Introducing The Omni-American Review
As Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project, I’m excited to announce the release of the first edition of The Omni-American Review, which features essays and interviews honoring Albert Murray by notable scholars and writers such as Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Leon Wieseltier, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Dan Asia, and Robert O’Meally.
What follows is an excerpt from the journal’s introduction by my colleague and fellow Co-Director, Aryeh Tepper. (For the full introduction, click here.)
Welcome to The Omni-American Review, a journal of arts and intellectual life dedicated to exploring and celebrating the depths of American culture. Our name is an homage to The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray’s 1970 book written from the heights of his Harlem apartment where Murray redefined the lines of American identity. This publication likewise aspires to be a spiritual-intellectual home for those who know that “for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black people and the so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world as much as they resemble each other.”
That passage is classic Murray, and it is fitting that we dedicate our inaugural issue to Albert Murray’s life and work. As the essays, conversation, presentation, and two eulogies included in this initial offering all say in different ways, Murray’s time has come. There is a hunger in the land for a robust cultural complement to the Civil Rights Movement; our contribution to satisfying this noble desire is a collection of articles transmitting a joyful, resilient and triumphal sense of life free from the resentment infecting America’s illiberal left and right. In Albert Murray’s America the center doesn’t just hold, it swings.
Skip Gates and Bob O’Meally Honor Murray
Several contributors to our first issue were Murray’s friends and students. Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., host of PBS’ Finding Your Roots and celebrated scholar of English and African-American Studies, apprenticed with the master in Manhattan bookstores and in Murray’s Harlem apartment. Gates honored Murray in return by penning a 1996 New Yorker profile, “The King of Cats.” In his contribution to this collection, “A Tribute to Albert Murray: 1916 – 2013,” Gates praises his teacher as “commanding on the page” but “equally impressive in the flesh,” a man who first stepped on the scene by rejecting the idea that “the black experience” is “an entity separate from… white American culture.” Instead, “Murray argued that ‘American’ and ‘Negro-American’ culture were mutually constitutive.”
Prof. Bob O’Meally is a pioneering scholar of American literature and Jazz Studies who also [accompanied] the King of Cats around town. “Adoption and Hospitality: Celebrating the Murray Spirit” is an adaptation of an oral presentation that O’Meally opens with an anecdote from a 1973 Harvard conference:
when I was an undergraduate there… (Murray) told me that he had been adopted and that adoption became an important part of his philosophy. He said that adoption is from a Latin word, meaning ‘to choose.’ And the fact that his adoptive parents chose him was part of the enrichment for life.
In O’Meally’s concluding vignette, Murray and his wife, Mozelle, are the elders choosing to host O’Meally and his four-year-old son Gabe in their Harlem apartment, “Mrs. Murray had a beautiful sing-song voice… ‘I know my boy would like to have some cake.’” When it came time to go home, Murray invited Gabe, a first-time guest, to “‘come over here and give your granddaddy a big hug right now.’ And he hugged him tight.” That warm, welcoming sense of life, “’Come on in. We’re all in this thing together.’ That’s the Murray spirit of things” . . . .
Countering Narratives of Perpetual Victimhood
New York literary doyen Leon Wieseltier’s eulogy for his longtime friend, “The Master of Melancholy,” is the first of two contributions explicitly linking Murray to Jewish thought. Opening with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav’s rule that “it is forbidden to despair,” Wieseltier recalls that “many years after (studying) R’ Nachman’s teaching” he discovered another version of “spiritual action to prevent spiritual defeat” in Murray’s “theory of the blues, which was also his theory of existence.” Blues music stomps the blues feeling, and as Murray pointed out “with that sly and erudite twinkle in his eye… there is no weariness in ‘The Weary Blues.’” Wieseltier honors his friend by placing him on the shelf next to ancient sages, “This is wisdom literature. Its grand theme is: how to go on.”
Towards the end of his eulogy, Wieseltier drops a charged but hidden Jewish reference by noting how Murray resisted the “lachrymosity” that reduces Black American experience “to the sum total of its horrors.” The term “lachrymosity” signifies Prof. Salo Baron’s critique of what Baron called the post-emancipation “lachrymose conception” of Jewish history that the legendary historian first articulated in “Ghetto and Emancipation” in 1928.
In the words of Warren Zev Harvey, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a contributor to this collection, “Baron forcefully rejected as untrue the dominant view among scholars which saw Jewish history as nothing but a bleak succession of miseries, persecutions, and pogroms.” The parallel in place, Harvey extends, elaborates and refines the comparison in, “Albert Murray vs. the Lachrymose Conception of Afro-American History,” his reading of Murray’s The Hero and the Blues.
