The Blues and Jazz as Aesthetic Statement: Part One
In our last post, we focused on the current national political scene and the blues idiom, touching lightly on aesthetics. Since jazz is a foundation for both this blog and the Jazz Leadership Project, in our next three posts we’ll delve deeper into the aesthetic and musical mind of a central figure of blues idiom thought, Albert Murray. This essay was originally published as the Afterword to Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues, edited by Paul Devlin, published in 2015.
We could say that art is a means by which you process raw experience into aesthetic statement . . . the aesthetic statement . . . feeds back into general human consciousness and raises their level of perception of their possibility in the face of adversity.
—Albert Murray to Wynton Marsalis
Murray Talks Music is a fascinating addition to the oeuvre of Albert Murray. As of the writing of this Afterword, Murray hasn’t been accorded the scholarly consideration of his friend and fellow literary colossus Ralph Ellison. Notwithstanding recognition by peers in elite institutions such as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle, and other honors, the wider American and international intelligentsia remains underinformed about the value and potential application of Murray’s ideas to contemporary intellectual discourse.
Strange barriers of politics, fear, ideology, American racial mysticism, and academic specialization have left Murray’s work as a whole is in a kind of no-man’s-land. Thankfully, Murray is championed by professors such as Henry Louis Gates Jr. [Harvard] and Robert G. O’Meally [Columbia], but remains conspicuously absent from conversations on civics, philosophy, and aesthetics in which his work is central. Be that as it may, Murray’s corpus is chock-full of multidisciplinary wisdom addressing predicaments that continue to rip and rend the American and global body politic since his first book, The Omni-Americans, was published in 1970.
Murray’s ideas about music center on natural history and cultural dynamics, on how music, as an art form, develops through the relationship between environmental conditions and the vernacular materials musicians and other artists employ for freedom of expression and to fulfill a basic need to create form to make sense out of existence. Murray ingeniously illuminated the meanings of those forms, especially the blues and jazz, as they correlated both to primordial ritual and to everyday ceremonial life in modern times.
As an art form, as Murray explained here and elsewhere, jazz has three fundamental levels of sophistication in the processing of life’s raw experience: folk, pop, fine. In fine art we’ll find the most comprehensive, elegant, and eloquent means of “stomping the blues,” of affirming life despite the hysteria, histrionics, and confusion of the moment. Through fine art we can feel and envision greater horizons of aspiration in the very forms and implications of stylistic content. How such content communicates with us, moves and inspires us, is the psychocultural function of aesthetic statement. Once we add Murray’s update of the hero image to these insights, his paradigm becomes a wisdom portal for application to social reality, to politics, to life generally. This collection is notable because by focusing primarily on Murray and music, readers, whether lay or scholar, can perhaps better divine Murray’s figure in the carpet.
The Active Tensions in Murray’s Thought
As you may have noticed in this volume, Murray’s thought contains active tensions. Control and resilience are among these. Of course, such complementary polarities are resolved when seen from a spiraling, developmental perspective: apprentice and journeyman artists strive for mastery by developing control over their means and methods of expression and reenactment. Achievement of mastery gives maximum resilience and flexibility to improvise with the vernacular resources at hand. Such mastery of aesthetic statement is consistent with Murray’s conception of fine art. You develop control to have the freedom to flow and improvise with elegance. Phrases such as “antagonistic cooperation” and “dynamic equilibrium” also give a sense of a poised dance of thesis and antithesis generating into what Murray called a “durable synthesis.”
Murray’s angle of vision, his depth of field and sharpness of focus, extended from the idiomatic to the national and global as well as consciousness to culture to the cosmos. But as abstract as he could be, never did he lose touch with the pragmatic connection of his ideas to everyday life, which he narrated time and time again in the space of his fiction, essays, and, indeed, in conversation. The very ideas he formulated about the blues and jazz as found in The Hero and the Blues; Stomping the Blues; The Blue Devils of Nada; From the Briarpatch File, and this collection derive primarily from the organic idiomatic and national cultural experience of blacks in the United States, not as a theory from outside imposed on the music or the culture. I have deeply studied his worldview—the blues idiom—for more than a quarter century. The way he bridged the profound and the quotidian, and complexity with fundamentals, all with an earthy sense of humor, was magnetic to me. He bristled with charisma and insight, which comes through in this book.
Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, and Jackie McLean
Although my love of jazz began about ten years before I became aware of his work, which occurred through reading essays by Stanley Crouch in the Village Voice and references to Murray by Wynton Marsalis (who inspired me in high school and college to always strive for excellence), once I began to study Murray’s work I was awestruck by his breadth of knowledge and clear articulation of the power and grandeur of jazz. I had been immersed in jazz as a fan and apprentice alto saxophonist, marinating in the music’s blisses, most especially the bebop period up to the renascence of acoustic, swinging jazz generationally pioneered by the Marsalis brothers. I had felt, in my gut and heart, that, indeed, jazz was great. But through Murray (and Ralph Ellison) not only did I gain emotional validation; my intellect was lifted to a horizon that clarified my very identity as a U.S.-born black male, with Southern roots, who had as much of a birthright to the national ideals and responsibilities of e pluribus unum, of equality, democracy, free speech and expression, and the pursuit of happiness as anyone.
I didn’t quite understand the dynamics at play in my early years of musical enchantment, but Murray’s words to Wynton in this book perfectly captured my experience:
Art is a secular companion to religious devotion. It’s just as profound. It’s basic equipment for living. So you listen for yourself and when you find yourself responding, it’s because the musician is getting to you and you say “Oh yeah, this is it!—oh Lord, am I born to die?! Why can’t this happen over and over? I’m gonna buy this record and play it!” Time and time again, if the record is good enough, it will continue to dispel the blues.
By the time Murray’s work entered my awareness in the late 1980s, around the time of the interview moderated by Loren Schoenberg with Crouch and Murray on WKCR, I was primed.
Visits to the Spyglass Tree
Murray obliged me by visits to his Harlem abode, in the Lenox Terrace apartments off 132d Street, which Murray insiders call “The Spyglass Tree,” the title of the second in his tetralogy of novels. He introduced me to Michael James, Duke Ellington’s nephew, and Mike became a dear friend, mentor, and confidant. Along with a graduate-school-level inquiry into the work and thought of Ellison and Murray, Michael and I discussed literature, history, philosophy, anthropology, politics, and so-called street knowledge that rarely ends up in books. One of my more formal (yet freewheeling with brio) conversations with Murray is captured in this volume, which I undertook in 1996 to frame my own work as a graduate student in American Studies at NYU. In the twenty years hence, my respect and admiration for Murray’s perspicacity, for his generosity as a friend and teacher, and for his, yes, genius, have grown even stronger. By the time of the conversation in this collection, I had committed myself to lifelong study of culture and jazz, and to sharing my knowledge and feelings about these dynamic realms of human reality and art as a professional writer. In fact, such a commitment derived from what Ellison and Murray called an ancestral imperative.
Both were fond of saying that you can’t choose your relatives but you for damn sure can choose your ancestors. Relatives come by genetic and idiomatic inheritance; ancestors can too, but the expansive conception of what I call the Ellison–Murray Continuum allows for the incorporation of heroes from the past in one’s métier or even outside it. An artist can be inspired by a scientist and vice versa. Ellison and Murray were more inspired by Louis Armstrong and Ellington to be first-class writers than by their writerly cousins of the Harlem Renaissance Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Zora Neale Hurston. But the main point is the imperative to make the old folks, so to speak, those who have laid down blood, sweat, and tears to make it possible for you to be alive, and, hopefully, to thrive, proud of you. To fulfill the dreams of generations gone by so their values will live on and be enacted by what you strive to achieve and actually accomplish. To do the level best you can so that your ancestors would say: Well done.
In Part Two of this essay, I relate a stunning moment in a conversation between Murray and Dizzy Gillespie in the volume and, as well, share Murray’s response to the question: Why hasn’t Black American literature risen to the heights Black American music has?