Albert Murray - "Stomping The Blues" - 40th Anniversary Edition

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Murray is possessed of the poet's language, the novelist's sensibility, the essayist's clarity, the jazzman's imagination, the gospel singer's depth of feeling."

—The New Yorker

"Beautifully illustrated with vivid period photos, LP covers, and broadsides of black jazz icons, Stomping the Blues represents the zenith of Murray's writing on the subject."

— Rolling Stone

"One fine lyrical history of the music. Murray demonstrates the central role of blues/jazz in American culture, telling us about the nature of our past, present and future: which of course is exactly what the blues is."

—San Francisco Review of Books

"A flamboyant, insightful examination and evocation of the sources, styles, and mythologies of blues music."

—Newsweek

Jonathan Haidt is a NYU professor of social psychology who specializes in morality and moral emotions.

On November 15th he delivered the 2017 Wriston Lecture to the Manhattan Institute under the title -  “The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities and Our Country.”

Professor Haidt began his lecture by observing:

“Today’s identity politics . . . teaches the exact opposite of what we think a liberal arts education should be. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world.

By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a utilitarian or as a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or as a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.

But what do we do now? Many students are given just one lens—power. Here’s your lens, kid. Look at everything through this lens. Everything is about power. Every situation is analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people.

This is not an education. This is induction into a cult. It’s a fundamentalist religion. It’s a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety and intellectual impotence.”

In recent years, Jazz, too, has been afflicted by the Cult of the Single Lens which preaches that Jazz was created by Black musicians and appropriated by White musicians. Some go as far as saying that Jazz as a Black Art was stolen by White impersonators.

Those who hold this viewpoint have promulgated a distorted version of the facts that was shaped by ideas that were ideological before they were musical.

But to many scholars, it is beyond dispute that white musicians have been an integral force in jazz from its earliest days. Above all, they maintain that the idea of Jazz as an exclusively black cultural preserve does not stand up to close scrutiny.

Such matters have been loudly argued, even fought over, and doubtless will continue to be hot subjects for some time to come.

More relevant is the question of the music: Does any evidence support the idea of identifiable "black" and "white" styles? Did it ever?

As Richard Sudhalter points out in his seminal Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945:

“In the early years of Jazz’s evolution, particularly in the 1920s and '30s, there were differences. They came about chiefly because musicians of different races were separated in their day-to-day and professional lives. And it was separately that black and white musicians grappled with the same problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, interaction.

Some of his more extreme views may make Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) an unlikely source of valuable insight into such matters. Yet he seems right on target when he remarks, in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

In the context of the early years, the distinction is important. Differences in upbringing, environment, and musical training left white jazzmen (especially those who had little personal contact with black culture and its traditions) more likely to intellectualize, emphasizing matters of harmony and structure.

Performances by black ensembles, above all those of the South and Southwest, possessed, in general, a degree of rhythmic freedom, personal interaction, and often a blues feeling and melodic vocabulary rarely found in music by corresponding white bands. Again, Baraka gets it right:

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

But, along with other scholars who follow this line of reasoning, he fails to account for those many major black Jazzmen who feel, and display, little or no affinity for the blues and its "attitude." The exceptions they present, in their very numbers, are a counterargument, which cannot be explained, as Baraka tries to do, only as a matter of "Negroes trying to pretend that they had issued from [white] culture."

More likely, it seems, is an interpretation suggesting that mastery of what came to be called Jazz was not a matter of racial or genetic affinity (always a dangerous hypothesis) but of choice.”

As has been widely demonstrated in Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, Jazzmen of the pre-World War II decades, black and white, paid careful attention to each other's work, and that the degree to which such mutuality affected individuals varied immensely.

As he states: “Beginning in the 1920’s, individual musicians and ensembles made choices based on what they liked, even admired, incorporating the results in their emergent solo styles. Choice, above all, quickly became the determinant of what and how a man played, how he constructed and developed a solo, addressed the beat. In this context, as noted earlier, certain traits — tendencies and attitudes — can be identified as "white" and "black" contributions to the mix.”

One such “choice” or to revert back to Professor Haidt’s use of the term “lens” is the use of The Blues as a basis for a musician’s approach to Jazz.

