Stanley Crouch died today. We hadn’t been in touch much the past few years. I’d heard he was sick. I don’t know the ailment. I’m sad and shocked. Sad. I always liked him. We got along. I don’t know why. People like you, and you think okay, I like you too.
The biggest smile when he greeted me at the Voice. He liked me and Paul Berman in some special way. He liked that we were Jews. He thought there was such a thing as a Jewish writer. I didn’t, but it made me smile the way he thought this, and he could have explained and maybe he tried to on more than one occasion before I said what are you talking about. I think what he liked about me and Paul was the shape of our sentences. Their smell, their roundness. Paul wrote great sentences from the heart. I was always learning. Stanley had so much confidence. I had none. I had something else. I had desire to do the things I was doing. Paul knew a lot. I had feminism, the logic of this analysis that was sharp and unassailable. I think Stanley got that or maybe he just liked the look of me seeing his face. Stanley, Stanley, I’m so sad you have died.
“‘Crouch ultimately wove together his celebration of jazz and his vision of American democracy. Jazz, he wrote, is ‘the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance.’
He added: ‘The demands on and the respect for the individual in the jazz band put democracy into aesthetic action. The success of jazz is a victory for democracy, and a symbol of the aesthetic dignity, which is finally spiritual, that performers can achieve and express as they go about inventing music and meeting the challenge of the moment.’”