Stanley Crouch
Crouch was born in Los Angeles. During the early 1970s, he moved from California to New York City, where he shared a loft with tenor saxophonist David Murray above an East Village club called the Tin Palace. He was a drummer for Murray and with other musicians of the underground NY 'jazz loft' scene. Also a poet, he released a 1969 album on the Flying Dutchman jazz label entitled Ain't No Ambulances For No Nigguhs Tonight. While working as a drummer, Crouch conducted the booking for an avant-garde jazz series at the club, as well as organizing occasional concert events at the Ladies' Fort. In Ken Burns' 2005 television documentary Unforgivable Blackness, Crouch says that his father was a "criminal" and that he once met the boxer Jack Johnson. Since the early 1980s, Crouch has become critical of the more progressive forms of jazz and has been associated with the opinions of Albert Murray. Crouch was fired from JazzTimes following his controversial article "Putting the White Man in Charge" in which he stated that, since the 1960s, "...white musicians who can play are too frequently elevated far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated."