphor for every question of unfairness and every question of servitude. As Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick, understanding this well, “Who ain’t a slave?”
Of the work, Marsalis says, “It starts on a slave ship during the middle passage. We meet two Africans, jesse and Leona, who until being forced into the equality of a tragic circumstance, occupied very different stations in life–he is a prince; she a commoner. They get sold to the same plantation and are chained together on a coffle. Jesse gets wounded trying to escape, and in order to survive the journey to his new home (for lack of a better term), he has to lean on Leona. When they arrive, he doesn’t even thank her for saving his life. He had been a prince in Africa, so perhaps it was beneath his noble station to express gratitude to a commoner. But one thing is apparent, he’s caught up in the injustice of his circumstance. For him, freedom is a purely personal thing. He needs to have his understanding expanded, and Leona is equipped with the tools to do the job.
“Eventually, Jesse goes to see Juba, a wise man posing as a fool. And Juba tells him that he needs to do three things. He has to love his new land, he has to learn how to sing with soul, and he has to learn who he will be when free–what will he call himself? nigger, colored, Negro, black, Afro-American, African-American or the next name (maybe just America). Juba’s advice sounds too “Uncle Tom-ish.” Jesse escapes and gets caught. He has a painful awakening under the bite of the lash. This convinces him to transform his attitude and ultimately his character.
“The transformation is completed when he sings the blues chant, “Oh, anybody hear this plaintive song. Oh, who wants to help their brother dance this dance? Oh, I sing with soul, heal this wounded land.”
Blood On The Fields details in music what I feel it takes to achieve soul: the willingness to address adversity with elegance.