Stanley Crouch Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Stanley Crouch was an author and cultural critic known for his jazz criticism as well as for his biography of Charlie Parker.Crouch was a jazz drummer in his youth, a founder of the combo Black Music Infinity.

columnist for the Village Voice and the New York Daily News, a guest on NPR and Charlie Rose’s show, a jazz drummer, a founder of what became Jazz at Lincoln Center and mentor to Wynton Marsalis and many younger writers and musicians, an aficionado of baseball and American folklore and scourge of Toni Morrison, Spike Lee and Amira Baraka among others.At home, he read, wrote and listened to music.

NEW YORK -- Stanley Crouch, a contentious and influential critic, columnist and self-taught Renaissance man who in fiction and nonfiction was inspired by his knowledge and love of blues and jazz and his impulse to step over the line, died Wednesday at age 74.His wife, Gloria Nixon-Crouch, told The Associated Press that he died at a hospice in New York City.