Stanley Crouch’s Vision of the Human Condition
My friend Stanley Crouch, whose reflections on tragic optimism I wrote about in May, has, after a long battle with chronic illness, joined the ancestors. Though he is gone, his work and his values on behalf of jazz and the best of American life and culture remain. From, say, 1980-1990, during the first decade of my love affair with jazz, Stanley’s writing about the music in the Village Voice and his album notes for Wynton Marsalis nurtured my flame for the music. As he’d say, certain young people turn to jazz to better grow and mature as adults; I certainly did, and the quality of Stanley’s writing, and, later, his friendship, deepened my grasp of the responsibilities of mature manhood, especially when one is called to be a writer.
Little did I know then, back in my teens and 20s, that I would become a writer, let alone meet and become acquainted with Stanley, seeing close up the complexities of a man whose prose could bite and sting, yet also purr with the tender touch of evening on the brink of a lovely dawn. He encouraged me to continue my search for knowledge and to keep writing, even after I’d disagree with his content or style in print. I was far from alone: he urged many other younger writers to find their own voice, their unique sound, and even spurred worthy contemporaries such as Playthell Benjamin to begin putting his vast memory and archives of historical knowledge on paper, on the regular, as Playthell recalls in his wonderful remembrance.
What a storyteller he was! I recall visiting Stanley’s apartment in Greenwich Village in the mid-1990s, before the fire. Wall-to-wall books and CDs lined the shelves, as jazz backdropped our chats. He once related a tale about a gathering of Black poets in the 1960s, where he and Jayne Cortez were among those who shared their work, one after the other, ascending rings of rhythmic lyricism. He painted the picture so vividly that I could see the scene in my mind’s eye and hear with the ear of my ears. He capped off the tale with an imitation of the greatest poet-reciter that day, a bad cat who integrated cool jazz scats with poiesis sorcery, slaying everybody, killin’ softly with his words.
In the late 1990s, when he was at the height of his acclaim as a critic and essayist—substituting for Charlie Rose occasionally on PBS; doing a short stint on 60 Minutes; having already won the MacArthur Prize; co-founding Jazz at Lincoln Center in concert with Albert Murray and Wynton Marsalis; and publishing essay collections, Notes of a Hanging Judge, The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race, and Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives—he took time to visit the junior high in Brooklyn at which I taught, speaking to the young Black and Latino students about their potential and how if he could make it, so could they.
I was honored when he invited me to accompany him at Adelphi University on March 7, 1996. He gave a keynote address at a conference titled “Rethinking the Western Tradition.” As this very blog is dedicated to leadership, I’ll share the outchorus of that address as appeared in print two years later:
It is perhaps most necessary that we have leaders, regardless of party, regardless of right, middle, or left, who have the patience and the courage and the eloquence to come forward, with a convincing sense of humanity that will allow us to acknowledge ourselves not only as what we are but what we can be—adults fully aware of how fundamental human shortcomings and mistakes are to all eras, yet a people ready to face the lumps we must take in order to get as much of this stuff right as we can. Such leadership, from the local to the national level, should eventually draw those disengaged millions back into the political process.
One never knows. As ever, our story is one everybody on the face of the earth follows. Our society has been the dark horse and it has been the Triple Crown winner. Perhaps that is how we have to see ourselves, as democratic jockeys moving in and out of the light with our mounts, winning, losing, improvising, learning, making great jumps, taking horrible falls, but always refusing to give an ear to anything less than the tragic optimism of the blues to be redefined.
Stanley was an iconoclast and contrarian whose mind scintillated with the will to insight as his pen praised the saints and castigated the scoundrels—as he judged them to be. Accused by lazy writers and critics of being a neoconservative rather than the courageous independent thinker he was, as they, crabs-in-a-barrel, bootlicked feigned radicalism by bootlegging politics into matters of artistic taste, in actuality Stanley was as tough on “the vulgar popularist” Patrick Buchanan as the “confidence man” Louis Farrakhan. Stanley called himself a radical pragmatist; I’d add that as a blues man he viewed the folly of the human condition as part of life, while maintaining deep structures of democratic aspiration informed by the spiritual grandeur of jazz at its best.
