McCoy Tyner - At The Beginning

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

“Sometimes, when John is soloing, I lay out completely.

Something important is involved here, I think. The pianist tends to play chords that the soloist knows are coming up next anyway. Normally, all the pianist does is try to give him a little extra push in the accompaniment and possibly to suggest some new ideas. When the piano isn't there, the soloist can concentrate purely on what he has in mind with fewer limitations or boundaries. Otherwise, what the pianist plays can attract his attention away from his original thought. So it is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically. Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.”

- Pianist McCoy Tyner on playing with John Coltrane

It’s hard to imagine that the following 1963 interview with pianist, composer and bandleader McCoy Tyner took place over a half century ago.

Although it was a huge launching pad for his career his association with iconic saxophonist John Coltrane was only a small part of his time on the Jazz scene. Since John’s death in 1967, McCoy has gone on to lead a number of his own trios, a big band and a Latin Jazz group.

His style is immediately identifiable, something that is very difficult to achieve on piano, and his influence is discernible in the style of many of today’s Jazz keyboardists.

“We talk a lot about freedom in Jazz, but there are underlying disciplines too. When you have the "discipline of religion, as I have, I think you can meet the demands of music and function better. There are still a lot of pressures in musicians' lives, and it is easy to understand why some fall by the wayside. But you have to strengthen yourself to meet those pressures. You can't wait for them all to be removed from your environment.

There are reasons for the pressures and problems. People will usually think of God at a time of tragedy but not when everything is running smoothly. But most musicians believe in God, because most of them are very sensitive individuals. When I first started in music I never realized how sensitive music is, nor how sensitive we are.

My mother played a little piano, and she wanted us to take an interest in music. We had the choice between singing and piano lessons, so my brother and I both took piano. I wasn't too interested at first, but after a while I began to like it and devote most of my time to it. Although I didn't study the classics extensively, I think I had a pretty good foundation.

When I was about 16, I had my own jazz group. I had met another boy who had bought a set of drums, and then we added trombone, trumpet, and alto saxophone. The drummer, Garvin Masseaux, has been playing conga with Olatunji.

I was mainly influenced by records at that time, because there wasn't too much jazz on the radio. Bud Powell and his brother were living just around the corner from me in Philadelphia, but they didn't have a piano in their apartment, and Bud came to my mother's house to play. I wasn't familiar with his work and didn't know who he was. It was hard to understand everything he was doing, but I liked it.

Judging from the records he made with Max Roach and Ray Brown, I think he had reached his prime then, and I learned quite a lot from him and his brother Richard. They were profound musicians, harmonically and in many other ways. Bud had so much taste and creative ability that I couldn't help learning from him.

He had worked opposite Art Tatum and had plenty of other opportunities to hear him, and Bud had been greatly influenced by Tatum. I know he had a lot of admiration for pianists who preceded Art, too, just as I have.

Tatum had really become a virtuoso. His music always sounded so neat and compact. I never thought of it as being arranged, but rather as the result of his tremendous knowledge of the instrument. Anything he could hear he could play.

After I graduated from high school, I worked days and played around home for a time. There were a lot of very good musicians in Philadelphia then and more clubs than there are now. I played with a lot of out-of-town musicians who were brought in as singles, and I worked in Calvin Massey's band around Philadelphia. Calvin had a nice band. He's a trumpet player, and he writes. Charlie Parker recorded his Fiesta.

I was about 17 when I first worked with John Coltrane. He had left Miles Davis for a period, and he was a close friend of Calvin Massey, who introduced me to him. I was working with Calvin at the Red Rooster, and John was going in there for a week. He asked us if we wanted to work with him.

After that, he would contact me whenever he came to Philly with Miles. I think he liked my playing, but we would also have long discussions on music, during which

he would sometimes sit down at the piano and play. He had a lot of ideas, and we were compatible. We saw eye to eye on so many things even at that time, and I could hear the direction he was going. I didn't know what it would be like, or how involved it would be, but I could hear something in his playing that was beautiful, and we enjoyed working together.

Benny Golson came to Philadelphia when I was about 20, and I played a concert with him. He asked me to go to San Francisco with him, where we would pick up a bassist and a drummer.

