Stanley Crouch (1945–2020)
Author of Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker
About the Author
Stanley Lawrence Crouch was an author, poet, music and cultural critic, essayist and columnist. He was born on December 14, 1945 in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from high school in 1963, he attended several junior colleges and became active in the civil rights movement. He became show more poet-in-residence at Pitzer College in in 1968. In 1975, he taught theater and literature at Pomona College. He moved to New York City in 1975 and worked as a musician and conducted bookings for an avant-garde jazz series at clubs. In 1980, he was hired as a staff writer for the Village Voice. In 1988, he was fired after a fistfight with a fellow writer. He then worked as a syndicated columnist based at the New York Daily News. His anthologies included Noted of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989; The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994; Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995-1997; and Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz. His fiction included, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing. He wrote a biography, The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker. In 2016, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literary Prize. Stanley Crouch died on September 16, 2020 in New York City at the age of 74. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Stanley Crouch
The All-American Skin Game, or Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994 (1995) 93 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
Booknotes: America's Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas (1997) — Contributor — 456 copies, 5 reviews
Black Genius: African American Solutions to African American Problems (1999) — Contributor — 72 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Crouch, Stanley
- Legal name
- Crouch, Stanley Lawrence
- Birthdate
- 1945-12-14
- Date of death
- 2020-09-16
- Gender
- male
- Occupations
- music critic
jazz critic
journalist
novelist
poet
drummer - Organizations
- Union of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension
- Awards and honors
- Whiting Writers' Award (1991)
Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (2016) - Cause of death
- COVID-19
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Place of death
- The Bronx, New York, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Crouch could really write - the prologue, his long review of Miles Davis Live at Carnegie Hall, and his searing rebuttal to Clint Eastwood's Charlie Parker movie are truly fantastic essays and I would recommend them to anyone, whether they like jazz or not. But on too many of the other essays Crouch seems to get drunk on flights of rhetoric that do little for the reader and quickly become exhausting. And his use of the term "Negro" instead of "Black"--in the late '90s!--seems like an odd show more affectation, but I guess that's not for me to say. show less
This, the first of Stanley Crouch's projected two-volume biography of musician Charlie Parker (1920-1955), ends at the point where a jazz fan's interest might begin, at the "Honey and Body" recording. Sometime in 1939 or 1940 - we're not sure exactly - Parker recorded, for his private use, a brief medley of "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Body and Soul"; it's his earliest known recording, and of great interest as a milestone in his musical development. For telling us about all the historic show more recordings that would follow, about who Parker was and what he meant, Crouch is mainly reserving the second book of the biography.
If you're unfamiliar with Parker, or need a reminder, here's "Ko-Ko" from 1945, just a few years later (Youtube: don't know if these links will last, and sorry about the ads). Here's "Donna Lee" from 1947.
But our jazz fan really needs to read this book, which tells us how Parker came to be Parker: his life to that point, his personal and musical growth, the people he knew who later served as witnesses to these years. But, beyond that, Kansas City Lightning is the story of all the threads of African-American life that came together around this boy/young man as he developed his extraordinary talent.
Crouch gives us a pocket history of African-American music and culture. An African-American named Frank Johnson led a popular dance band in 1819. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans were able to make increasing use of what freedoms were available to them to travel widely, observing the musical styles in distant cities, and organizing their own nightlife despite the repression from white society. The early popularity of ragtime preceded the development of jazz, a new music having improvisation as its central characteristic. Crouch expands on the tension between minstrelcy - the clowning behavior that entertainers were confined to for so long - and the elegance and dignity exemplified by Duke Ellington; on the importance of music teachers in racially segregated high schools, providing rigorous training for musicians who were largely excluded from higher education; on the meaning of boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, proving that an African-American was as good as anyone.
Supremely important in this world was the character of jazz as a blood sport - a ferocious competition between players or bands, wherein the better musicians won the day and the lesser ones went home in shame, according to a judgment shared by everyone on the bandstand and in the audience. In this mileu, performers were constantly seeking to improve their skills and, equally importantly, to develop unique personae of sound and style that were theirs alone, matched by no one else. Parker's hometown, Kansas City, developed a regional coterie of players who could match the best visitors from Chicago or New York. We're used to the modern jazz idiom now, and it's hard to comprehend the decades of work and competition among hundreds of superbly talented people that brought it into existence. Crouch starts the book on this point, in early 1942, with the Jay McShann band winning New York's Savoy Ballroom with Parker's alto saxophone, before going back to the start of his subject's life.
