Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch

by Stanley Crouch, Glenn Mott (Editor), Jelani Cobb (Introduction), Wynton Marsalis (Afterword)

Overview

The grievous loss of Stanley Crouch, one of America’s most renowned intellectuals, is underscored by the posthumous appearance of these remarkable essays.

With Stanley Crouch’s untimely death in 2020, American literature lost “a critic without peer” (Ta-Nehisi Coates). Born in Los Angeles in 1945, Crouch—a towering stylist, fearless columnist, and without question, one of the finest jazz critics of all time—was Rabelaisian both in stature and in intellectual appetite. Beloved yet cantankerous, Crouch delighted and enflamed the passions of his readers in equal measure, whether writing about race, politics, literature, or music.

In these essays—some discovered on his computer, unpublished until now—Crouch tackles subjects ranging from Malcolm X (“a thorned bud standing in the shadow of sequoias”) to the films of Quentin Tarantino (“With Django, Tarantino has slipped down . . . into a shallow and bloodstained hip-hop turn that his own best work has well-refuted”). Introduced by Jelani Cobb, with an afterword by Wynton Marsalis, and collected by his longtime editor Glenn Mott, Victory Is Assured canonizes the legacy of an inimitable, indispensable American critic.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324090915
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	09/13/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

“A stylish butcher of sacred cows” (Salon), and self-described “radical-pragmatist” Stanley Crouch (1945–2020) was a columnist, novelist, essayist, and television commentator. A cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he is the author of eight critically acclaimed books.
Glenn Mott edited Crouch’s “American Perspectives” columns for over a decade.
A staff writer at The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb was a former student of Stanley Crouch.
Wynton Marsalis is an internationally acclaimed musician, composer, bandleader, and educator. He is the artistic director of Jazz at the Lincoln Center.

Table of Contents

Preface: Great Bouts to Come Glenn Mott xi

Introduction: The Championship Rounds Jelani Cobb xxi

Prologue of Blues and Swing to Be There, Way Down Yonder in New Orleans 1

Part 1 Outlaws and Gladiators 27

After the Rain 29

Look Out Moan We Standing Round 30

When Watts Burned 33

Diminuendo and Crescendo in Dues: Duke Ellington at Disneyland 37

Jazz Lofts: A Walk Through the Wild Sounds 58

Laughin' Louis Armstrong 65

Comrade, Comrade, Where You Been? 69

Big Star Calling 73

The King of Constant Repudiation 75

An Epic American Hero: Buddy Bolden 82

Thinking Big: Max Roach and Cecil Taylor 89

Cecil Taylor's Pianistic Fireworks 95

Great Escapes 100

Marvin Gaye's Interconnections 104

Saint Monk 108

Fighters 112

Ellington the Player 115

The "Scene" of Larry Neal 122

The Incomplete Turn of Larry Neal 126

Uptown Again 130

An Opera Based on Malcolm X 135

Premature Autopsies 142

Part 2 Swing Time 149

Los Angeles: Jazz 153

Invention of the Self: John Coltrane 155

Kansas City Swing and Shout 157

The Street: 1944 168

Lowdown and Lofty, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis 181

1000 Nights at the Village Vanguard 186

Remembering Buddy Rich 200

Fusionism: Wayne Shorter/Dexter Gordon 204

Black Like Huck 210

A Bird in the World 215

Miles Davits, Romantic Hero 230

Blues for Krazy Kat 234

Noir Americana 240

The Electric Company: How Technology Revived Ellington's Career 245

I've Got a Right to Tap My Feet Inside of the Machine 258

The Colossus: Sonny Rollins on the Bandstand 268

A Baroness of Blues and Swing 289

A Song for Lady Day 294

Part 3 In Defense of Taboos 299

Voluptuary 303

Harold Cruse 305

Invention on the Black Willie Blues 319

The Admiral and the Duke 330

Shut Up, Scarlett! 334

Bette Davis: The Greatest White Bitch of All 339

The Impeccable Sidney Poitier 344

Tarantino Enchained 351

Then and Now, I Am a Negro 364

12 Years a Slave 367

Goose-Loose Blues for the Melting Pot 373

The Lies That Blind: Black Girl / White Girl 387

Joyce Wein's Life and Death, a Model for All of Us 392

By Any Means Necessary 395

Blues for Note and Paint 400

Steel City Swing 407

Pimp's Last Mack: Death RE quest 424

Black and Tan Fantasy: A Letter from the Blues 426

Afterword Wynton Marsalis 433

Acknowledgments 439

Index 445

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/13/2022

Stanley Crouch’s development as a critic is on full display in this standout collection of 58 essays, described by Mott in his preface as a sort of “intellectual autobiography.” “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Dues” is a stunning account of Duke Ellington playing at Disneyland in 1973, while “The King of Constant Repudiation” delivers a takedown of what Crouch considered phony activism: he writes of critic LeRoi Jones that “he has almost completely traded-in a brilliant and complex talent for the most obvious hand-me-down ideas, which he projects in second-rate pool hall braggadocio.” Nor did Crouch sympathize with hollow notions of machismo—he writes in “Miles Davis, Romantic Hero” about finding in Davis’s performances “public visions of tenderness that were, finally, absolute rejections of everything silly about the version of masculinity that might hobble men in either the white or the Black world.” Most of all, it is Crouch’s abiding humanism that comes through, casting a critical eye on “those ‘race men,’ Black or white, who think they love Black people but only as receptacles for theories that use data to remove the mystery from life.” This is an essential collection for fans of Crouch’s writing, or anyone interested in the art of cultural criticism. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2022-06-25
A sterling collection of essays and other pieces by the eminent critic and music historian.

As Mott writes, Crouch (1945-2020) was “a physical intellectual up from the streets of South-Central L.A. who never lost the presentation of himself as a slightly dangerous and not-to-be-fucked-with individual.” There’s not much evidence of the street-fighting-man stance here, though when Crouch turns it on, as with a delightful takedown of Joseph Epstein, it can raze whole city blocks. Few writers were as well schooled in the history of jazz as was Crouch, and one of the many high points here is a restored chapter from the unpublished second volume of his life of Charlie Parker, which finds Parker in a musical duel with an offending Dizzy Gillespie: “His rage took him to altissimo extremes of the alto, notes from that register came like darts, then he swooped all the way down, his horn honking and grunting, then suddenly moved to smooth melodic lines, sensual and ethereal in their translucency.” The author explores the genius of John Coltrane, whose musical evolutions stand as “proof that a man can invent himself,” and he offers a thoughtful reflection on George Herriman, whose "Krazy Kat" comic strip never quite gave away his multiracial roots but that elevated comic art to the level of slapstick, a medium that “is as democratic as death, which plays by no rules other than its own.” Though keenly attuned to currents in Black intellectual life, Crouch is equally at home discussing John Ford’s movie The Searchers and the “knuckleheads” of every ethnicity that one sees on daytime TV. The author also deftly assesses the best and the worst of the Blaxploitation films and the evolving but incomplete thought of Malcolm X. The book features an introduction by Jelani Cobb and an afterword by Wynton Marsalis.

Testimony to a remarkable intellect and essential to any student of modern cultural criticism.

Kirkus Reviews