Then the Jazztet was formed, and that was very good experience for me. The original group consisted of Art Farmer, Curtis Fuller, Addison Farmer, Dave Bailey, Benny, and myself. It was a very musicianly band, and it had a lot of possibilities, but sometimes I felt there ought to have been more room allowed for improvisation. Eventually there was.

After about six months with the Jazztet, I got another call from John. He was forming his own group. I had a decision to make. I knew there was something with his group that I wanted to do, but yet the fellows in the Jazztet had been so nice to me, and they had helped me quite a bit, musically and otherwise, that I felt I owed something to them. I had to be honest with them and myself, and in the end I decided the best thing to do was to go where I could be really happy, where I could contribute more and really do some good. So I went with John.

I think I made the right move. I wasn't concerned then with whether or not John's group would be successful, for I feel that the majority of good listeners will always support good music.

I know a lot of good groups are formed and disappear, but usually they break up because of personal differences. If the guys conducted themselves right, thought more about producing good music, and generally took care of business, then I believe they would stay together longer. Music has to be the first interest. More dollars will come later.

It's important, too, for a group to be composed of men — real, true men — who will accept their responsibilities. I am proud to be part of an organization where each one is dedicated to the whole. And I really enjoy it.

People sometimes say our music is experimental, but all I can answer is that every time you sit down to play, it should be an experience. There are no barriers in our rhythm section. Everyone plays his personal concept, and nobody tells anyone else what to do. It is surprisingly spontaneous, and there's a lot of give and take, for we all listen carefully to one another. From playing together, you get to know one another so well musically that you can anticipate. We have an over-all different approach, and that is responsible for our original style. As compared with a lot of other groups, we feel differently about music. With us, whatever comes out—that's it, at that moment! We definitely believe in the value of the spontaneous.

So far as we are concerned, too, a lot depends on what John does. A rhythm section is supposed to support and inspire the soloist, and it is a very sensitive thing. How each one of us feels can determine so much, but when I come to solo I may be inspired by what John has played and by the support Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison are giving me. It's all too personal to analyze on paper, anymore than it's possible to say why one person likes chocolate and another likes cookies.

Sometimes, when John is soloing, I lay out completely.

Something important is involved here, I think. The pianist tends to play chords that the soloist knows are coming up next anyway. Normally, all the pianist does is try to give him a little extra push in the accompaniment and possibly to suggest some new ideas. When the piano isn't there, the soloist can concentrate purely on what he has in mind with fewer limitations or boundaries. Otherwise, what the pianist plays can attract his attention away from his original thought. So it is all a matter of giving the soloist more freedom to explore harmonically. Nevertheless, there is a foundation and a point of return. We all know where we are working from.

You can establish your feeling in music so that the public recognizes it, but you can also develop it within a recognizable framework. Sometimes people don't want to hear the development. They only want to hear it as it was in the primary stages. "He isn't playing the way he was," they'll say. "I don't understand what he is doing." But the roots are actually still there, and when the flower blooms the people may not accept it, though it's all part of the same thing. Then their acceptance will depend on their getting more familiarity.

That's why I think there should be more good jazz on the radio — and at times when the music can be exposed to a larger listening audience.

I've often contemplated that word "jazz." I believe early jazz came out of the churches, through the spirituals, which were a form of worship. Then there was the period of the blues, which were played in very different places. Back in those days "jazz" used to mean something else, and that's one of the reasons, I think, why many people still look down on it now. Yet I believe the music itself is one of the most beautiful art forms that exist, but the word used to describe it is just not good enough.

You are exposed to so much music today that you cannot always pinpoint influences. I know that when I used to listen to Max Roach's band I was impressed by the harmonies Richard Powell used to play and by his use of the sustaining pedal on chords. In fact, one of the strong points of his playing was his beautiful harmonic conception. I never copied what he did, but I certainly appreciated it.

I may find myself playing a phrase from another musician, but I never consciously copy, Guys ask me sometimes how I do this or do that, but I don't have any preconceived formula. You can almost subconsciously acquire technical devices, of course, like Richard Powell's way of sustaining chords.

