‘Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings by Stanley Crouch,’ edited with a preface by Glenn Mott (Liveright Publishing Corporation) There were many occasions when I crossed paths with Stanley Crouch (1945-2020), usually at various clubs, but I can’t claim to have been a close friend. My favorite moment with him occurred at Carnegie Hall one summer night when ragtime was on the program. Crouch walked up to me and whispered in my shell-like ear, “You see, Black people are just like the Jews. Even in incredibly hard times, they can’t help but create the most joyful music imaginable.” He had a point: The 1910s had been among the lowest of times for African Americans since slavery, a moment when segregation, institutional discrimination, and lynchings were at their worst. Yet the music from that era was ineffably upbeat and celebratory.Crouch was many things — from a one-time drummer and itinerant musician to a commentator on race and politics (and the interconnection thereof), all the while being an incredibly original thinker. Still, the aspect of his work that meant the most to me was his considerable catalog of writing about jazz. The term “critic” sounds so reductive; he didn’t go to a show and then report the next morning, “The opening was great, but the pianist rushed and the bassist dragged while the drummer seemed to be cracking walnuts.” Nothing like it. Crouch was always the man who had his eye on the big picture, while not neglecting the details. This latest collection of his writings, “Victory Is Assured,” edited by Glenn Mott, is an especially valuable one. Most of us read Crouch religiously when he was, alongside the equally formidable Gary Giddins, one of two regular contributors on jazz to “The Village Voice,” especially in the 1980s and 1990s. These pieces come mostly from a later period, one when many of us mistakenly assumed that Crouch was primarily turning his attention to political topics and wasn’t thinking about music so much. Further, they were originally published all over the place, in all manner of publications; most of us missed these articles because we didn’t know, or didn’t think, to look for them.Having finished reading “Victory Is Assured,” I have to say that it took me a long time to go through it, but not for the reason you might think. Like all of Stanley Crouch’s writings, the essays here are rife not only with amazing things to say but amazing ways of saying them. At the end of virtually every chapter, I felt compelled to read it again to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Then, I would invariably put the book aside, and go to whatever article I was working on at that moment, and rewrite it, trying to incorporate some idea I had gleaned from Stanley.Here’s an idea that I’ve tried to express several times, but Crouch says it much better: Those who try to confine creativity to racialist categories find themselves imposing limits they’re not even aware of. Such as saying only Black people can play jazz is the equivalent of saying only white people, or, more specifically Italians, can sing opera. As Crouch puts it: “People such as Leontyne Price, who grew up in segregated Mississippi but went on to become one of the world’s finest opera singers, showed us what Stan Getz showed us in jazz. Beginning as a follower of Lester Young, Getz evolved into a truly great individual player who could sing through his horn, play the blues, and also swing almost as hard as anyone else, unless they were in the magic circle of the grandest of grand masters. … Price and Getz, given their objectively superior talent, may have a destiny beyond color and sociology. Art never fails to show us that.”Most of the music-related writings here celebrate the major canonical figures of jazz — Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charlie Parker — though back in the earlier days when he wrote about the music more regularly, he also composed beautiful odes to other, more obscure figures, like the pianist Hank Jones, tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, and the lesser-known African American crooner Earl Coleman. These are all pieces that I still remember vividly though I haven’t read them since they were published.In terms of his politically oriented writings, Crouch was no less an original thinker. He was not content to limit his beliefs to those of any one party or hide behind a label like “liberal” or “conservative.” Throughout, Crouch doesn’t hide his disdain toward those who argued in favor of racial separatism, like Amiri Baraka, and especially those who advocated violence, like Malcolm X. Most of all, he refuses to celebrate all Negroes (he preferred that term to “African Americans”) as heroes nor to castigate all white people as villains. (Likewise, he was extremely critical of some contemporary Black popular music, especially rap and hip-hop, which he repeatedly and convincingly compared to the most demeaning tropes of blackface minstrelsy.) It’s hard not to be moved by an essay on the pioneering civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois: “We should also note that some American men and women who were white did far more in opposition to the enslavement of Negroes than anyone in Africa did or even considered doing. Though we can brag about the democratic ideas that came from the Founding Fathers, we can also point at how even men of genius, such as Thomas Jefferson, were mightily flawed when it came to matters of color and bondage. At the same time that we can self-righteously talk of the hypocrisy of white Americans, we must also acknowledge that had the most enlightened of them not been willing to push an abolitionist’s agenda for so long, and had thousands upon thousands of others not been willing to lay down their lives to hasten the destruction of the slave system — our history would be very, very different.” “Victory is Assured” contains much work from the later part of his career, yet it is hardly the end of the story. Rather, it’s just the beginning. Stanley Crouch’s canon of great writing is as big, as wide, and as generous as the man himself.
