“Why are you putting me with those guys?” an incredulous Albert Murray exclaimed to me, a confused young Black American intellectual who also happened to love jazz. With fear and trembling but with the exuberance of youth, I called Mr. Murray to ask him to participate in a book project. I envisioned a work in which I would interview him, Lerone Bennett Jr., and John Henrik Clarke and detail their influence on Afro-American thought.
For me, back then in the mid-1990s, the three men reflected varying streams in Black American intellectual life: Murray, the pro-American aesthetic philosopher of jazz and the blues; Bennett, a Black American historian, editor of Ebony magazine, and political theoretician whose book The Challenge of Blackness I found compelling; and Clarke, a black nationalist folk historian, beloved in Harlem for centering African identity as a source of proud origin. While these descriptions are somewhat precise, I later realized that I proposed such a project to resolve a tension within myself over how to evaluate history, culture, and politics in relation to my people’s struggle. I also eventually understood why Murray was wary of my book idea, given his emphasis on cultural excellence over racial essentialism and the perennial power of art over rigid ideology and politics.
My intellectual confusion over the best vision and strategies for Black American advancement might be attributed to the era of my upbringing. I was born the year of JFK’s assassination and was a tiny tyke during the civil rights and Black Power movements. I came into my intellectual awareness during the 1970s when the embers of black political radicalism and black nationalism were still flickering. By the time I entered college in 1981, those radicals and nationalists and their ideas had largely taken cover inside the academy. My extracurricular study included listening to Malcolm X’s and Louis Farrakhan’s fiery speeches.
I became aware of the work of Albert Murray only after graduating from Hamilton College in 1985. I had been enamored with jazz since my sophomore year at Tottenville High School, when I was greatly moved by my peers’ stage band performance. I was so inspired that I began playing alto sax. By the time I began studying Mr. Murray’s work (and the oeuvre of his friend and fellow Tuskegee student Ralph Ellison), I’d been listening to jazz avidly for over a decade. Even so, I remained intrigued by black nationalism as a source of resistance and self-determination in the face of the horrific legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s also true that my love of the playing of jazz saxophonists racialized as white, such as Phil Woods, Paul Desmond, and Zoot Sims, precluded my ever becoming an anti-white racist. However, I still flirted with notions such as the black roots of ancient Egypt and Egypt being the fount of Western civilization. I even visited Murray once, wearing a jacket with an African mud cloth print—wrong move.
He ribbed me mercilessly.
“Man, don’t you know that when Nelson Mandela comes to the United States, he wears a Western suit?”
“I’m the one who got Stanley Crouch out of his dashiki!”
“Don’t you know that we follow Greenwich Mean Time?”
After hearing and thinking about such comments, I slowly understood what time it really was. Fashion statement aside, Murray was implying that it was foolish to think of Black American culture as primarily originating in Africa. On the contrary, a Black American orientation to time, power, and style, as with most Americans, is Western, rooted in modernity, with a predominant European influence.
Murray was implying that it was foolish to think of Black American culture as primarily originating in Africa. On the contrary, a Black American orientation to time, power, and style, as with most Americans, is Western, rooted in modernity, with a predominant European influence.
As a longtime educator who taught at several colleges and universities, Mr. Murray put up with my confusion. He spent many hours with me in person and on the phone because he knew I adored jazz, was a serious student of Black American culture, and was a budding writer. During one of these conversations, he referred me to a close friend and protégé. “You should reach out to Michael James. He’d kick your ass. Unlike some people masquerading as jazz critics, he actually knew those artists.”
Mike sure did. As Duke Ellington’s nephew, he hung out and traveled with the Ellington Orchestra back in the late fifties as a teen. Johnny Hodges was his godfather. Mike was in the studio for Duke’s 1962 recording with John Coltrane when, as he recalled, Coltrane’s interpretation of “In a Sentimental Mood” greatly impressed Hodges, the saxophonist most identified with performing that song in previous decades. Mike seemed to know all the legends of jazz personally. During our conversations, I would marvel at how, no matter whom I mentioned, he’d say where they were from and provide biographical and musicological details that contextualized their artistry. He was also extremely well-read on American and world history and literature and was a lay specialist in Black American culture to boot. Mike took me deep into the historical, literary, and cultural woodshed regarding the blues idiom tradition of affirming life and confronting its ups and downs through wise improvisation. Mike loved to quote this passage from the conclusion of Murray’s The Hero and the Blues
. . . perhaps above all else the blues-oriented hero image represents the American embodiment of the man whose concept of being able to live happily ever afterward is most consistent with the moral of all dragon-encounters: Improvisation is the ultimate human (i.e., heroic) endowment.