In Kansas City, Kansas was born Charlie Parker, the indulged child of a fiercely admiring and protective mother who was his only parent from an early age. He grew, played with friends, went to school, married, and studied the saxophone. What Crouch tells us comes from the testimony of his playmates, fellow aspiring musicians, and his first wife, Rebecca Ruffin Parker. Amazingly, and outrageously, no one interviewed Rebecca Parker, the first wife of one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century, until Crouch did so in 1981, 26 years after Charlie's death. This and other lacunae mean that our knowledge of those years is rather fragmentary in parts - but the story of a developing talent is clear, even as Parker as a person remains a bit mysterious.
We learn about the mentors Parker admired and sought out, his student and early professional days, his hopping freight trains - in the midst of the Great Depresson - to Chicago and New York. We see proved once again the adage about genius being mostly perspiration. Parker practiced many thousands of hours, over years, before he was even good enough to be allowed on the bandstand with the pros. He listened to live performances, radio broadcasts, and records for many more thousands of hours.
Sadly, we learn that, like many great men, Parker was capable of abusing women. He neglected Rebecca and their baby son for the streets, and for other women, and at one point held a pistol to her head. In this, Parker's story, far from unique, is much too familiar.
Crouch writes with a lyricism that, though a bit overdone at times, captures the feeling of the music in non-technical terms. Here's that 1942 Savoy date:
The rhythm section lit out. The band came in and played the song's ensemble chorus, sixty-four bars of a tune notorious for its complex harmony, all those holes you could break your musical legs in. This was one of those times when the griddle was hot and nothing came up except steam. Arrogant and proud of themselves, the rhythm section reared back and pounced on Charlie's back when he put his horn to his mouth. And his saxophone, in turn, became a flamethrower of rhythm, melody, and harmony. They pushed and drove, chorus after chorus. Then as professional experience had taught them, they lulled, let him get a little stronger, went back to their basic strategy, and let him dance his hot-footed dance with suble support. Then they tore into him again, setting fire to his tail.
(...)
That afternoon, sixteen miles away from Harlem, bassist Chubby Jackson was working at the Adams Theatre in Newark. He was playing with the big band led by Charlie Barnet, who had had a hit with "Cherokee" two years before. While on break, Jackson decided to see (...) the Savoy broadcast. As soon as he turned on the radio, a sound that was almost brutal shot out of the speaker. The song was "Cherokee", but the sound leading McShann's version was that of an alto saxophone almost completely devoid of vibrato, notes flying thick as buckshot, slapping chords this way and that, rambling quicker and with more different kinds of rhythms than his band had ever heard from a saxophone. Everybody stopped talking, fiddling with their instruments. Who the hell was this? Oklahoma trumpeter Howard McGhee, who was there that afternoon, chuckled at the memory: every musician standing there with his mouth open knew where he was going that night.
At the end, we are left with Parker making that private recording at 19 or 20; already estranged from Rebecca, already addicted to opiates, already more than halfway through his terribly short life, already a master musician whose name would someday serve as half of Miles Davis's summary of the history of jazz: "Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker". The needle cuts into the recording disk. Crouch has worked on this book since 1981; he has promised the sequel in a couple of years. Can't wait. show less
If you're unfamiliar with Parker, or need a reminder, here's "Ko-Ko" from 1945, just a few years later (Youtube: don't know if these links will last, and sorry about the ads). Here's "Donna Lee" from 1947.
But our jazz fan really needs to read this book, which tells us how Parker came to be Parker: his life to that point, his personal and musical growth, the people he knew who later served as witnesses to these years. But, beyond that, Kansas City Lightning is the story of all the threads of African-American life that came together around this boy/young man as he developed his extraordinary talent.
Crouch gives us a pocket history of African-American music and culture. An African-American named Frank Johnson led a popular dance band in 1819. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans were able to make increasing use of what freedoms were available to them to travel widely, observing the musical styles in distant cities, and organizing their own nightlife despite the repression from white society. The early popularity of ragtime preceded the development of jazz, a new music having improvisation as its central characteristic. Crouch expands on the tension between minstrelcy - the clowning behavior that entertainers were confined to for so long - and the elegance and dignity exemplified by Duke Ellington; on the importance of music teachers in racially segregated high schools, providing rigorous training for musicians who were largely excluded from higher education; on the meaning of boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, proving that an African-American was as good as anyone.
