Down into the Maelstrom Swinging: Albert Murray’s Fakebook of the Chaotic Imagination

Omni: having unrestricted, universal range
	Coda: a concluding passage, well-proportioned clause
	On piano someone plays a boogie-woogie run:
	Omni-Albert Murray   Omni    Omni    Albert Murray
					--Elizabeth Alexander, “Omni-Albert Murray”

Adapted from a 2016 keynote at a day‑long colloquium on Murray hosted by Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies

In their book, Do You Know…? The Jazz Repertoire in Action, sociologists Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker conduct research to understand how it is that musicians who may never have met, who may never have played together, and who have had no time to rehearse before a gig can play what needs to be played at a particular place at a particular time. Becker and Faulkner discovered that the musicians they studied were able to “play whatever people who hired them want[ed] them to play, within the limits of their knowledge and abilities.”¹ What was the secret to this remarkable musical adaptability? 

As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, completing his dissertation in the 1950s, sociologist Becker moonlighted as a piano player in the Bobby Laine Trio. He recalls standing out on the sidewalk between sets one night with his bandmates, when a man drove up and opened the trunk of his car to reveal an 8.5 x 11-inch spiral notebook that contained an illegal photocopy of hundreds of musical arrangements. Realizing what he was seeing, he paid $25 for the notebook on the spot. He’d paid what would have been a hefty sum for a struggling graduate student, and obtained what musicians refer to as a fakebook.

In his early days playing gigs, trombonist and composer, Bill Lowe recalls that an older musician might start playing a tune and “the melodies would be [recognizable], but the bridges would be where you’d find the variation” and because the bridge “was the hardest thing to master,” fakebooks “would help [younger, less experienced musicians] keep up.” But musicians who relied too heavily on their fakebook often came face-to-face with its limitations. In Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Paul Berliner asserts that young musicians who adhered too closely to the changes in the fakebook, that is, those who played what was on the lead sheet and only that, could often draw the ire of older musicians. “Although veterans can be generous initially,” Berliner writes, “they expect their demonstrations to be but a point of departure for learners’ independent initiatives in pursuit of a personal style.” Berliner describes how one “novice was rebuffed when he resisted such work and pressed an expert for more material. ‘My voicings are my voicings,’ his friend replied roughly, ‘and I’ve already shown you enough to get started. Go off and find your own voicings the same way I did, just by sitting at the piano and trying them all kinds of ways until you find the ones you like.’”²

What seems clear is that fakebooks, while they are coveted by young musicians, can never be viewed as a final destination. It is one of several systems of storage and preservation (e.g., lead sheets, records, and memory) musicians employ to create a musical repertoire that is serviceable for all occasions and settings. But having a fakebook obligates the young musician to realize that playing jazz is finally a matter of finding one’s own voice, not imitating someone else’s. For the weekend musician content to play in venues where the audience only cares about dancing or is altogether indifferent to the music playing as they dine, a fakebook is a source of steady work and a tool for holding boredom at bay. But for the jazz musician facing the question of how to make an original contribution to the larger (and complicated) conversation, the fakebook is best thought of as “a momentary stay against confusion,” a point of embarkation, a proverbial leap of faith.

For the weekend musician content to play in venues where the audience only cares about dancing or is altogether indifferent to the music playing as they dine, a fakebook is a source of steady work and a tool for holding boredom at bay. But for the jazz musician facing the question of how to make an original contribution to the larger (and complicated) conversation, the fakebook is best thought of as “a momentary stay against confusion,” a point of embarkation, a proverbial leap of faith.

So why, in this context, did I choose to include the term “maelstrom” in my title? The word gestures to Albert Murray’s fearless descent into the workings of American culture and to his love of swing music. 

The Maelstrom

I first started thinking about the maelstrom about eight years ago in an essay about Richard Wright’s revision of Edgar Allan Poe’s concept of horror. Recalling two of Poe’s short stories, “Descent into the Maelstrom” and “MS Found in a Bottle,” the maelstrom represents a space of vortical pandemonium that has the power to imperil us, but also to unravel the fabric of time and space itself. As such, the maelstrom is the cousin of turbulence. As the field of stochastics describes it, turbulence often results from trivial disturbances that grow in complexity until they are major disruptions of a system. Scientists working in the field of stochastics argue that “abrupt changes, discontinuities, uncertainty, randomness, and turbulence are basic forms of system behavior and may just as easily lead to new and amazing possibilities as to negative system disruption and collapse”³