One of my proudest moments on the production and business side of the music came when Jewel and I designed and promoted a themed series of shows in 2013 based on the tradition in jazz called cutting contests. “Cuttin’ Up,” presented at Ginny’s Supper Club in Harlem, caught the attention of Henry “Skip” Louis Gates, who used portions of one of those shows, featuring alto saxophonists Antonio Hart and Sherman Irby, as part of his PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. The invite-only audience was full of VIPs, but the person whose presence meant the most to me was Stanley’s. His influence on my early days of baptism in the joy spring of jazz came full circle as he bopped his head to straight-ahead swang that Jewel and I curated in New York City, the jazz capital.
Stanley Crouch, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Henry Louis Gates at our Ginny’s Supper Club jazz production
Stanley Crouch was one of the keenest minds who described the contradictions and paradoxes of the American character in the fin de siècle of the 20th century. He was more concerned about “the nature of American discourse” than party affiliation. His capacious view of horizons of existence extended beyond the transcendence of the blues idiom and music and what I called the Ellison-Murray Continuum to film, pop culture, social and political commentary, and cultural criticism of a depth few of his generation could match.
Ellison, who Stanley would call “Ralphus” in their conversations, once commented on the metaphysical function and existential role of literature. Literature, he said,
is an affirmative act, but, being specifically concerned with moral values and reality, it has to deal with the possibility of defeat. Underlying it most profoundly is the sense that man dies but his values continue. The mediating role of literature is to leave the successors with the sense of what is dangerous in the human predicament and what is glorious. That’s why we must judge literature not on the basis of its thematic content or its technical innovations, but on its vision of the human condition.
Stanley Crouch’s vision of the human condition, in all its carnivalesque textures, pointed to what is dangerous in human predicament and what shines with glory. For successors, then, the work of this writer’s writer will stand the test of time, as long as America survives. But even if America doesn’t make it—as history shows, civilizations rise and fall—we’ll have Stanley’s words and thought to explain why.
The man insiders called “the professor of connection” for his gift of metaphor will have the last word, with the dedications he wrote to his wife and mother:
JUST FOR YOU
This most recent book of essays [Always in Pursuit] is dedicated to my wife, Gloria Nixon, who is not only a surprisingly fine sculptor of the first order, but a woman who is able to handle the varieties of unexpected experience that go with being married to a writer of my sort. I met her in Harlem at a party, where she floated across the room so brown and beautiful she seemed incapable of touching the floor. I was wrong. Gloria Nixon keeps her mind on the star the other side of heaven we all know while her feet maintain traction on the earth. She understands illumination and knows how to keep from sinking down in the mud. I assume that most of us wish for big spirits filled with light to enter our personal lives. I got lucky and was able to retire from the wishing business.
TO THE ONE
This, my second book of essays [The All-American Skin Game], is dedicated to my mother, Emma Bea Crouch, who died a few years ago on Bloomsday, symbolizing for me the essential role she had played in my development as a writer. She taught me the alphabet and taught me to spell before my first day of school. I was told by her the basic truth of books, which is that you can travel all over the world from inside a library, page upon page. She always cut out editorials for me to read or pointed out pieces on science and history that she came across in newspapers in magazines. My mother also introduced me to jazz and told me stories about the elegant wonder of Duke Ellington, whom she and her schoolmates met at the Los Angeles train station, where they were awed by his deportment and the gleam of his alligator shoes. Her tales of the way young Negroes of her generation dressed and danced, of the cars they drove and the dreams they had, were introductions to a homemade aristocracy that she, a domestic worker quite proud about the quality of her work, embodied from hoot to toot. 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. Had I followed her instruction, I’m sure I would have gotten where I am now much more quickly. Thanks for your part in the victories, Mom, the losses were all mine.