One reason I have so much respect for the older pianists is that in their period there were so many different styles. There were many good musicians among them, and they knew their instrument, and it wasn't so much a matter of copying one another. Many of the younger musicians today involve themselves in a particular style instead of trying to learn the instrument, which I think is very important.

I'm not saying they don't know the instrument, but I think they make an error in trying to duplicate another style rather than try to play the way they feel about things. I've been told that at one time everyone was trying to play like Earl Hines. That could have been good, provided you didn't get hung up and limited to what he was able to do. I think another musician can show you the way, maybe inspire you, but I've never wanted to be an exact copy of anyone else. I'm 24, and I guess I'm still evolving. You can't rush maturity.”

Source:

“Tyner Talk: John Coltrane’s pianist discusses his musical background, beliefs and goals - as told to Stanley Dance.”

Downbeat - October 24, 1963

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Ken Burns Jazz - A Retrospective Review - Part 3

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

“Among the many important subjects Ken Burns’ Jazz does not explore is this:If jazz bespeaks the black experience, and only blacks can play it, why does it have, and has had since its beginning, such appeal to people of all races and nationalities? What is there in this music that would electrify a white boy in Canada, namely me? I cannot count how many letters I receive in which the writer says something to the effect,  "The first time I heard jazz I was . . . ."

That first exposure usually lingers vividly in memory. Why were six or seven thousand white people in an arena with me when I first saw Ellington? They weren't responding to this music because they were full of rage or regret over slavery and at last had found a voice to express these emotions. Jazz became a world music, and quite quickly. I am friends with two French writers who specialize in jazz, Paul Benkimoun and Alain Gerber. Paul in fact is a physician who is the medical correspondent for Le Monde. Each of them, particularly Alain, has written me letters explaining the passion he had for jazz from the moment of first exposure.

Musicians from behind what used to be called the Iron Curtain will often tell how they were instantly enthralled by the Voice of America jazz broadcasts of the late Willis Conover — someone else, incidentally, who isn't even mentioned in the series, though he did more than any man in the music's history to spread it around the world, and he — and this music — did more to bring down the Iron Curtain than all the politicians and generals and armies put together.

Why has a similar experience of instantly musical love not occurred in people suddenly exposed to Indian ragas, Japanese koto music, or Chinese opera, which remains as opaque to Westerners as the Chinese language itself? What is there in Chinese opera that we just don't get — and in jazz that we do? What gave it this enormous and often instantaneous appeal? This is an awesome question. It isn't even addressed in Jazz, much less answered..

Jazz, in the end, gives me what it gave Jon Faddis: the blues of sadness — sadness for a lost opportunity. This series could have been: the finest instructional and introductory tool the music has ever known, something I could recommend to anyone. It is appallingly distorted, driven by the payback agenda of Murray, Crouch, and Marsalis.”

• Gene Lees, Jazz author, critic and publisher

As we noted when the first and second series of criticisms [I use the term here to denote an analysis and judgment of the merits and faults of a literary or artistic work and not its negative connotation] about Ken Burns PBS TV series Jazz posted to the blog, if you want to stir up a controversy among Jazz fans, do a retrospective on the music and you will be certain to hear from someone about who and what you left out of it.

On the other hand, the tendentious, prepossessed and misrepresented supposed documentary on the subject of Jazz produced by Ken Burns deserves to be skewered for both what is was and what it wasn’t.  

If you doubt the “wisdom” in this assertion read the following correspondence by Dick Sudhalter that was addressed to Gene Lees at the Jazzletter. May 2001

By way of background, trumpeter Richard M. Sudhalter had two careers, one as a musician, the other as a journalist. He co-author a biography of Bix Beiderbecke with Philip Evans and the author of Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz 1915-1945. The latter book documents the contributions of white musicians to jazz. He wrote this rejoinder especially for publication in the Jazzletter.

By Richard M. Sudhalter

“While watching one of the early episodes of the Ken Burns Jazz series, I was surprised to find myself thinking not about Louis Armstrong or any other musician present or past, but about Leni Riefenstahl. No, she insisted in talking about Triumph of the Will and Olympische Spiele, her films weren't Nazi agitprop. They were above politics, beyond ideology; done solely in the interest of Kunst, high art.