But the maelstrom, or the vortex, depending on which term you prefer, is also a site of tremendous hybridity, where the forces acting on objects are so great that new combinations of matter become possible. For all its destructive power, I want to think about Albert Murray in relation to the maelstrom because he so often turned an unflinching gaze on American complexity. Consider his conversation with Robert Penn Warren in South to a Very Old Place, where the poet and critic remarks that slavery “was an awful thing, just a terrible thing,” and continues:

Penn Warren’s point is not lost on Murray, and he opts to see his descent into the maelstrom of the Southern past within the context of what he refers to as “antagonistic cooperation.” In Murray’s The Hero and the Blues, we find a comment that seems to take direct aim at Warren’s observation when he states, “the writer who deals with the experience of oppression in terms of the dynamics of antagonistic cooperation works in a context that includes the whole range of human motivation and possibility.”⁵

Though Murray would likely not use any of these terms to describe either his upbringing in Mobile, Alabama, or his subsequent education at Tuskegee Institute, one of the underlying messages in Murray’s writing is that to be black and Southern is to be someone who can embrace—if not embody outright—turbulence and discord.⁶ That condition is reflected in Isabel Wilkerson’s account in The Warmth of Other Suns of everyday interactions in the Jim Crow South, where “a black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first. A black person could not be the first to offer to shake a white person’s hand…[and where t]he consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal.”⁷ And it is also evident in the correlation that Stuart and E.M. Beck establish between racial violence and the volatility of the agricultural market, where the uncertainty governing everyday social relations means that they, too, are by turns extremely volatile and chaotic. And let me go a bit further: with all the regulatory systems in place to govern race relations, to keep blacks “in their place,” the Jim Crow South constituted a negative feedback loop. 

Far from taking a passive approach to the question of negative forms of feedback, Albert Murray’s writing is the very embodiment of iteration. Though critics who disdain his work often complain about his propensity to repeat himself, to return time and again to the same, well-worn concepts, reading back through the Murray canon, I would argue that his work “simultaneously evokes previous patterns and strategically veers away from them.” His work is self-referential, and like jazz, it is also deeply invested in acts of creative re-invention. As a foundational concept in chaos theory, iteration “involves the continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has come before.”⁸ According to Gordon Slethaug in his book Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, iteration is both “an important foundation stone in chaos theory” and “an inherent part of the reading and writing process in literature, and fundamental to art and architecture.” Iteration is characteristic of a literary work, Slethaug argues, that “self-consciously explores [its] own antecedents and limits.”⁹

Though critics who disdain his work often complain about his propensity to repeat himself, to return time and again to the same, well-worn concepts, reading back through the Murray canon, I would argue that his work “simultaneously evokes previous patterns and strategically veers away from them.” His work is self-referential, and like jazz, it is also deeply invested in acts of creative re-invention.

Further, iteration is also essential to our work as literary scholars, for what does our work involve but acts of reading and re-reading, where with each textual encounter, we see things that escaped notice in a previous reading, respond to a scene that we glossed on first glance, or suddenly grasp the nuances of a text that flummoxed us only moments before. In Murray’s novel, The Seven League Boots, a character describes the iterative nature of playing music when he observes, “Everybody’s always carrying on about how hip and out front this band has always been; but man, this stuff we play is also historical. Everything this band plays is flesh and blood and history.”¹⁰ Hearing this, the protagonist, Scooter, recalls his college roommates’ comment that “the best way to get to the meaning of a poem was to see it as part of an ongoing conversation.” Hence, iteration is as likely to happen in social encounters as it is in moments of solitude, and thus, each new articulation of his ideas, torqueing them for a specific purpose, is standard procedure in Albert Murray’s work. 

In Murray’s 1973 volume, The Hero and the Blues, he describes the blues idiom as an essential element of not only the African American literary tradition, but the mainstream American tradition as well. What he says is worth repeating at length:

Albert Murray’s career can be understood as a valiant struggle against the onset of entropy. The relevance of the fakebook lies in the fact that musicians who lack imagination, commitment, and inventiveness will look at lead sheets containing melodies and chord progressions and see a space of security, a way to be on the bandstand and avoid mistakes, rather than a springboard from which to take a leap of faith. Such an approach renders the fakebook a closed system; it becomes a site of entropy because the musician’s unwillingness to do what is necessary to develop a distinctive voice, where she fashions her own approach to phrasing, leads to a fall into randomness. As it is defined in the field of thermodynamics, the concept of entropy is asserted in the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics, which states that “in a closed system entropy always tends to increase,”¹² meaning that “if some energy is lost for useful purposes in every heat exchange, there will eventually come a time when no heat reservoir exists anywhere in the universe, leading to “heat death,” or a final state of equilibrium in which “there is no longer any heat differential to do work or sustain life.”¹³

Albert Murray’s career can be understood as a valiant struggle against the onset of entropy. The relevance of the fakebook lies in the fact that musicians who lack imagination, commitment, and inventiveness will look at lead sheets containing melodies and chord progressions and see a space of security, a way to be on the bandstand and avoid mistakes, rather than a springboard from which to take a leap of faith.