Supremely important in this world was the character of jazz as a blood sport - a ferocious competition between players or bands, wherein the better musicians won the day and the lesser ones went home in shame, according to a judgment shared by everyone on the bandstand and in the audience. In this mileu, performers were constantly seeking to improve their skills and, equally importantly, to develop unique personae of sound and style that were theirs alone, matched by no one else. Parker's hometown, Kansas City, developed a regional coterie of players who could match the best visitors from Chicago or New York. We're used to the modern jazz idiom now, and it's hard to comprehend the decades of work and competition among hundreds of superbly talented people that brought it into existence. Crouch starts the book on this point, in early 1942, with the Jay McShann band winning New York's Savoy Ballroom with Parker's alto saxophone, before going back to the start of his subject's life.
In Kansas City, Kansas was born Charlie Parker, the indulged child of a fiercely admiring and protective mother who was his only parent from an early age. He grew, played with friends, went to school, married, and studied the saxophone. What Crouch tells us comes from the testimony of his playmates, fellow aspiring musicians, and his first wife, Rebecca Ruffin Parker. Amazingly, and outrageously, no one interviewed Rebecca Parker, the first wife of one of the most important American musicians of the 20th century, until Crouch did so in 1981, 26 years after Charlie's death. This and other lacunae mean that our knowledge of those years is rather fragmentary in parts - but the story of a developing talent is clear, even as Parker as a person remains a bit mysterious.
We learn about the mentors Parker admired and sought out, his student and early professional days, his hopping freight trains - in the midst of the Great Depresson - to Chicago and New York. We see proved once again the adage about genius being mostly perspiration. Parker practiced many thousands of hours, over years, before he was even good enough to be allowed on the bandstand with the pros. He listened to live performances, radio broadcasts, and records for many more thousands of hours.
Sadly, we learn that, like many great men, Parker was capable of abusing women. He neglected Rebecca and their baby son for the streets, and for other women, and at one point held a pistol to her head. In this, Parker's story, far from unique, is much too familiar.
Crouch writes with a lyricism that, though a bit overdone at times, captures the feeling of the music in non-technical terms. Here's that 1942 Savoy date:
The rhythm section lit out. The band came in and played the song's ensemble chorus, sixty-four bars of a tune notorious for its complex harmony, all those holes you could break your musical legs in. This was one of those times when the griddle was hot and nothing came up except steam. Arrogant and proud of themselves, the rhythm section reared back and pounced on Charlie's back when he put his horn to his mouth. And his saxophone, in turn, became a flamethrower of rhythm, melody, and harmony. They pushed and drove, chorus after chorus. Then as professional experience had taught them, they lulled, let him get a little stronger, went back to their basic strategy, and let him dance his hot-footed dance with suble support. Then they tore into him again, setting fire to his tail.
(...)
That afternoon, sixteen miles away from Harlem, bassist Chubby Jackson was working at the Adams Theatre in Newark. He was playing with the big band led by Charlie Barnet, who had had a hit with "Cherokee" two years before. While on break, Jackson decided to see (...) the Savoy broadcast. As soon as he turned on the radio, a sound that was almost brutal shot out of the speaker. The song was "Cherokee", but the sound leading McShann's version was that of an alto saxophone almost completely devoid of vibrato, notes flying thick as buckshot, slapping chords this way and that, rambling quicker and with more different kinds of rhythms than his band had ever heard from a saxophone. Everybody stopped talking, fiddling with their instruments. Who the hell was this? Oklahoma trumpeter Howard McGhee, who was there that afternoon, chuckled at the memory: every musician standing there with his mouth open knew where he was going that night.
At the end, we are left with Parker making that private recording at 19 or 20; already estranged from Rebecca, already addicted to opiates, already more than halfway through his terribly short life, already a master musician whose name would someday serve as half of Miles Davis's summary of the history of jazz: "Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker". The needle cuts into the recording disk. Crouch has worked on this book since 1981; he has promised the sequel in a couple of years. Can't wait. show less
Charles “Teenie” Harris (1908-1988) is ranked among the great photographers of recent times. As presented in this book, Harris’ work provides a magnificent visual history of African-American life in Pittsburgh in the 1920s through the 1950s.
A little background puts Harris’ work in context. Having been born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Charles Harris was a prominent resident of the black “Hill” district. Having acquired his first professional camera in 1931, he worked as a show more freelance photographer, and then was hired by The Pittsburgh Courier, the preeminent national black news weekly. (As Stanley Crouch notes in this book’s forward, the Courier “carried on the inarguably grand American tradition of liberating the humanity of the Negro from the epithets and the stereotypes backed up by bad science and superstition…). As for the city of Pittsburgh, it had a long history with a culturally resplendent black community. Pittsburgh’s black community had begun to grow quickly during World War I, as families migrated north to take jobs with the steel and coal industries. Black cultural life in Pittsburgh flourished in the succeeding decades. In fact, segregation and discrimination led the Hill district to develop its own clubs and restaurants, and the city developed two black baseball teams. The fruits of such developments are the focus of Charles Harris’ photographic art.
