Celebrating Albert Murray’s Centennial at the Schomburg: A Speech by Greg Thomas
Albert Murray would have been 100 in 2016. He died at the age of 97 in 2013. In honor of his legacy in his centennial year, I curated, organized, and co-produced several series and events in his honor at Jazz at Lincoln Center, the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Columbia University—in collaboration with the Center for Jazz Studies—and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
In our last post, we gave an account of the first time Murray was featured at the Schomburg, in 1997. Nearly twenty years later, with the cooperation of Murray’s daughter Michele Murray and the executor of the Albert Murray Trust, Lewis Jones, I arranged for performers from the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater and scholars and students of Murray’s work to come together in his honor.
Cliff Thompson, Paul Devlin, Jackie Modeste, and Greg Thomas. Photo by Lauren Walsh.
Here are my tributary remarks:
I first met Mr. Murray in the early ‘90s, after writing him an introductory letter. Like some other writers, for instance Cliff Thompson, I first became aware of Murray through the work of Stanley Crouch. My study of seminal intellectual influences on Wynton Marsalis also pointed to Murray.
My stated intention in the letter was to write a book analyzing the contributions of three Black American writers: Murray, historian John Henrik Clarke, and Lerone Bennett Jr., Executive Editor Emeritus, Ebony magazine, whose book The Challenge of Blackness, published originally in the early ‘70s, I found compelling when I read it in the early ’90s. At the time, I was grappling with questions of identity, political and cultural strategy, and the role of music and spirituality in the struggle.
I asked myself: how do these all fit together? Ultimately, what’s it all about? I later realized that I was compelled to pose such a project to better clarify how jazz, the blues, Black American history, and black nationalism (or a variant called Afrocentricity) were to be resolved within myself.
When Murray and I had our first phone conversation, he said to me, “Hey man, why are you putting me with those guys?” By then, in the early 90s, he had taught hundreds if not thousands of bright, but uncertain and confused students developing their consciousness. Due, I think, to my love of jazz as well as the sincerity of my quest for the betterment of black folk, he invited me to his home, the place we Murrayites called “the spyglass tree,” right down the street at 132nd off Lenox.
Although later in the 1990s I’d attend graduate school at NYU, in the American Studies department, those sessions with Murray began my true graduate education.
As historians, Bennett and Clarke centered mainly on the political and social fortunes of black folk, across time, told in narrative form. Murray was a literary man who focused primarily on culture, though he incorporated history as representative anecdotes, and, as he wrote in The Omni-Americans, “a quest for a basis for consistency, a benchmark for further explorations.”
The New York Times, in its Murray obituary in 2013, fell into the old divide-and-conquer routine by framing Murray as against “black separatism.” He was against far more than that, but as we’ll continue to discuss tonight, what he was for is even more crucial. Murray was a master of integration, an integral thinker not boxed in by political or intellectual fads.
Both he and Clarke were both born in Alabama; Clarke in 1915, Murray in 1916. Clarke, in the volume he edited in 1966, American Negro Short Stories, included tales by Murray and Bennett, who was born in Mississippi in 1928. And though their attitudes toward history were different, Murray told me the following about Clarke in that very first phone conversation: “Don’t get me wrong: you can’t count John Henrik Clarke out,” Murray said. “Someone told me that Clarke once said: ‘Albert Murray, he talks about the things those other guys don’t talk about!’”
He sure did. He sure did.
Signal Intellectual Contributions
Of the gazillion insights that I’ve gained through conversations with Murray, and by mining the genius of his thought in his books and secondary literature, what stands out the most for me are:
One’s own experience over what so-called experts determine and spout about that experience without even asking you
A view of culture and life that is developmental, beginning with basics, fundamentals, and progressing in complexity and depth from there
His take on the primary role of communication in human affairs, especially as regards friends and mentors
Regarding the first, no matter what someone else says about you, what is your own experience and how do you define yourself? In The Omni-Americans, his first book, Murray’s grounding in the humanities helped him to challenge the social science establishment of the 1960s. Instead of providing images and metaphors to contend with life’s hardships and absurdities, and to affirm and celebrate life in spite of them, too many social scientists and journalists used statistical surveys and clinical psychology to back up theories about “white norms—against which “black” deviation could be measured. Many of them imply that because the social environment and social facts are negative that an individual’s worth and potential is already determined. Then, as now, that view supports what Murray called “the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology.”
Murray was a master of pragmatic pluralism and philosophical anthropology. Examples of such mastery include: his clarification of the functional role of critics and of elites; of the meaning of art and aesthetic statement; of levels of culture based on mastery of idiomatic stylization not on race, gender, class, or geographic origin; of the relation of the blues and jazz to heroic action on “the break”; of the ways in which the African disposition to dance beat movement infused Black American culture and our way of enacting incantation and percussion; of how Black American culture is a constituent of American culture writ large, which itself, at its higher frequencies, can be the cutting edge of European culture; and of how the arts affirm life itself, confronting existential chaos and meaninglessness—all this, and more, is what he called Cosmos Murray.
Further, his key phrase: “extension, elaboration, and refinement” encapsulates the creative process underlying natural and human dynamics.
To my last point of reference, regarding communication, Murray introduced me to his friend and protégé Michael James, the late son of Ruth Ellington, and a nephew of Duke Ellington. “You should call him up,” said Murray. “He’d kick your ass.”
True. He did just that many times. But more importantly, Mike took me deep into the historical, literary and cultural woodshed regarding the blues idiom tradition of confrontation and improvisation, and, as he’d say, “affirmation and confirmation.” For that intro alone, I’m forever indebted to the grand master philosopher of the blues and jazz, Albert Murray, for he also paved a way for me to get to know the very people speaking in tonight’s program and even some of you in our audience of guests.
To bring home this point about communication, I’ll quote from Murray himself.
On April 20, 2007, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Murray with Harvard’s Du Bois Medal in a small ceremony at Murray’s abode, where he lived here in Harlem for over 50 years with his daughter Michele—nicknamed Mookie—and his beloved, Mozelle, wife of 72 years. I covered the event as host of a Harlem-based online jazz news and entertainment series, a video program titled “Jazz it Up!” When I asked Murray, then 90, “What does it mean for you to receive this award?,” here’s his response:
When you do things that have to do with communication—point of view, sense of life—you want to know how valid your conception is and what effect it can have on other people. How many people see it from a point of view that’s agreeable to your point of view, you see?
So, if you’re a writer, you’re in the communications business. You wonder what you’re accomplishing and if your objectives are being observed. When you get actual feedback . . . for you to see what effect your sense of life has on them, whether it’s useful, whether you had some insights, whether you had some depth, whether you had sophistication, whether you had strength—any of these things, to improve the human condition!
—Albert Murray
Clifford Thompson, Lauren Walsh, Paul Devlin, Michele Murray, Jackie Modeste, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Greg Thomas, and Lewis Jones