Someone forgot to tell Albert Murray that progress has disenchanted our world. Or rather Murray—writer, thinker, and philosopher of the blues—never believed in progress, in the strong sense, in the first place. How could he? “Even in the best of times,” Murray wrote, “the blues are only at bay.”
To be clear, “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not.” Blues music stomps the “blue devils” that go around inflicting misery on our lives. Thus the title of Murray’s classic study, Stomping the Blues. But thanks to the “blue devils” being, at best, only at bay, the stage is always set for heroic action. Hence Murray’s enchanted world. No amount of progress, technological or economic, will ever change the fact that “life is at bottom . . . a never-ending struggle,” which was fine for Murray:
Given up for adoption shortly after his birth, and raised in Magazine Point, on the outskirts of Mobile, Albert Murray (1916-2013) made something of himself by earning a bachelor’s degree at Tuskegee and then serving in the U. S. Army Air Force during 1943-62, retiring with the rank of major. Along the way he earned a master’s in literature on the G I Bill and cemented a lifelong friendship with Ralph Ellison. The collected correspondence between Murray and Ellison, Trading Twelves (2000), demonstrates how Ellison and Murray conversed as equals even as Ellison rocketed to literary fame in the 1950s while Murray labored in obscurity.
Murray, of course, was hard at work all those years, and in 1970 at the ripe age of 54, he published his first book, The Omni-Americans. A collection of essays that took on social science theories, protest fiction, and black separatism, Murray’s central thesis was that American culture is manifestly mulatto, and that black Americans are quintessential Americans compelled to live in a heroic mode: “The Underground Railroad was not only an innovation, it was also an extension of the American quest for democracy brought to its highest level of epic heroism.” This passage should be read together with Allan Bloom’s comment in The Closing of the American Mind regarding the increasingly anti-heroic tone of American life: “the contempt for the heroic is only an extension of the perversion of the democratic principle that denies greatness.” Murray’s literary career can be viewed as one long counterstatement to this perversion of liberal democracy, as he celebrates “great books,” “standards of excellence,” and, of course, “heroes.”
Primary among Murray’s culture heroes were jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Lester Young, artists who extended, elaborated, and refined the blues. Rejecting art for art’s sake, Murray argued that music, like literature, possesses a “telling effect,” conveying a story in rhythm and tune that supplies essential equipment for flourishing. Not all musicians are aware of the import of their craft, but true artists like Armstrong know. Riffing on Constance Rourke, Murray wrote that “Armstrong was . . . a culture hero. . . . [W]hat the elegant innovations of his trumpet and vocal improvisations added up to was the American musical equivalent of ‘emblems for a pioneer people who require resilience as a prime trait.’ ”
Blues-idiom music for Albert Murray is much more than just music. It’s also a goodtime ritual of resilience through improvisation, gracefully swinging your way through changes even as the “blue devils” nip at your heels. As such, it contributes to shaping the character of its practitioners and devotees. Murray’s writings on music, at their deepest, explore themes found in the classic political-philosophical tradition that extends from Plato to Rousseau and Nietzsche and that takes seriously music’s power to shape the character of individuals and societies: the relationship between instrumental music and text (blues music contradicts the text) and the relationship between rhythm and instrumental color (the syntax of the rhythm section guards against excessive emotionalism). All of which is to say that if Allan Bloom was right that “this is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it,” then Albert Murray is a guide for our time.
Against this backdrop, we can appreciate the importance of this first posthumous publication of Murray’s work. Murray Talks Music is a collection of interviews and articles ranging from discussions with musicians, writers, and professors, to a mid-1950s lecture that Major Murray delivered in French in Morocco, to liner notes Murray composed for Alvin Ailey’s Revelations/Blues Suite. Its editor, Paul Devlin, offers that Murray Talks Music “serves simultaneously as a coda . . .and as an introduction to [Murray’s] canonical texts.” True enough, but the collection also takes us directly to the center of Murray’s thought, including his clearest statement on the problematic power of music:
Precisely because music is a problematic power, “politically suspect,” however, the musician’s understanding of his social function becomes crucially important. Thus, Murray distinguishes the artist from the technician: “If he’s a true artist he takes his profession as seriously as a priest as poet-priest-medicine man. He provides basic existential equipment for living.”
Predictably, Murray’s untimely meditations on the use and abuse of music and the task of the true musician didn’t help make him popular inside or outside the academy. But his ideas have been assimilated by artists like Wynton Marsalis, who interviews Murray here, while Murray’s interpretation of jazz and blues deeply informs one of America’s premier cultural institutions, Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Devlin contends that Murray’s discussion with Marsalis “rises to become perhaps Murray’s most comprehensive interview.” Responding to Marsalis’s question about how “the discussion of art . . . can be applied to something as down-home . . . and functional as the blues,” Murray responds with one of his favorite ideas—namely, that folk and fine art are distinguished by “levels of control.” Folk art can be “deeply moving. . . . But the control and range is going to be limited.” With fine art, however, “you have . . . maximum control” and the attendant capacity “to deal with a wider range of experience.” When Marsalis mentions “the widely-held belief that . . . literacy actually destroys . . . the real authentic blues feeling in the jazz musician,” Murray definitively responds: “Why should Louis Armstrong not be the best trumpet player that he can possibly be?”
Murray’s emphasis on control was a theme throughout his career. In a 1959 letter to Ellison, Murray laments the association of jazz with primitivism and the necessity of pointing out that “jazz represented CONTROL not abandon.” He likewise wrote, in Stomping the Blues (1976), that “blues-idiom merriment” is distinguished by “control [while] sensual abandon is, like overindulgence in alcohol and drugs, only another kind of disintegration.”
But establishing control doesn’t mean stomping the blues with a grimace on your face. You stomp the blues with a smile and a healthy portion of sprezzatura. Nevertheless, the victory is no joke.
Maybe Murray’s interpretation of “blues-idiom merriment” was inevitable. After all, the jazz universe is populated by dukes (Ellington), counts (Basie), and founding fathers (“Pops,” Louis Armstrong). But you need only reflect for a moment on the unpopularity of this most American music to realize that nothing is inevitable when it comes to jazz, just as nothing is inevitable when it comes to heroic action. And in our time, heroic action not only deserves to be identified and celebrated, it needs to be identified and celebrated.
Aryeh Tepper has lectured at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia.
Correction: An earlier version of this story stated Murray was raised in rural Alabama. He was raised outside of Mobile.
