Everyone knows Stanley Crouch. The public intellectual as an abstract figure may be widely mourned, but Mr. Crouch, the Daily News columnist, jazz promoter, novelist, and man about town, keeps up the tradition in intimate fashion.He’s a difficult man to miss on his walks below 14th Street, wandering about in a yellow rain slicker or rumpled suit talking jazz or the great race hustle with anyone who buttonholes him, and he’s made his impression all over the city, from the Jazz at Lincoln Center space at Columbus Circle to the young men he’s generously mentored to the small bookshops where you can find unpublished manuscripts of novels he’s written.

Notoriously, he’s made himself known elsewhere, too — in the West Village restaurant where he once walked up to the loathsome novelist Dale Peck, introduced himself, and slapped him in the face, avenging himself for a bad review, and in other places, such as the offices of the Village Voice, where he’s taken on his enemies with his fists. All of this, along with his outlandishly provocative style, has won him a reputation as a blowhard, perhaps even a dangerous one, and he does himself no favors when he accuses his critics, as he (repeatedly) does in his most recent collection of essays, of “walking beneath a flag of white underwear stained fully yellow by liquefied fear.”

There is a difference, though, between doing oneself no favors and being a blustering fool; between taking ideas seriously enough to fight over them and being a self-promoting adventurist; between being a man of substance to whom some colorful anecdotes are attached and being Dale Peck. Mr. Crouch is on the right side of every one of these differences, and with this new anthology of his writings on jazz, “Considering Genius” (Basic Books, 368 pages, $28), perhaps he can be taken at his real value rather than reduced to the sum of his misunderstood eccentricities.

As a jazz critic (and he is, before he is anything else, a jazz critic), Mr. Crouch is the heir of Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison, the two best and most important theoreticians and exponents of America’s greatest art form. Mr. Crouch also is, along with Wynton Marsalis, one of the key figures involved with turning their vision of the music into the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, which, no matter its flaws, is the most significant development in the music’s history in decades — probably since the advent of bop.

As theirs are, his ideas are easily and often caricatured; if one wants to turn him into a demonic musical neoconservative who rejects all music made after about 1965 and loathes the very idea of change because he wants to turn jazz into a museum music, one can do so by means of selective quotation and disingenuous representation. To be fair, one can also do so simply by pointing out his blind spots: His insistence on placing Mr. Marsalis, his friend and onetime disciple, among the inner circle of the music’s elite is misguided, and gives comfort to those who would rather discuss ideology than music.

But in the end, Mr. Crouch’s work overwhelms the criticisms that can be made of it on three counts: The strength, sensitivity, and depth of his ear; his critical imagination, which allows him to grasp the full history of the music and draw from it what he needs to make any point, from the largestscale hyperbole and the smallest-scale appreciation of a nuance of rhythm; and his literary gifts, which allow him to write epically of epic men and their epic achievements.

This last count is the thing that makes Mr. Crouch’s insistence on brawling with the likes of Mr. Peck and Leroi Jones so frustrating; heavyweights do not need to slap around bantamweights, and are better off facing real competition. Showing down the legacies of Miles Davis and Duke Ellington, Mr. Crouch’s writing can be absolutely electric and pointed and clear and precise and studded with epigrams. “The Miles Davis horn not only helped define the very best of American life,” he writes, “it helped purify our conception of what quality was possible within the arena of the popular.” There is a real proportionality, for better and for worse, between the quality of Mr. Crouch’s subjects and the quality of his writing on them, and what emerges from the best of them is an expression of the fundamental awareness that he shares with Ellison, Murray, and even Mr. Marsalis: That jazz, not merely in its sociological particulars or racial dynamic (though in those as well) but in the essence of the way it is played, in the ways notes are combined and phrased and calibrated, is a metaphor for and an engine of democracy. The politics of the music are unavoidable, but they flow from the particular applications of a tradition by individual and idiosyncratic geniuses.

Jelly Roll Morton’s “Wolverine Stomp,” Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing,” and Andrew Hill’s “New Monastery” form a direct lineage of confrontation with music and the joys and sorrows of American life. That lineage is not an expression of politics; in its expressions for a group dynamic, spontaneity, and the possibilities of art, it instead gives rise to politics. The root of Mr. Crouch’s various enmities — with fellow critics, with musicians like Miles Davis who eventually betrayed their traditions, with simple minded people of all stripes who insist that jazz is something more, less, or other than an art that functions according to defined though not sacred aesthetic particulars — is simply that there is such a wide misunderstanding of this basic idea, to which he gives, at his best, such elegant expression. This collection is rich in detail, broad in scope, and worthy of the music to which it is dedicated.The cantankerous and sometimes thoughtless gadfly who wrote it ought now to get the praise he’s due.

tmarchman@nysun.com