Dear Readers,
Welcome to the second issue of The Omni-American Review (TOAR). At a time when social‑media hot-takes drive public discourse and the humanities are in retreat across the academy, TOAR plants a counter‑cultural flag on the hill of good writing that forges equipment for living in a complex world.
Good writing stylizes a sense of life, and the sense of life transmitted in these pages is Omni-American: pluralistic, receptive, resilient, joyful, triumphant. Albert Murray coined the term “Omni-American” in order to counter race-based reductions of American identity. Cutting across that categorical grain, Omni-Americans identify with human excellence wherever it shows up. For a time after the Civil Rights movement, it felt like this was the most natural thing in the world. We are wiser now.
Today, illiberal forces on the left and the right, fueled by resentful, sentimental convictions, again threaten that “the center cannot hold.” The classically liberal center has long been criticized as earnest but ineffectual—trusting in debate and procedural fairness, but naive regarding human nature and unable to defend its own. While there is much truth to this critique, in Albert Murray’s Omni-America the center doesn’t just hold, it swings.
The pieces gathered in TOAR’s second issue offer both nourishment for the soul and equipment for combating the resentful, sentimental extremes. Our inaugural issue was dedicated to Albert Murray’s life and career. The current issue takes several themes from Murray’s work as points of departure: regional American identities, the art of jazz, and blues-idiom affirmation. These themes are then extended via explorations of Western classical music and the contemporary soundscape, as well as jazz’s impact on the imagination of an early 20th century political liberal fighting for national self-determination in the Middle East.
The pieces gathered in TOAR’s second issue offer both nourishment for the soul and equipment for combating the resentful, sentimental extremes.
In “Seeing the South: From Both Sides and Neither,” John Shelton Reed—an East Tennessee–raised MIT and Columbia sociologist who has spent a lifetime studying “what Southerness is all about”—begins with Albert Murray’s South to a Very Old Place and a Harlem New Year’s Day “ritual” of Southern food to argue that “being outside the South does wonders for Southern self‑consciousness” and that this is “one way that Southerners resemble groups more often thought of as ‘ethnic.’” Reed’s own biography—“the upper South, in a town with an abnormally high concentration of Northern immigrants, one of them my own mother,” Civil War kin on “both sides and neither,” and a Yankee mother who sang “Marching Through Georgia”—shows how liminal lives heighten “regional consciousness.” TOAR’s inaugural issue featured writer Thomas Chatterton Williams recalling how Murray’s The Omni-Americans opened his eyes to “the idea that American society is based on… regionalisms (and) regional characters.” Reed’s perspectives elaborate and illustrate this Omni-American principle: the way to discovering the depth, humor and beauty of American life runs through particular regions and their cultural histories, not racial reductions.
Reed’s lush rendering of Southern subcultures throws into relief the thin but dominant abstractions targeted by three essays—Greg Thomas’s “Deracialization and the Omni-American Vision,” Adaam James Levin-Areddy’s “The Puns of Eden: From Culture to Kitsch,” and Jake Mackey’s “The Omni-American Tradition: An Affirmative Alternative to Resentment.” Enriching their critical vocabularies by drawing on the Omni-American tradition, Thomas attacks race as a fixed identity, Areddy exposes culture thinned into kitsch, and Mackey targets resentment-driven ideologies that reduce people to permanent victims.
In “Deracialization and the Omni-American Vision,” TOAR Senior Editor Greg Thomas confronts “the scourge of race and racialization” that has “poisoned American life from before the nation’s… founding” by turning to the Omni-American work of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray for a healthier understanding of American identity. Ellison envisions America as a “composite, pluralistic culture-of-cultures,” while Murray sets aside race as a “sterile category” in favor of understanding America as a “mulatto culture” where no one is “pure” and everyone is, in some measure, “part us” and “part them.” Together, the “Ellison–Murray continuum” underwrites a “deracialized Omni-American perspective” that affirms the possibility of moving beyond race itself.
Ellison envisions America as a “composite, pluralistic culture-of-cultures,” while Murray sets aside race as a “sterile category” in favor of understanding America as a “mulatto culture” where no one is “pure” and everyone is, in some measure, “part us” and “part them.” Together, the “Ellison–Murray continuum” underwrites a “deracialized Omni-American perspective” that affirms the possibility of moving beyond race itself.