Hence, Murray’s insistence that American life becomes legible when read through the blues idiom relates to his sense that the expenditures of ideological heat to be found in sociological treatments of black life were conceptual dead-ends., Albert Murray had peeped the game, describing the Moynihan Report as “a notorious example of the use of the social science survey as a propaganda vehicle to promote a negative image of Negro life in the United States”¹⁴. He asserts further:

However, in South to a Very Old Place, Murray reflects on his education at Mobile Country Training School and “the steel-blue actuality” that no matter what sort of difficulties Jim Crow may have presented, the old heads insisted that youth coming up in Alabama had no right to “expect to get away with blaming any of your own personal shortcomings and failures on anybody else, including the white folks—least of all the white folks.” 

But it should not be lost on us that Murray’s assertion is iterative, on the one hand, echoing ideas that have been articulated in African American literature, but on the other, incorporating them into his argument regarding the prospect for entropic failure to be found in sociological treatments of black life.¹⁶ From their standpoint, black life in the south thrived in spite of rather than in the shadow of white supremacist social and legal practices, an attitude on display in one of Ellison’s early short stories, “A Coupla Scalped Indians.” The story features two protagonists, Buster and Riley, young black boys growing up under Jim Crow, who decide that they will take all the tests in the Boy Scout Handbook despite not being able to be part of a Boy Scout troop. When Riley says, “You know we gotta stop cussing and playing the dozens if we’re going to be Boy Scouts. Those white boys don’t play that mess,”¹⁷ consider Buster’s reply:

Buster eschews the Cartesian binary of either/or in favor of a both/and relationship to white conceptions of social conduct. Which is to say that the boys are not ignorant of the restrictions imposed outside the color line, but neither has elected to be confined or defined by them. 

 In his first novel, Train Whistle Guitar, we find Murray fashioning his own chord changes on Ellison’s Buster and Riley. The novel’s narrator, Scooter, engages in a constitutive act of self-naming that quickly becomes something more:

The word “also” appears seventeen times in the two-paragraph interlude between the first and second chapters. But scanning the breadth of Murray’s fiction, we find the word “also” constitutes a motif that runs through all four of the novels, as it suggests that life in the South, far from being characterized by foreclosures and obstacles, insists upon the need for elaboration and extension. As a reiteration of Ellison’s Buster and Riley, Scooter and Little Buddy Marshall reject an either/or approach to living; their desire to be baseball players, buckskin pioneers, wilderness scouts and most of all, individuals who ramble from coast to coast hopping freight trains, means that the boys eschew the limitations that come with knowing one’s place, as whites have assigned it, opting to embrace multiple identities. In this sense, they seek to achieve both physical and conceptual mobility while rejecting the idea that black life in the South is synonymous with immobility and pathology.²⁰ Moreover, Murray’s concept of the briarpatch is, in my view, his way of conceptualizing the maelstrom, which, contrary to common assumption, is the site of creativity and self-invention. 

Though Murray would likely not use terms like “maelstrom,” “turbulence,” or “iteration” to describe either his upbringing in Mobile, Alabama, or his subsequent education at Tuskegee Institute, one of the underlying messages in Murray’s writing is that to be black and Southern is to be someone who can embrace turbulence and discord.²¹ My point here is not that we should view Murray’s description of his upbringing in Alabama as evidence of false consciousness. Rather, propose that his resistance to the imposition of closed systems arises out of his sense that social relations in a space so impacted by the volatility of agricultural markets were bound to be volatile as well. It is for this reason that Murray would come to reiterate his definition of the blues idiom; he would argue that if black folks were subject to the “drag” produced by racial turbulence, they possessed “a riffing-the-blues disposition toward the ‘rough times’ that beset all human existence”²², and through that attitude, transformed “drag” into swing. 