Mike also helped me clarify the African past that Afrocentrists romanticized. As a continent with many peoples and languages, there isn’t one African culture per se. After he urged me to read The History of the World by J.M. Roberts, I became aware of the sweep of human civilizations and the extent of slavery in human societies for millennia. Regarding chattel slavery across the Atlantic, Mike referred me to Hugh Thomas’ magisterial The Slave Trade, which detailed not only the treachery of “the Portuguese, the English, the French, the Spaniards, the Dutch, and the North Americans” but also of the African monarchs and merchants who participated in the trade on the coasts of the African rivers that course into the Atlantic. As written on the jacket cover
Hundreds of thousands of Africans participated in the trade, but especially the kings in Ashanti, Dahomey, Benin, Loango, Congo, and Angola. . . Slavery in Africa resulted from captivity in war, from kidnapping or raids on neighbors, or sometimes from judicial decisions after crimes.
So, Mike did kick my butt intellectually on many occasions—often referencing the work of Murray, the man he called “The Professor”—but somewhat more gently than Murray did! Yet the greatest contribution Mike made to my intellectual development, other than graduate-level conversations on the work of writers such as Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mann, Malraux, Dostoevsky, Constance Rourke, and Kenneth Burke, was his description of what I call the Ellison-Murray Continuum.
This continuum of cultural and aesthetic insight grounds the blues and jazz as not only grand musical contributions by Afro-Americans but also as embodiments of our lifestyle and philosophical orientation as Americans. Blues music helped us face adversity and the tragic dimensions of the human condition without resigning ourselves to pessimism and a victim mentality. Blues and jazz remain “triumphant music” that can help us strive with hope and optimism for a better day. When asked to define the blues idiom, Murray responded:
It’s an attitude of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face of challenge. It means you acknowledge that life is a low-down dirty shame yet confront that fact with perseverance, with humor, and, above all, with elegance.
Albert Murray taking the time to explain his heroic aesthetic philosophy, which argued for the universal value of blues, jazz, and Black American culture to and in the West, and introducing me to his dear friend Michael James, are two of the many gifts he granted me over the years. He also sharpened my fuzzy thinking on culture and history, which in The Omni-Americans he described as “a quest for a basis for consistency, a benchmark for further explorations.”
I recall sitting in his Harlem “spyglass tree,” his living room full of hundreds of books. With Murray facing me from his desk, I told him I had heard yet another protégé, Wynton Marsalis, speak on a television program. He asked me what I thought. Murray boomed when I gave a perfunctory answer: “MAN, how precise was he? That’s the key: precision.”
That same lesson applied on another occasion when I asked him what he thought about the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. He asked me, “What do you know about that?” I gave what I considered a basic journalistic summary. He said, “No. That’s a poor reading. Here’s what happened”—and gave me a nuanced history lesson.
Sometimes, I’d read passages from other writers to Murray to get his impromptu response. When the passages didn’t meet his standards of depth and insight, he’d let me know straight, no chaser. Yet on one sunny afternoon, I read the following from economist Hazel Henderson’s The Politics of the Solar Age: Alternatives to Economics (1988) to Murray:
Competition and cooperation are both appropriate strategies under certain circumstances and nature employs both equally and in balance. . . Rather than whether an economy is socialistic, market-oriented or mixed (as most are), it is more relevant to know to what extent it is organized cybernetically to take advantage of feedback, not just in the form of prices . . . but also feedback from voters (i.e., democracy) and from nature (such as acid rain or climate change.)
The more a society is structured to use a variety of these multi-dimensional feedbacks—to learn from them, modify structures, behavior patterns, as well as values—the better they can also adapt to new conditions and survive.
“Now that I agree with,” Murray said, likely feeling an affinity for the quote’s texture of cooperative opposition and self-organizing feedback loops in human life and nature. It felt terrific to merit his approval.
Although Murray was fond of giving impromptu dissertations on a wide range of subjects, including, for instance, entropy and the implications of Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, he wasn’t interested in just hearing his own voice. As should be clear above, he’d often ask what you know about a topic and use your response as the basis to deepen your perspective while freely sharing his knowledge and wisdom. Since he had dealt with and resolved many of the issues I was grappling with fifty or more years before our conversations, his accessibility and forbearance remain a wonder to me. At heart, along with being a great American writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and an aesthetic theorist of the first order, Albert Murray was a patient teacher.
At heart, along with being a great American writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and an aesthetic theorist of the first order, Albert Murray was a patient teacher.
I learned so much from him personally and through his books that I’ll be forever indebted. Through Albert Murray, I refined my thinking and removed my African garb, replacing a misguided focus on African origins with a much deeper appreciation for the cultural and historical context of my own land, America, and my Afro-American ancestors’ contributions to it. Through Murray, I know that the triumph and meaning of jazz and blues in the twentieth century and beyond are as monumental as the building of pyramids in ancient times.