[“I was given many lenses to apply to any given question or problem.”]

And since it was first published in 1977, there has been no better description of how Jazzmen who chose The Blues as a lens through which to solve the problems of rhythm, harmony, melodic construction, and interaction needed to play Jazz at the highest levels than Albert Murray’s Stomping The Blues.

If you missed its original publication, the University of Minnesota Press is currently offering a 40th anniversary paperback edition with a new introduction by Murray-scholar, Paul Devlin.

The following from a University of Minnesota media release is very accurate concerning the tone and tenor of Murray’s landmark study of the blues and its relationship to Jazz:

In this classic work of American music writing, renowned critic Albert Murray argues beautifully and authoritatively that "the blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance."

In Stomping the Blues Murray explores its history, influences, development, and meaning as only he can. More than two hundred vintage photographs capture the ambiance Murray evokes in lyrical prose. Only the sounds are missing from this lyrical, sensual tribute to the blues.”

To carry Professor Haidt’s lens analogy one step further, a reading of Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues will certainly provide the reader with some clearer views to understand these assertions from Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. Leroi Jones) in Blues People: Negro Music in White America:

“Jazz as played by white musicians was not the same as that played by black musicians, nor was there any reason for it to be. The music of the white jazz musicians did not issue from the same cultural circumstances.”

“The white musicians understood the blues first as music, but seldom as an attitude, since the attitude, or world-view, the white musician was responsible to was necessarily quite a different one.”

It’s one thing to say The Blues, but it’s quite another to understand what is meant by it.

Since it publication 40 years ago, Stomping the Blues has been influential in a number of ways as is detailed in Paul Devlin’s new introduction to the 40th anniversary edition.

Perhaps one of the most helpful insights about what Mr. Murray means by The Blues is contained in the opening paragraph of Mr. Devlin’s Introduction:

"’For Paul, Some fundamentals.’ That is how Albert Murray inscribed my copy of Stomping the Blues. Here is one of his most fundamental points: "You don't stomp the blues like this [pounds fist on table] — you stomp the blues like this [snaps with panache on the afterbeat]." Murray used this example all the time in interviews and on panels in order to illustrate that the blues is "stomped" with elegance, not force; with technique, not power; with joie de vivre, not rage.”

Mr. Devlin’s Introduction also contains many other perceptive and penetrating observations about the book that will help the reader gain a fuller appreciation of its significance. For example, Mr. Murray tells us that:

“Blues music has always been good-time music; its function has been the exorcism of despair."

Mr. Devlin parallel’s this with the work of Andre Malraux when he explains:

“To an extent, this is an application of Andre’ Malraux's argument about the workings of the artistic process: that art, primarily, is a response to art, as explained in his book The Voices of Silence (1953), a monumental, profound, and idiosyncratic analysis of the visual arts that Murray studied for decades, and a work not unlike Stomping the Blues in several ways: poetic, written by a learned critic, yet not shackled by the conventions developed or expected by academic or journalistic critics of the form in question, slow and methodical to start, and difficult to put down once it starts swinging.

Another point Murray considered fundamental was his reorientation of how blues relates to jazz: as a matter of the level of orchestration. Indeed, he argues that the process by which pop tunes and show tunes are recomposed as jazz tunes is "precisely" the process by which the folk blues was extended, elaborated, and refined into jazz. Stomping the Blues is fundamental to his vision of existence and a lens through which to view other aspects of culture. …  It expounds a vision of and for life …  Stomping the Blues endures year after year, enthralling readers new and old while provoking debate.”

In a brief synopsis, Mr. Devlin also details the storied, earlier publication history of Stomping the Blues:

“Stomping the Blues was published by McGraw-Hill in November 1976 and was celebrated with a midday "Kansas City Jam Session" in the publisher's landmark headquarters in midtown Manhattan, featuring jazz giants Mary Lou Williams, Budd Johnson, Buck Clayton, Eddie Durham, Oliver Jackson, Bill Pemberton, and Doc Cheatham. What an auspicious beginning: an artist saluted by artists he salutes. Stomping the Blues went on to win ASCAP's Deems Taylor Award for music criticism in 1977. A British edition was published in 1978, and subsequent American editions in 1982, 1989, and 2000. In 2016 it was included in the Library of America's edition of Murray's essays and memoirs ….”

