Stanley Crouch Selected Works

In these essays―some discovered on his computer, unpublished until now―Crouch tackles subjects ranging from Malcolm X (“a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias”) to the films of Quentin Tarantino (“With Django, Tarantino has slipped down . . . into a shallow and bloodstained hip-hop turn that his own best work has well-refuted”). Introduced by Jelani Cobb, with an afterword by Wynton Marsalis, and collected by his longtime editor Glenn Mott, Victory Is Assured canonizes the legacy of an inimitable, indispensable American critic.

One by one, Stanley Crouch destroys some of the most celebrated revolts of our day, defiant promiscuity and flagrant drug use, the obsession with the private lives of our politicians and the misguided allowances made by overly permissive parents. All were once taboo, all are now commonplace.

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker is the first installment in the long-awaited portrait of one of the most talented and influential musicians of the twentieth century, from Stanley Crouch, one of the foremost authorities on jazz and culture in America. Throughout his life, Charlie Parker personified the tortured American artist: a revolutionary performer who used his alto saxophone to create a new music known as bebop even as he wrestled with a drug addiction that would lead to his death at the age of thirty-four. Drawing on interviews with peers, collaborators, and family members, Kansas City Lightning recreates Parker’s Depression-era childhood; his early days navigating the Kansas City nightlife, inspired by lions like Lester Young and Count Basie; and on to New York, where he began to transcend the music he had mastered. Crouch reveals an ambitious young man torn between music and drugs, between his domineering mother and his impressionable young wife, whose teenage romance with Charlie lies at the bittersweet heart of this story. With the wisdom of a jazz scholar, the cultural insights of an acclaimed social critic, and the narrative skill of a literary novelist, Stanley Crouch illuminates this American master as never before.

Stanley Crouch identifies the civil rights movement of the last four decades as the defining feature of contemporary American society. In Notes of a Hanging Judge, he explores it from all sides—from its epochal triumphs and the forces that have nearly destroyed it, through its great artistic and political success stories, to the crime culture it has been powerless to prevent or control—and traces its complex and ambivalent interactions with the feminist and gay dissent that followed its example. Balancing the passionate involvement of an insider with a reporter's open-minded rigor, and using his virtuosic prose style, Crouch offers uniquely insightful accounts of familiar public issues—black middle-class life, the Bernhard Goetz case, black homosexuals, the career of Louis Farrakhan—that throw fresh light on the position of Afro-Americans in the contemporary world. Even more revealing are Crouch's accounts of his travels, focusing on his perceptions as a black man, that put places as diverse as Atlanta and Africa, or Mississippi and Italy, in unique new perspectives. Perhaps most powerful of all are Crouch's profiles of black leaders ranging from Maynard, to Michael, to Jesse Jackson. Crouch's stern evaluations have been controversial, especially his vision of the Civil Rights Movement as a noble cause "gone loco," mired in self-defeating ethnic nationalism and condescending self-regard, and conspicuously lacking in the spiritual majesty that ensured its great political victories. His discussions of artistic figures, including extended critiques of Toni Morrison and Spike Lee, have also incited much debate. Taken together, these essays represent a major reinterpretation of black, and therefore American, culture in our time.