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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZCROUCH, Stanley(b 14 Dec. '45, L.A.) Originally a drummer; also a poet, actor, teacher, writer, playwright. He is a cousin of Andrae Crouch. He formed a co-op group late '60s with Arthur Blythe and Bobby Bradford, which later became Black Music Infinity with Bradford and Charles Tyler on records. A book of poems was called Ain't No Ambulances For No Nigguhs Tonight '70. He gave up performing somewhere along the way and is today besat known as a journalist, working for many years on a biography of Charlie Parker, and deeply involved as Wynton Marsalis's guru and in the controversial jazz programme at Lincoln Center in NYC, where no white groups appeared for many years (and nothing that would nowadays be considered avant-garde). The worrying thing about this is that jazz has been accepted by the rest of the world as one of the great American gifts of the 20th century, a gift representing human freedom itself yet no longer an exclusively black or even American art form, while critics like Crouch inadvertently encourage African-Americans to wallow in the culture of complaint: criticism becomes racist if the music being criticised is black. The fact that Crouch also seems to dislike hip-hop and baggy trousers serves only to further lock him in as a curmudgeon. Yet people who know Crouch say that he is genuinely entitled to his views, which we suppose means that you'd better know what you're talking about if you're going to refute him. |