Mr. Devlin offers a broader context as well in which to appreciate the influence and effect of Stomping the Blues as its relates to other of Mr. Murray’s writings, all of which have been published by the University of Minnesota Press, when he notes that:

This edition is a result of a collaboration that began in mid-2009 when I pitched what became Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones as told to Albert Murray, to the University of Minnesota Press [2011]. Since then, working with Murray's literary executor, Lewis P. Jones in, Minnesota has published Murray Talks Music; Albert Murray on Blues and Jazz (2016), a collection of Murray's previously uncollected or unpublished interviews and writings on music (edited by me), and a new edition of Good Morning Blues; The Autobiography of Count Basie as told to Albert Murray (2016), the fourth American edition. Murray Talks Music is a valuable companion to Stomping the Blues. These four books together tell an edifying story about American music and culture in the twentieth century: jazz and the blues as thought and lived; jazz and the blues in theory and practice. Stomping the Blues is the masterpiece that led to the other three….”

In the third and final section of his Introduction, Mr. Devlin offers these comments about the reception and influence of Stomping The Blues:

Stomping the Blues was reviewed extensively. Some of the smartest and most perceptive reviews include those by Gary Giddins in New York, John Edgar Wideman in The American Poetry Review, Robert Fleming in Freedomways, Bob Blumenthal in The Boston Phoenix, Stanley Dance in Jazz Journal, and Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. ...

Many reviewers understood and appreciated what Murray was trying to do. A few years later Nelson George argued in the Village Voice in 1982 that it should be brought back into print and it soon was. George notes, perceptively, ‘the marvel of Stomping is that Murray manages to be both analytically detached and emotionally involved—criticism's most difficult parlay.’

By the early 1980s, and perhaps beginning with the review of the British edition in the Times Literary Supplement in 1978, a certain number of white jazz critics had started misinterpreting and exaggerating the caption on page 197, in which Murray refers to white jazz musicians as being part of the "third line." Third line does not mean third rate, as several critics have claimed or implied: it simply refers to a physical position in the old New Orleans parades, which Murray then used as a metaphor for closeness to idiomatic sources. ….

Stomping the Blues was probably the first work to articulate the connection between jazz, the blues, and locomotive onomatopoeia (or at least the first to do so cogently and comprehensively). Duke Ellington had been orchestrating stylized locomotives since the 1920s and Murray had been talking with Ellington about this since at least 1951 ….

Stomping the Blues had a marked influence on the development of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which Murray cofounded (see Murray Talks Music). The Preface to the Da Capo Press edition in 2000 frames the book in terms of that influence; it is the only previous dition to have an introductory essay. The Preface was written by Rob Gibson, a performing arts executive who was the first director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in 1991, and in 2000 was its executive producer and director….As of 2000, he writes that Stomping the Blues is a ‘preeminent source’ for people working in the jazz world and that Jazz at Lincoln Center has been able to embody ‘the many ideas that define this treatise.’

Aside from its place in the intellectual foundation of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stomping the Blues has become a standard text in history of jazz courses, is a foundational text of the discipline of jazz studies, and has been quoted, cited, and discussed in dozens of books and academic articles….

But the reason to read Stomping the Blues today is not necessarily for its influence on Jazz at Lincoln Center, or on jazz studies as a discipline, or because the blues is central to the life of a random person on the street, or can elucidate a crucial response to modernity, but because following the movement of Murray's thought is a valuable experience in itself.  Yet the content of Stomping the Blues is accurate and can be the cornerstone of

an education in twentieth-century music. …”

Mr. Devlin sums up his Introduction with the following exhortation:

“So, if you're buying this book to replace a tattered copy from a history of jazz course, or if you are completing a Murray collection, or if you are discovering Murray for the first time, may it be your discovery of the year, and may rediscoveries be like new discoveries. Happy stomping.”

Paul Devlin

Long Island, New York

April 2017

I would also urge you to read Stomping the Blues because it will afford you with, from the perspective of Professor Haidt, another “ … tool for understanding the world,” -the Jazz World, that is.