Murray’s Novels and Crouch’s Ear

For a long time, I could not understand what Murray was up to in his novels. I found them to be entertaining, but their deeper significance alluded me. It seemed to me that Scooter, the hero whose exploits we follow from boyhood to manhood, already knew all he needed to know to be able to survive in any situation he found himself. Time and again, Scooter is in a position that is characterized by almost unlimited access, despite the fact that he discovers that his real mother, Miss Tee, gave him up to be raised by his “parents” after becoming pregnant by a man long gone. Indeed, at no point does the narrative provide us with a single moment when Scooter is faced with indecision to the point of inaction. Nor am I alone in this response to the novels. In a review that first appeared in The New York Times Book Review, novelist and critic Charles Johnson described The Seven League Boots as “a novel without tension.”²³ Henry Louis Gates characterizes the novel as “the least autobiographical of Murray’s three (at that point) novels,” asserting that “its protagonist leaves Alabama with his bass (which he’s learned to play over the course of his senior year in college) and joins up with a legendary jazz band—one not unlike Ellington’s. The band is blissfully free of quarrels and petty jealousies, and Murray’s alter ego, Scooter, inspires only affection in those he encounters.”²⁴

But re-reading all four novels (Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, The Seven League Boots, and The Magic Keys), Scooter’s character only makes sense if one relinquishes the notion that Murray is working within a strict definition of the realist mode. As Murray notes in The Hero and the Blues, “Realism in literature, after all, is only an esthetic device, and it is no less dependent upon craftsmanship than are the devices necessary to the concoction of fantasy.”²⁵ Though Murray’s fiction has realist components, given all the correspondences between his Alabama past and Scooter’s—notably the fact that both attend Mobile County Training Schooland Tuskegee Institute on scholarship—ultimately, we are wrong to equate Scooter with a singular consciousness. To be sure, each of the novels is narrated in the first-person, but it is not, as one might have it, first-person singular but rather first-person collective. 

I’m intrigued, then, by the fact that Stanley Crouch, who perhaps comes closest to reiterating Murray’s phrasing, pitch, and rhetorical timbre in his own writing, would consider Murray both his mentor and a man “whose novels he deplored.” To be sure, Scooter’s likability and the high levels of proficiency and acceptance he achieves as a scholar, musician, and (in what strikes me as the closest Murray comes to authorial self-indulgence) lover can test the limits of veracity. But Murray’s point is not, as Crouch would have it, that Scooter’s life is free of all conflict, worry, deprivation, and terror; rather, the novels are iterative instantiations of the blues idiom.  In a manner that recalls Kenneth Burke, the character of Scooter is a personal embodiment of his community’s performative ethos, which insists that one consider “the dancing of an attitude” as normal procedure. As Murray declares in The Omni-Americans

Consider, then, what I consider to be one of Crouch’s most provocative essays, “Blues to Be Constitutional” (1995), where he asserts that the “Constitution is also a blues document because it takes a hard swinging position against the sentimentality residing in the idea of a divine right of kings. Sentimentality is excess and so is any conception of an inheritance connected to a sense of the chosen people”²⁷. He states further,

While I would insist that Crouch’s ideas are his own, it is difficult to deny that he is playing changes from the Murray fakebook. And for good reason; like Murray, Crouch sees the Constitution as the guarantor against the likelihood of the United States becoming a closed system. In spite of the fact that it was composed in the main by men who owned slaves, the Constitution represents what Murray calls the “blues-as-such,” because its most consistent—and optimistic—feature is that it was designed to remain nimble enough that even as American history evinces the truth in poet Carolyn Forche’s assertion that “there is nothing one man will not do to another,” it can be amended to fit the country’s changing circumstances. 

Outchorus: The Iterative Space of the Maelstrom

As I scan the landscape of African American literature, I find my gaze settling on numerous examples of writers who self-consciously engage the “antecedents and limits” of Murray’s aesthetic commitments. In so doing, these writers assert that salvation, both individual and collective, is to be found in the iterative space of the maelstrom. Robert Hayden, Toni Morrison, James Alan McPherson, Charles Johnson, and Ayana Mathis, just to name a few, exemplify Murray’s response to the reductionism of social science binaries. Their works affirm Murray’s belief that the blues idiom, a product of the disequilibrium that can plague us, allows the black American to enter the maelstrom and “remain fixated on his higher aspirations in spite of the fact that human existence is so often mostly a low-down dirty shame.” 

