Remarks read at the Albert Murray Memorial Service, Jazz at Lincoln Center, September 10, 2013
Early in the nineteenth century, there lived in Poland a rabbi, Nachman of Bratzlav, who was tormented by the question of the proper attitude toward despair. R’ Nachman was a man of saturnine temperament, ruled often by sadness and dejection. So the philosophical problem mattered urgently to him. Eventually, he arrived at the conclusion that it was his sadness itself that came between him and the illumination that he sought. And his subsequent formulation became famous in his tradition. R’ Nachman wrote: “As a rule, it is forbidden to despair.” Sorrow is to be acknowledged, the Hasidic master taught, but it is not to be allowed the last word. For the standpoint of unhappiness is partial and incomplete. And the same is true of the standpoint of happiness.
R’ Nachman illustrated the complexities of the relationship between happiness and unhappiness with a parable about a party. Imagine a room full of festive people, he said. And imagine, just outside the room, a despondent man. The despondent man, the rabbi instructed, had to be brought into the room, into the merriment, if the festivities would not be thoughtless and therefore invalid. Despondency in full view of merriment, merriment in full view of despondency: this was his prescription for a more proper picture of the world.
Many years after I studied R’ Nachman’s teaching, I discovered another version of it, in another authority, worlds away. My second authority in this lesson, in the circumscription of sorrow, in the diversification of the human spirit, was Billie Holiday.
Good morning, heartache, here we go again.
Good morning, heartache, you’re the one who knew me when.
Might as well get used to you hanging around —
Good morning, heartache: sit down.
Nobody made fatalism more beautiful than Billie Holiday. But in the dual recognition of the inalienability of heartache in the human experience, and in the recognition of the futility of trying to banish heartache entirely, there is more than fatalism. There is spiritual action to prevent spiritual defeat. In welcoming sorrow to her company, and even to her table, the singer was disarming it by domesticating it. She befriends her woes so as to not surrender to them. She thwarts her troubles by adopting them, by recontextualizing them, by situating them in the full flow of life, which, except in the most extreme situations, inevitably dwarfs them. The famously forlorn song is in fact an anthem of perseverance. In this way, one of the most melancholy voices in American music achieved the mastery of melancholy.
The mastery of melancholy: Wynton Marsalis will recall that twenty years ago together we pondered a score that he was composing for a dance company. We thought of calling it “The Mastery of Melancholy.” In doing so, we were being faithful students of the princely and invincible man whose memory we are here today to honor. For the mastery of melancholy was supremely Al Murray’s teaching. He enunciated it most clearly in his theory of the blues, which was also his theory of existence. It was Al who really noticed that the blues are almost never only blue, and who developed the enormous implications of this discovery. He let me in on his insurrectionary insight during one of our conversations about Louis Armstrong, when he pointed out, with that sly and erudite twinkle in his eye, that there is no weariness in “The Weary Blues.” How to better illustrate the conquest of weariness than by transfiguring it in one’s account of it?
For the mastery of melancholy was supremely Al Murray’s teaching. He enunciated it most clearly in his theory of the blues, which was also his theory of existence.
Be weary, but not wearily; be dark, but not darkly. This was of course the central argument of Stomping the Blues, the deepest and most stirring book ever written about its miraculous subject. “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits,” Al wrote,
but blues music is not. With all its so-called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music is by its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion. With all its preoccupations with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of so doing, it is actually performed to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.
The statement of sadness, in other words, is itself a form of resistance to sadness. Al remarked again and again that the blues, which was so often defined as a music of lamentation, had the actual effect of making people want to get up and dance. “That the blues as such are a source of sore affliction that can lead to total collapse goes without saying. But blues music almost always induces dance movement that is the direct opposite of resignation, retreat, or defeat.” In listening carefully to the great blues singers—and whoever listened more carefully than Al did?—he was struck also by an uplifting contradiction in the music: the instruments often seemed to defy the words. “What blues instrumentation does,” he explained, “often in direct contrast to the words, is define the nature of the blues response to the situation at hand. More often than not, even as the words of the lyrics recount a tale of woe, the instrumentation may mock, shout defiance, or voice resolution and determination.”
That is more than music criticism; that is wisdom literature. Its grand theme is: how to go on.
In his study of music, Al hit upon a preparation of the soul for the cruelties of the world. . . and not just the Negro soul. Al’s learned insistence on the compound nature of the blues, his identification of the joy that stubbornly persists in spite of, or even within, the broken hearts, originated as an indignant response to a certain condescending interpretation of the music according to which it was a merely a document of African American suffering. He would not allow the black experience to be diminished and simplified to the sum total of its horrors. He shrewdly and wickedly observed against this lachrymosity that blues lyrics were much more likely to be preoccupied with love affairs than with such political issues as liberty, equality, and justice.
Al was right: what was standing in Jimmy Rushing’s back door cryin’ was his baby, not his right to vote. And this was Al’s paradoxical proof of his own sovereign autonomy, and of the failure of oppression to capture or lessen him. There is a terrifically iconoclastic passage in The Omni-Americans that makes me cheer every time I read it:
Justice to U.S. Negroes, not only as American citizens but also the fascinating human beings that they so obviously are, is best served by suggesting some of the affirmative implications of their history and culture. After all, someone must at least begin to try to do justice to what they like about being black and to what they like about being Americans. Otherwise, justice can hardly be done to the incontestable fact that not only do they choose to live rather than commit suicide, but that poverty and injustice notwithstanding, far from simply struggling in despair, they live with gusto and a sense of elegance that has always been downright enviable.
This was not the conventional wisdom in 1969, and it is not the conventional wisdom now. But Al was by temperament and by conviction, an affirmer. And there are few more effecting expressions of the human soul than the affirmations of the wounded and the scarred, and their preference for compassion over pity. And as I say, the wounds and the scars against which Al sought understanding and fortitude were not racial, though racism was their cause; they were human. Albert Murray was a Harlem universalist. In Armstrong and Basie, and Ellington and Parker, he found prescriptions for meaningful and significant living. We lived a mottled existence, he seemed to be saying, where there are always grounds for pessimism and always grounds for optimism. The resources of the soul always exceed its confinements and constraints. The absence of joy is a lie. Where there is shadow, there is light. The quest for justice must not be mournful, even if injustice brings grief. It is forbidden to despair. “What is ultimately at stake,” Al wrote, “is morale.”
The resources of the soul always exceed its confinements and constraints. The absence of joy is a lie. Where there is shadow, there is light.
Albert Murray was himself a steadfast and soulful foundation for the morale of so many of us. This egalitarian man with an aristocratic demeanor; this friend of everything true, whether high or low; this vigilant guardian of the republic of beauty and bliss; this perfect representative of dignity and decency; if there is one emotion that suffuses all of Albert Murray’s writing, and suffused all of his person, it was gratitude. And in this too, we are his students, as we record with all the celebration that a farewell will allow, the enormity of our gratitude for him.