Crouch, a highly visible commentator and McArthur Foundation "genius" award-winner whose strong opinions and sometimes blustery manner have frequently provoked controversy, was dismissed after the publication of "Putting the White Man in Charge" in Jazz Times' April issue.
In the column, he wrote that white critics have elevated white jazz musicians "far beyond their abilities in order to allow white writers to make themselves feel more comfortable about evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated."
Crouch is certainly knowledgeable about jazz and the ways race is actually lived in America (as opposed to the way polemicists portray it), but he's also an iconoclast. It seems he often writes the first thing that pops into his find, because in many of his essays in years past he's explicitly made the point that the most important aesthetic assessments of jazz music have come from white critics, and that whites have been the primary promoters of jazz throughout its history. I guess he's changed his mind, though I haven't read the essay in question.
Like I said, I have often enjoyed Crouch's essays. But his New York Daily News column is god-awful on most days. It's like he's just going through the motions. Maybe his long-in-the-works biography of Charlie Parker will be worthwhile.