While Baron and Murray both criticize histories that emphasize victimization, Harvey posits a pedagogical question as their ultimate concern, “Do we seek to promote self-pity or self-reliance?” If we choose self-reliance, Murray provides equipment for the quest: “Albert Murray’s The Hero and the Blues… is a critique of lachrymosity and a guidebook for heroes.”
The fact that Wieseltier and Harvey independently note the correspondence between Murray and Baron demonstrates the naturalness and the depth of the comparison [and] new perspectives that emerge from this rooted-cosmopolitan, Omni-American meeting of minds. . . .
The Ellison-Murray Continuum
Essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams traces the process of discovering Murray’s intellectual firepower in “The most extraordinary nonfiction book I’d ever read,” a conversation with The Omni-American Review Co-Editor Greg Thomas. “Astonished” as an undergrad by Ralph Ellison’s bold vision of “the mongrel nature of American society” portrayed in Invisible Man, Chatterton Williams was a graduate student when Murray protege Stanley Crouch advised him to check out Murray’s thought. Chatterton Williams followed the thread and subsequently discovered that “Invisible Man is coming out of ideas that Ellison had been talking about with Murray.” Humbled by Murray’s dignified commitment to doing the work “without worrying about whose shadow might be cast over him,” Chatterton Williams ultimately concluded that Murray is “the more important figure” whose writing remains the standard for thinking about America’s “cultural synthesis at its best” . . . .
Dan Asia is an award-winning composer in the Western classical tradition, and in “A Classical Composer Reads Stomping the Blues” he turns to Murray for thinking about the foundational stories told by jazz and classical artists. Adopting Murray’s distinction between folk, pop and fine arts, Asia distinguishes, at the level of fine art, between the concerns of the classical composer and the jazz improviser, “If the classical composer is concerned with the finished product, the jazz improviser is more interested in the process of creation” . . . .
Contextualizing Murray’s Thought Across the Ages
Aryeh Tepper, Co-Editor of The Omni-American Review, makes the case that Murray’s heroic interpretation of jazz possesses depths best heard in dialogue with the tradition of classical political philosophy. In “Albert Murray’s Conversation Partners, Ancient and Modern” Tepper shows how Murray’s conscious aspiration to use jazz “to shape the contours of American culture” connects him to “an old tradition” transmitted by the likes of Plato and Nietzsche “that takes seriously the power of music to shape the character of individuals and political communities.” Tepper then imagines Murray, Plato and Nietszche “trading fours” back-and-forth over the role of rhythm, lyrics and spiritedness, with Murray offering the provocative thought over a single-malt scotch that “when the modes of music change, the ways of the state change with them.” Via music, Murray shows us human excellence at home in American liberal democracy.
In the penultimate contribution to this collection, “Monumental Vision, from the Black Roots of Ancient Egypt to Blues Idiom Wisdom,” Greg Thomas honors Albert Murray as “a great teacher” who aided Thomas’ quest “to resolve a tension within myself over how to evaluate history, culture, and politics in relation to my people’s struggle.” Murray’s Harlem apartment was the seminar room, and the professor’s pedagogical tools included merciless ribbing of undercooked ideas like “the black roots of ancient Egypt.” Reminding Thomas that “when Nelson Mandela comes to the United States, he wears a Western suit,” Murray “replaced a misguided focus on African origins” with a vision of home-grown culture that plants its flag among the peaks of human achievement, “Through Murray, I know that the triumph and meaning of jazz and the blues in the twentieth century are as monumental as the building of the pyramids in ancient times.”
Outchorus
Karen Lehrman Bloch’s “A Jazz Concert Relives a Dream” concludes The Omni-American Review’s first issue by taking us to Minton’s Jazz Club in Nov., 2022, when the Omni-American Future Project, with Thomas and Tepper hosting, set the stage and the Itamar Borochov Quartet provided the vibe for an evening that elegantly but authoritatively placed the focus on “culture, not race.” With the band killin’ and bite-sized portions of Murray, Ellison and friends read by honored guests, Lehrman Bloch left the event with a series of insights, “The Omni-American tradition serves as a bridge between ethnicities, provides ‘equipment for living,’ and—at its best—propels a drive for honor, nobility and excellence: a heroic approach to life.”
The Omni-American Review hopes you enjoy our inaugural issue. We look forward to exploring and celebrating the depths of American culture with you in future issues, as well.
Aryeh Tepper is Co-Editor of The Omni-American Review and the author of Progressive Minds, Conservative Politics: Leo Strauss’ Later Writings on Maimonides (SUNY Press, 2013).