“The Puns of Eden: From Culture to Kitsch,” by Adaam James Levin-Areddy, begins with the “puns” of Genesis 3 to show how “language and attention are a culture’s barrier to entry.” Building on Murray’s insights, he contrasts cultural “heroes,” who “plung[e] into the abyss to slay the dragon and reemerg[e] … with their innovations,” with “pretenders, resentful of the virtuosity they cannot achieve and of the culture that, in demanding their attention, humbles them,” for whom “the solution is kitsch.” Kitsch, a “patina of culture” made of “small, sugary doses of atmosphere,” slides into “instrumental art” that is “fixated on fixing humanity.” Areddy concludes with a warning that, it should be noted, is only intensified by AI slop: “A world that has forgotten how to read its own stories will still hunger for destruction, but it will have nothing left to break except itself.”
In “The Omni-American Tradition: An Affirmative Alternative to Resentment,” Jacob L. Mackey begins with the “resentment” and “identity-based grievance” now taught across much of the academy that “drives so much of American political and cultural conflict.” He presents Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans as an “affirmative alternative” to resentment grounded in cultural achievement. Whereas “protest writers” and “professional supplicants” simply “complain and negate and resent,” the “blues idiom” at the heart of the Omni-American tradition offers a “heroic response” to “the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence.” For Murray, hardship becomes “antagonistic cooperation,” like fire forging a sword, calling forth “self-reliance” and the “Omni-American blues hero” instead of ressentiment. Not the patina of soul, but real soul, the kind that grows stronger through struggle and suffering, is required.
Mackey’s essay was adapted from his lecture delivered at a January 2026 one-day seminar, “An Introduction to the Omni-American Tradition,” which I co-organized at the Azrieli Center for Israel Studies at Ben-Gurion University. You never know how ideas will travel, and after the seminar, a scholar in attendance, Dr. Uri Appenzeller, a Tel Aviv–based historian writing a biography of Odessa-born Ze’ev Jabotinsky—the Jewish nationalist and principled liberal who liked to say that “every man is a king”—approached me with Jabotinsky’s previously unpublished English-language fictional dialogue, “America Has a Rhythm.” Jabotinsky originally wrote the story in Russian after an exhilarating encounter with jazz during a 1926 fundraising tour across the U.S., before revising and translating it into English in 1932. We are pleased to feature that story in this issue.
Appenzeller’s introduction draws attention to how Jabotinsky’s “big ears” enabled him, already in a 1926 Yiddish article, to hear jazz as “a new kind of music that would also receive and record the noise of the modern movement and the inferno of thousands of machines in the factories, and even the sound of an airplane’s snore,” concluding that “America did not plead; it acted and triumphed through Jazz.” Six years before the Duke Ellington Orchestra recorded “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got that Swing),” Jabotinsky heard the music “swinging the machine,” an intuition that would be fully articulated some fifty years later in Albert Murray’s account of the “locomotive onomatopoeia” embedded in blues-idiom rhythms and then elaborated and extended by Joel Dinerstein’s analyses of jazz’s machine-age aesthetics.
In “America Has a Rhythm,” Jabotinsky folds his earlier interpretation into a fictional conversation among continental European intellectuals for whom the very idea of jazz as a potentially revolutionary power sounds bizarre, staging a sharp, funny debate about what America is and what its new music means. Jabotinsky lets one character argue that the true “spiritual influence” of the age is not high philosophy but cinema and jazz, while another responds as if the suggestion had floated in from another planet. In this brief dialogue, composed after his Harlem revelation, Jabotinsky moves through boys’ adventure stories, Poe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, movies, and dancing to jazz’s driving rhythm in order to question inherited fences of class, taste, and sexuality, and to wonder how far the global order can stretch before it begins to shake. Ultimately, Jabotinsky hoped it would shake sufficiently to make room for a Jewish state.
In this brief dialogue, composed after his Harlem revelation, Jabotinsky moves through boys’ adventure stories, Poe, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, movies, and dancing to jazz’s driving rhythm in order to question inherited fences of class, taste, and sexuality, and to wonder how far the global order can stretch before it begins to shake. Ultimately, Jabotinsky hoped it would shake sufficiently to make room for a Jewish state.