A Biography of Fats Waller by Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"My father [Fats Waller] had a unique system to reward inventiveness in improvisation. Pop kept two bottles of gin on a table during the rehearsals. One bottle was for himself... The other bottle was the 'encourager,' as he called it. When one of the band excelled in an improvisational section, Dad would stop the rehearsal, pour him a healthy shot of gin, and the two of them would toast each other."

- Maurice Waller

“Both Fats Waller and his principal tutor, James P. Johnson, lived lives of aching frustration. Johnson ached openly because he could find no audience for his serious compositions, but Waller's desire to find acceptance as a serious musician was buried under a heavy coating of pervasive geniality. And while Johnson plodded steadily downhill in puzzled despair, Waller's blithely ironical attitude carried him up and up and up in the material world — eventually to a level that even his enormous energy could not cope with.

He was one of the most massively talented men who has ever turned up in the world of popular music — an inimitable entertainer whose charm has, if anything, grown in the nostalgic decade and a half since his death; the writer of some of the great evergreen songs in the popular repertoire ("Honeysuckle Rose," "Ain't Misbehavin'"); a jazz pianist whose playing was a landmark in the development of that instrument and whose influence on pre-bop pianists was surpassed only by that of Earl Hines; and a section man who could swing an entire band as no one else could.

All of these gifts were his and yet, like the inevitable clown who wants to play Hamlet, he had a consuming desire to bring to the public his love of classical music and of the organ. His need to offer this gift and have it accepted was almost childlike and, childlike, the hurt when it was rejected was deep and long.”

- James S. Wilson, Jazz author and critic

“Fats Waller, one of the most enduringly popular figures in American music, is a state of mind. Jazz has always claimed him (what idiom wouldn't claim him?) and yet he spent most of his abbreviated career cavorting through, and contributing to, the Tin Pan Alley canon—applying a determined jazz accent, perhaps, but with the sui generis detachment of a free-floating institution. He wasn't witty, if that word is taken to imply a kind of humor too subtle to engender belly laughs— he was funny. He was also bigger than life, Rabelaisian in intake, energy, and output. His greatest joy was playing Bach on the organ, but he buttered his bread as a clown, complete with a mask as fixed as that of Bert Williams or Spike Jones. It consisted of a rakishly tilted derby, one size too small, an Edwardian mustache that fringed his upper lip, eyebrows as thick as paint and pliable as curtains, flirtatious eyes, a mouth alternately pursed or widened in a dimpled smile, and immense girth, draped in the expensive suits and ties of a dandy.”

- Gary Giddins, Jazz author and critic

I never knew what to make of Fats Waller. His music happened way before my time and I could never seem to reconcile the views some held of him of him as little more than a musical buffoon with those that labeled him a keyboard stylist and composer of the first order.

In attempting to make up my own mind about his music, part of the problem was that most of what I had access to was derivative, in other words, what other Jazz musicians had to say on Fats’ Ain’t Misbehavin’, Honeysuckle Rose [upon which Charlie Parker’s Scrapple from the Apple is based], Squeeze Me, The Jitterbug Waltz and Black and Blue.

It really wasn’t until the reissue mania associated with the advent of the compact disc in the 1980’s that I had the opportunity to sit down and listen to the collected works of Fats which helped me finally understand what the fuss had been all about concerning his playing and his music.

One of the great joys of recorded Jazz is being able to go back in time and listen to the music of the Jazzmasters of yesteryear.

And recently, thanks to the kind folks at The University of Minnesota Press who sent along a preview copy of Fats Waller by his son Maurice and co-authored by Anthony Calabrese, I now have a narrative reminder to revisit Fats and his music.

This month [August, 2017] The University of Minnesota Press [UMP] is releasing a paperback version of the Waller-Calabrese biography of Fats which was originally published in 1977 by Schrimer Books.

As was the case with the original hardbound publication, the UMP paperback version of Fats’ bio benefits immensely from the inclusion of a Foreword by Michael Lipskin that places Waller and his music in the broader socio-cultural context of his times [Fats died in 1943 at the age of 39!].

