Stanley Crouch (1945-2020) was an author and social critic whose writings helped elevate jazz to a nationally recognized cultural prominence. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he attended two junior colleges and was an actor-playwright in the Studio Watts company from 1965–1967. While teaching at the Claremont Colleges from 1968–1975, he also wrote poetry and played drums. He was initially active in the civil rights movement but abandoned it for a more militant viewpoint. In 1975 he moved to New York City, where he promoted jazz performances and then became a staff writer for The Village Voice. Like writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, Crouch criticized politicians and writers who viewed black people as victims and black culture as deprived. He became known for journalism and criticism on a range of interests and for his outspoken essays on African American art, politics, and culture. He was in residence in 1985.
Crouch’s writing, which espoused the notion that Black people and their experiences were and continue to be fundamental to the American experience, has appeared in The New York Daily News, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Esquire. He is the author of three collections of essays, Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990), The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and Short of It, (1995), and Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, (1998) and one novel, Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing (2000).
Though he never graduated from college, his prominence, writing, and reputation led to teaching positions at Pomona, Pitzer, and Claremont Colleges in California. His students knew him as a vibrant poet, English, and theatre instructor through the 1960s and 1970s. After a move to New York and a storied career in journalism, and becoming a well-respected in the realms of musicology and ethnomusicology, Crouch met a young Julliard student Wynton Marsalis, went on to write liner notes for Marsalis’s albums, and later helped the world-famous trumpeter to establish Jazz at Lincoln Center.