If Jabotinsky’s dialogue catches jazz at the moment when its machine‑age rhythm first crashes into European thought, “Albert Murray’s Blessing: Wynton Marsalis, Jazz, and American Nobility” returns to that same music on its native soil, featuring Wynton Marsalis’s acceptance remarks for the inaugural 2021 “Albert Murray Award for Omni-American Excellence” and my postscript. In his remarks, Marsalis—New Orleans–born trumpeter, bandleader, and managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center—recalls how Murray urged him to read Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, a retelling of the Biblical story of trial and character that opens into a way of thinking about what nobility might mean in America. It’s a big book, and Marsalis remembers asking his mentor, “Man, why did you have me read that?” To which Murray replied, “Because you have to know that the blessing is also a curse.” Out of that guidance emerges an American tradition of soulful nobility that jazz enacts on the bandstand and transmits on a frequency so deep that it speaks to anyone willing to listen closely.
If Murray and Marsalis help us to hear jazz as a vehicle for forming character and testing nobility, they are joining a long, if often neglected, intellectual tradition that treats music not as background or thoughtless entertainment but as a force shaping the souls of individuals and the character of communities. That tradition, stretching from classical philosophy through the Hebrew Bible to modern composers and critics, is one of the conversations that The Omni-American Review intends to cultivate and extend. “Deep Listening in a Chaotic Soundscape: Thinking about Music with Dan Asia” situates the contemporary concert hall, synagogue, and city street inside that larger story. Composed as an interview, I ask Asia, a serious working composer, about music, transcendence, time, and the disciplines of listening that can help us distinguish sound from noise and make sense of our overloaded sonic environment. From Heschel’s “architecture of time” and Berio’s stylized portrait of sonic clutter in “Sinfonia” to Asia’s defense of music as a high art that demands active, attentive listening, the conversation invites us to listen again, and more deeply, to the worlds of sound we already inhabit.
If Murray and Marsalis help us to hear jazz as a vehicle for forming character and testing nobility, they are joining a long, if often neglected, intellectual tradition that treats music not as background or thoughtless entertainment but as a force shaping the souls of individuals and the character of communities. That tradition, stretching from classical philosophy through the Hebrew Bible to modern composers and critics, is one of the conversations that The Omni-American Review intends to cultivate and extend.
The issue’s final essay, Herman Beavers’s “Down into the Maelstrom Swinging: Albert Murray’s Fakebook of the Chaotic Imagination,” takes us home to where we began: a maelstrom of a moment animated by resentful, sentimental extremes. Adapted from a 2016 keynote at a day‑long colloquium on Murray hosted by Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies and organized by TOAR Senior Editor Greg Thomas, the essay examines Murray’s novels, a topic that Clifford Thompson also explored in our inaugural issue.
Beavers begins with the working musician’s fakebook, a spiral‑bound cache of lead sheets that offers security on the bandstand but, when clung to too tightly, leaves the musician unable to venture beyond the comfort zone of what’s explicitly on the page. He then contrasts this will to safety with the risk of improvisation embodied by Murray’s blues‑idiom heroes. Reading Murray through Poe’s “Descent into the Maelstrom,” Beavers invokes “the maelstrom” as a “space of vortical pandemonium that has the power to imperil us, but also to unravel the fabric of time and space itself.” It is a cousin of “turbulence” in which “abrupt changes, discontinuities, uncertainty, randomness, and turbulence are basic forms of system behavior” that “may just as easily lead to new and amazing possibilities as to negative system disruption and collapse.”
For the musician who clings to the fakebook, like the individual who clings to a rarefied ready-made ideology, volatility invites retreat into “a closed system” in which “entropy always tends to increase.” Murray’s blues‑idiom heroes, by contrast, treat the written musical chart as only “a momentary stay against confusion.” For them, it’s time to improvise, and the maelstrom becomes “the site of creativity and self-invention.” Murray’s work thus invites “a riffing-the-blues disposition toward the ‘rough times’ that beset all human existence,” transforming “drag” into energy and providing Omni-American equipment for swinging through life’s inevitable challenges with grace, gratitude, and strength.