Michael Lipskin is a veteran stride pianist and former protege of Harlem stride piano master Willie “The Lion” Smith and his Foreword contains many insights and observations about Fats including the following:

“Like most artists, Fats possessed a very complicated personality. On the surface there was the sense of humor that pervaded any situation, be it in a private party, hotel room, or concert hall. His humor always managed to get a laugh. But, on another level, it subtly pointed out the basic contradictions and deceits that he saw around him every day. There was the rampant sensualist, with tall tales of how many steaks, hamburgers, pies he could eat at one sitting. And there were the women who wanted Fats, whom Fats had trouble resisting. Above all, there was the tremendous drinking that the man could do, and did for too many years. His gargantuan capacity for life was in many ways responsible for his premature death.

Occasionally, when the party stopped, there appeared a sadness, increasingly apparent on the later slow-tempo compositions cut at private sessions, on his London Suite, and in his last Associated Program Service transcriptions. Conjecture as to specific reasons for this disparity is pointless, but conflicts in his upbringing appeared early. Fats' father, a Baptist deacon, rejected the young Waller's music, Fats' moral support coming from his mother, whose death, in Fats' fifteenth year, was a tremendous blow to him. In those times, before mass black consciousness, Negro families frowned upon jazz, and certainly did not like their children playing a music that they felt demonstrated the worst aspects of their society.

Although he took pride in what he did, and had a healthy attitude toward his music, in some small way Fats never got over the feeling that what he was contributing was not an end in itself; that his real artistic success would lie in the creation of "serious" or "classical" music. Like James P. [Johnson] and the highly individual Willie The Lion, Fats admired the "serious" tradition. The Lion's own wonderful compositions referred constantly to impressionists of the late nineteenth century, and this influence rubbed off on Fats. Consequently, Fats never quite appreciated the fact that his own contributions were different but equal in value. But it is the rare artist who has a proper perspective on his place in history.

What Fats and those around him did was create a beautiful and whole music, on both an extended intellectual level and a sensual level, many years before there was anything approaching equal opportunity for formal education, the end of segregation that would allow proper exposure to the tools of Western tradition, or the existence of a collective black ego.”

Fats Waller's death in December 1943, accelerated by his habitual overindulgence, was a worldly exit fully in keeping with his flamboyant lifestyle. His clowning and infectious capers disguised a top-ranking musical genius whose importance lay in two distinct areas: the development of the STRIDE style of piano playing to its limits of virtuosity, and the promotion of jazz as a medium for refined popular entertainment.

Waller's early keyboard training was as a church organist, an experience that enabled him as a teenager to gain employment playing in the cinemas and theaters of New York. (In later life he shocked the musical establishment by playing jazz on the organ of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.) His skills as a pianist were fostered by James P. Johnson, whose own piano concerto Yamekraw Waller performed at Carnegie Hall in 1928. Waller's astonishing keyboard facility and compositional fluency resulted in a steady succession of fine works for solo piano characterized by a combination of dazzling virtuosity and harmonic ingenuity, including Smashing Thirds, Alligator Crawl, and Handful of Keys. Among his admirers was Al Capone, who allegedly had Waller kidnapped at gunpoint in Chicago in the mid-1920s, just to get him to play at the gangster's birthday party.

Waller's incomparable aptitude for songwriting was developed in collaboration with lyricist Andy Razaf. Many of their numerous hits began life in stage shows, including Ain't Misbehavin. popularized by the vocal talents of Louis Armstrong, on whose gravelly tone Waller partly modeled his own singing voice.The peak of Waller's achievements came after 1934 in a series of recordings on the Victor label, made with a versatile combo billed as "Fats Waller and His Rhythm." In this context he found full expression for his remarkable comic talents, interpreting his own songs with infectious wit and a strong dose of satire. Among the most celebrated numbers in his vast repertoire was Honeysuckle Rose, which became an indispensable standard for later jazz musicians, not only in its original form, but as a harmonic skeleton on which other compositions were based.

As a keyboard technician, Waller formed an essential link between the first generation of STRIDE performers and the innovative work of later pianists such as Art Tatum  and Thelonious Monk.”

Thomas “Fats” Waller is a Jazz immortal and I for one couldn’t be happier that the UMP has sought fit to reissue in an affordable paperback format his biography by his son Maurice in conjunction with Anthony Calabrese as a reminded of that fact.

You can obtain order information on The University of Minnesota website by going here.