The photographs presented in this book are stunning in quality and content. They are high resolution duotones, well- presented in full page spreads. Most of the focus is on people living their daily lives. The humanity and dignity of Harris’ photographic subjects shines forth throughout. Among the photographic subjects we see street scenes; people in clubs and restaurants; men playing checkers on the sidewalk as their friends watch over their shoulders; a newspaper delivery boy; a waitress; a soda jerk; a constable; a female disc jockey; curious children watching a sidewalk piano player; boys with a toy army tank; an injured woman under a streetcar; a black swim instructor at an integrated pool; an old woman holding threatening Nazi posters. Other images show Boy Scouts; school children being inoculated against polio; a boy and a girl with their Easter baskets; a railroad worker; a coal miner; a firefighter; and a little black girl holding a “white” baby doll. Still others capture the growing issues of civil rights (sign- wielding protestors demonstrating against the hiring practices at Isalys’; a man protesting at the courthouse against unequal treatment in the justice system; Martin Luther King at the University of Pittsburgh). Some of the images show visiting politicians (Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt). Several others show musicians (Duke Ellington, Luis Armstrong, Sam Cooke; Lena Horne, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstein) and other celebrities (Cassius Clay).
The photographic images in this work are truly superb. If a book ever deserved five-stars, this one certain does. show less
A little background puts Harris’ work in context. Having been born in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Charles Harris was a prominent resident of the black “Hill” district. Having acquired his first professional camera in 1931, he worked as a show more freelance photographer, and then was hired by The Pittsburgh Courier, the preeminent national black news weekly. (As Stanley Crouch notes in this book’s forward, the Courier “carried on the inarguably grand American tradition of liberating the humanity of the Negro from the epithets and the stereotypes backed up by bad science and superstition…). As for the city of Pittsburgh, it had a long history with a culturally resplendent black community. Pittsburgh’s black community had begun to grow quickly during World War I, as families migrated north to take jobs with the steel and coal industries. Black cultural life in Pittsburgh flourished in the succeeding decades. In fact, segregation and discrimination led the Hill district to develop its own clubs and restaurants, and the city developed two black baseball teams. The fruits of such developments are the focus of Charles Harris’ photographic art.
The photographs presented in this book are stunning in quality and content. They are high resolution duotones, well- presented in full page spreads. Most of the focus is on people living their daily lives. The humanity and dignity of Harris’ photographic subjects shines forth throughout. Among the photographic subjects we see street scenes; people in clubs and restaurants; men playing checkers on the sidewalk as their friends watch over their shoulders; a newspaper delivery boy; a waitress; a soda jerk; a constable; a female disc jockey; curious children watching a sidewalk piano player; boys with a toy army tank; an injured woman under a streetcar; a black swim instructor at an integrated pool; an old woman holding threatening Nazi posters. Other images show Boy Scouts; school children being inoculated against polio; a boy and a girl with their Easter baskets; a railroad worker; a coal miner; a firefighter; and a little black girl holding a “white” baby doll. Still others capture the growing issues of civil rights (sign- wielding protestors demonstrating against the hiring practices at Isalys’; a man protesting at the courthouse against unequal treatment in the justice system; Martin Luther King at the University of Pittsburgh). Some of the images show visiting politicians (Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Eleanor Roosevelt). Several others show musicians (Duke Ellington, Luis Armstrong, Sam Cooke; Lena Horne, Dizzy Gillespie, Billy Eckstein) and other celebrities (Cassius Clay).
The photographic images in this work are truly superb. If a book ever deserved five-stars, this one certain does. show less
By Stanley Crouch - Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (8/25/13) by Stanley Crouch
A fascinating look at Charlie Parker's beginning. I assumed (wrongly) that this would be a full biography of Parker's life, but it stops before he truly hits the big time. It traces his rice in Kansas City, his hoboing to Chicago and then to New York to see the world and prove his worth, and ends with his eventual return to Kansas City. Included are many pictures, interviews with his first wife and a wonderful array of Jazz history and culture so that the reader can gain a better show more understanding of how Parker created a unique sound all his own while studying the Jazz masters of the day. A wonderfully informative book that makes me wonder if it's the first in a series. I want to know about his rise to fame, not just the beginnings! show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 14
- Also by
- 14
- Members
- 766
- Popularity
- #33,217
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 15
- ISBNs
- 37
- Languages
- 1
- Favorited
- 1