eJazzNews Archive

Stanley Crouch, Recently Fired from JazzTimes Magazine

Originally published on eJazzNews · · By Daniel King

On May 14, 2003, eJazzNews published a long piece by Daniel King on why JazzTimes had dropped Stanley Crouch’s column weeks after running his April 2003 essay “Putting the White Man in Charge.” King collected reactions from critics and editors on both sides of the race-and-criticism argument the essay had reopened. Crouch died in New York on September 16, 2020, at 74.

What the 2003 article reported

King summarized the essay’s charge, as Crouch put it, that white critics elevated white musicians “far beyond their abilities” to feel more comfortable judging an art from which they felt alienated. He quoted the e-mail that ended the column, which told Crouch it had “run its course,” and managing editor Chris Porter, who added that Crouch was routinely late with copy and that the columns had become tedious. Crouch answered that dismissing a writer of his standing with no discussion was an injustice, and suggested that industry pressure over his views on fusion and world music lay behind it.

The responses split. Nat Hentoff, himself a JazzTimes columnist, called the decision “absolutely stupid.” Gary Giddins called it “a huge mistake,” said the two-line e-mail was a discourtesy, and warned that it looked like a response to record-company pressure, though he doubted that it was. Amiri Baraka, Crouch’s political opposite, said he had expected the firing and hoped Crouch would fight it. Howard Mandel, then president of the Jazz Journalists Association, opposed censorship but called Crouch’s attack on trumpeter Dave Douglas’s background name-calling rather than criticism. DownBeat editor Jason Koransky dismissed the idea of a white critical establishment, while black critics Mark Ruffin, Willard Jenkins and John Murph told King that Crouch had a point, citing the praise heaped on the trio The Bad Plus.

King, who described himself as a 23-year-old white JazzTimes contributor and a friend of Porter, also raised the case against Crouch: the magazine had refused to let him review a Wynton Marsalis album for which he had written liner notes. He reported that JazzTimes had commissioned and then not published Baraka’s “Jazz and the White Critic Revisited,” and closed by arguing that the magazine should print both men.

Who Stanley Crouch was

Crouch was born in Los Angeles on December 14, 1945. He played drums in avant-garde groups, taught at Pomona College and moved to New York in 1975, where he became a critic at the Village Voice. Publishers Weekly notes that the Voice fired him in 1988 after a fight with a fellow staff writer. He mentored Wynton Marsalis, wrote liner notes for his early albums, and in 1987 sat on the committee that led to Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he served as artistic consultant. He wrote a column for the New York Daily News from 1995 to 2014. In his NPR obituary, Ethan Iverson paired “Putting the White Man in Charge” with Baraka’s earlier polemic “Jazz and the White Critic.”

What happened next

Crouch kept writing about jazz after the JazzTimes column ended. Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz collected pieces from the Voice, The New York Times and JazzTimes, and in 2013 he published Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker, a study of the young bebop pioneer. In 2019 the National Endowment for the Arts gave him its A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy. After nearly a decade of serious health problems, he died at Calvary Hospital in New York on September 16, 2020; his wife, Gloria Nixon-Crouch, announced the death.

Two of the critics King quoted had died before him: Amiri Baraka in January 2014, at 79, and Nat Hentoff on January 7, 2017, at 91.

Sources

This page is based on an article from the original eJazzNews archive (2001 to 2018), with background and sources added in 2026. The original text is not republished here. You can read the original as it appeared on eJazzNews via the Internet Archive.
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