Stanley Crouch, the fiercely iconoclastic social critic who elevated the invention of jazz into a metaphor for the indelible contributions that Black people have made to American democracy, died on Wednesday at a hospital in the Bronx.

A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.

All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.

By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

(Mr. Crouch disdained the expression African-American, saying: “I use Negro, black American, Afro-American. And I might throw brown American in eventually. I don’t use African-American because I have friends who are from Africa. But I do use Afro-American, because that means it’s derived but it’s not direct.”).

He wrote of the jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie:.

At Claremont, he established Black Music Infinity, a band made up of young musicians from the area, all of whom went on to become noted avant-garde figures, among them the saxophonists David Murray and Arthur Blythe and the bassist Mark Dresser.

Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.

In 2019 he was named a Jazz Master for jazz advocacy by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Crouch said his mother had been instrumental in his development as a writer, teaching him the alphabet and spelling before he enrolled in school, and introducing him to jazz.

Crouch responded by embracing an incipient black nationalism.

Marsalis’s albums and become his primary artistic consultant in generating a neo-classicist movement in jazz and helping to establish Jazz at Lincoln Center.

“All young jazz musicians coming up today realize that they have to know blues and swing — which are at the core of all jazz, from Armstrong to Marsalis — and this simply wasn’t the case 15 years ago,” Peter Watrous, a former jazz critic for The New York Times, said.

In exhorting Black people to shoulder responsibility and debate reasonably, she wrote, Mr

In 2003, he was dismissed by JazzTimes after publishing a column under the title “Putting the White Man in Charge,” in which he argued that white music critics were overly eager to promote jazz musicians of their own race, thus allowing themselves “to make themselves feel more comfortable about being in the role of evaluating an art from which they feel substantially alienated.”

Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking

Crouch ultimately wove together his celebration of jazz and his vision of American democracy

Jazz, he wrote, is “the highest American musical form because it is the most comprehensive, possessing an epic frame of emotional and intellectual reference, sensual clarity and spiritual radiance.”