GME Notes with Sadness the Recent Passing of Stanley Crouch

A prolific author, essayist, columnist and social critic, Crouch challenged conventional thinking on race and helped found Jazz at Lincoln Center. He proclaimed himself a “radical pragmatist,” defining it this way:

“I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race.”

Mr. Crouch said he had largely taught himself to write by devouring books as a child and then drawing on an innate lyrical sensibility, which he expressed in poetry as well as in prose. He wrote of the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie:

“He rose from the position of an odd fish to a star surfer riding the high, high curving water of a trend, sank into the position of those miracles taken for granted, but periodically returned to view, dripping with new wisdoms, beckoning as others followed him on the thin boards of art and entertainment that those who make their name in jazz must ride, atop the roller coaster waves of public taste, swinging all our blues in a fickle brine where they are forever at peril.”

Noted photographer of the NY jazz scene, Hugh Bell, captured the power and essence of Gillespie in this iconic image:

Gartenberg Media is the exclusive representative for the Estate of Hugh Bell.