1. Robert R. Faulkner and Howard S. Becker, Do You Know…? The Jazz Repertoire in Action (1976), p. 15. ↩︎
2. Paul Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, p. 89. ↩︎
3. Gordon Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, p. 62. ↩︎
4. Robert Penn Warren, South to a Very Old Place, p. 32, italics in original. ↩︎
5. This could be why Murray is so insistent on the ineffectual nature of protest fiction.  As he states in The Hero and the Blues: 
   Almost every gesture in American protest fiction seems designed to convince the Reader of one thing above everything else: Dragons bring only terror and devastation. But if this is so, then the writers of protest fiction can only be agents of sheer nonsense. They are professional supplicants, who are in the grotesquely pathetic position of making
   Urgent requests which they cannot possibly believe will be honored by the enemy. (48)
   Hence, Murray’s critique of both Richard Wright and James Baldwin is that, for all the obvious talents of both writers, they were involved in a fool’s errand, which amounted to change the villain by “trying to put the bad mouth on him.” ↩︎
6. We come to understand the magnitude of such a challenge when we view the South as a site of social turbulence, a point underscored in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, which describes the laws passed in various part of the Post-Reconstruction South to enforce Jim Crow laws and to reinforce black inferiority.  Wilkerson writes:
   By 1905, every southern state, from Florida to Texas, outlawed blacks from sitting next to whites on public conveyances.  The following year, Montgomery, Alabama went a  step further and required streetcars for whites and streetcars for blacks.  By 1909, a new curfew required blacks to be off the streets by 10 pm in Mobile, Alabama.  By 1915,  black and white textile workers in South Carolina could not use the same “water bucket, pails, cups, dippers, or glasses,” work in the same room, or even go up or down a stairway at the same time. (41)
   Wilkerson goes on to describe statutes outlawing a colored person and a white person playing checkers, even a courthouse with a white Bible and a black Bible for witnesses to swear to the truth on (not that blacks could testify against whites). As if these legal measures were not enough, social decorum in the south frowned, consider consider Wilkerson’s account of everyday interactions in which “a black person could not contradict a white person or speak unless spoken to first.” ↩︎
7. Elizabeth Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, p. 45. ↩︎
8. Briggs and Peat, quoted in Gordon Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, p. 124. ↩︎
9. Ibid, 124. ↩︎
10. Albert Murray, The Seven League Boots, p. 32. ↩︎
11. Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues, p. 36. ↩︎
12. N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound, p. 38. ↩︎
13. Ibid, p. 39. ↩︎
14. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans, p. 27. ↩︎
15. Ibid, p. 26., italics in original. ↩︎
16. Much has been made of the fact that because of their relationship dating back to their days at Tuskegee, Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison seemed to be reading the same lead sheet for much of their careers.  It is clear reading Trading Twelves, that Ellison and Murray’s correspondence was essential to the artistic maturation of both men. ↩︎
17. Ralph Ellison, “A Coupla Scalped Indians,” p. 71. ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. Albert Murray, Train Whistle Guitar, p. 4. ↩︎
20. Though it is easy to link turbulence with biological or physical systems, turbulence also constitutes “an inherent part of human society and individual action as well” (63). James Gleick describes turbulence as “a mess of disorder at all scales, small eddies within large ones.  It is unstable.  It is highly dissipative, meaning that turbulence drains energy and creates drag.  It is motion turned random’” (63).  One can see why scholars working in the humanities and social sciences would be attracted to turbulence and stochastics since they “refer to chaotic conditions caused by chance and randomness; they also serve as a metaphor for the confusion and uncertainty that sometimes accompanies unpredictability and…the relationship between order and disorder” (64).
    ↩︎
21.  We come to understand the magnitude of such a challenge reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, in which Wilkerson describes Southern statutes outlawing a colored person and a white person playing checkers). Wilkerson’s account underscores the manner in which “the consequences for the slightest misstep were swift and brutal” (45).  Reading Wilkerson’s book alongside that of sociologists Stuart Tolnay and E.M. Beck in their book Festival of Violence, which studies the “era of lynching” in the South between 1880-1938, they find a high correlation between the price of cotton and racial violence.  Tolnay and Beck find that when cotton prices were high during this period, lynchings were nearly non-existent, but in those instances when there was downturn in the price offered for a particular year’s cotton crop, lynchings increased accordingly.  ↩︎
22. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans, p. 59. ↩︎
23. Charles Johnson, Keeping the Blues at Bay, The New York Times Book Review, p. 35. ↩︎
24. Ibid. ↩︎
25. Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues, p. 20.—A narrative seems realistic because it was designed (and polished!) to create that effect. And unedited film or tape recording of people acting perfectly naturally is not likely to create the effect of “slice of life” realism at all. The effect it creates might well be that of  tedious unreality. The truth may often be stranger than fiction, but objective documentation is seldom as interesting and effective as skillful dramatic fabrication. ↩︎
26. Albert Murray, The Omni-Americans, p. 59. ↩︎
27. Stanley Crouch, “Blues to Be Constitutional,” p. 158. ↩︎
28. Ibid, p. 159. ↩︎