It was disingenuous balderdash back in Third Reich days, and balderdash it remains today. Similarly, Mr. Burns keeps telling us he's set out to tell the story of jazz as the great American experience; what he's done instead, I fear, is loose a vast political tract, a multimillion-dollar example of special pleading race for a theory of the centrality of race in twentieth century American culture — all in the guise of a series putatively about music.

That saddens me: not so much that he and his collaborators have created this artifact as the prospect of viewers sitting through it without a thought about the audacious, even insulting, deception that's been worked on them.

Jon Faddis got it right in decrying presentation of a body of disputable opinion as fact. To be sure, Albert Murray's theories about the role of the black experience have a certain strength and inner logic, and are worth discussion; but they are far from revealed truth. Other interpretations, no less responsible, will contest and contradict his at every turn.

Viewers of Jazz aren't permitted to hear those interpretations. Burns, and with him Murray, Marsalis, Crouch, Early, and the stunningly underqualified Margo Jefferson, are relentless in peddling their unidimensional cultural view. It's a view that activates, nurtures, and plays on the racial guilt still endemic in large numbers of white Americans. Hardly a moment goes by when some reminder of the past isn't replayed and reiterated on the screen and in the voice-overs, as if making certain no viewer tunes out or is allowed to forget.

With a boyish candor meant to be disarming, Burns has told interviewers that he regards the history of jazz as a metaphor for the story of America's civil rights. It's a clever gambit: no one of good heart and social conscience will dare publicly challenge him, for fear of being branded a racial atavism. It seems to me that Burns has it exactly backwards: rather than mirror the turbulent struggle of black Americans in a predominantly white society, jazz came about, came of age and flourished, in spite of it. The music, in other words, established its own democracy, an extraordinary freemasonry thriving in the face of society's worst depredations. It guaranteed a warm welcome and instant understanding for everyone, regardless of who he was, if he could play. [Emphasis mine].

Even the phrase "our language," title of one of the episodes, sends a message that is at best ambiguous, at worst exclusionist. Does the "our" identify something solely, defensively black? Or does it refer to something understood and embraced by all who were "inside" regardless of race? I'd like to think it was the latter but fear it is the former.

Gradually, carefully, the series compounds and reinforces its message. Having sat through the entire nineteen hours, a neophyte viewer can be forgiven for thinking the entire century of jazz yielded little more than a handful of titanic figures — "geniuses," in the script's inflated language — who excelled against a field of mediocrities, pretenders, and brigands, most of them white. It's also worth noting that each time a white musician receives any credit, it is as a dropout (Beiderbecke), a popularizer (Goodman), or amanuensis to a black creator (Gil Evans to Miles). That a substantial number of white musicians also qualify as genuine innovators and trailblazers (Norvo, Teagarden, Lang, Gifford, for starters) remains unspoken and, ultimately, inadmissible. We're watching a masterful exercise in synecdoche, peddling the part as the whole.

A small personal digression here. Ken Burns interviewed me for some ninety minutes, mostly about Bix, but also about the white New York-based jazzmen of the late 1920s. With care and, I hoped, clarity, I explained how Beiderbecke brought into jazz a new emotional complexity, a layering hitherto absent from the majestic operatic conceptions of Bechet and Armstrong. Where their utterances proceeded along a vaulting emotional arc, his looked inward, using restraint and even indirection in something of the European manner, freely mixing what might otherwise have been considered mutually contradictory elements. The white New Yorkers, I went on to say, were the universally acknowledged modernists of their time, experimenting imaginatively with form, harmony, and melodic organization.

These were innovations of far-reaching import, facilitating myriad developments now accepted as integral to jazz. Above all, they fostered new awareness in other musicians, just as Louis had done with the idea of swing. Jazz before Bix lacked a certain kind of emotional texture; jazz after him was seldom without it. Nor was that all, I said: free use of substitutions, construction of melodies based on chordal extensions, use of shifting tonal centers, experimentation with forms breaking the tyranny of two, four, and eight-bar patterns — all these traced their origins to a readily identifiable circle of early New York-based musicians who happen to have been white.

Obviously, such views comported ill with the overall "message" of Jazz. Therefore all that survived of our ninety -minute conversation was a pair of supremely innocuous sound bites. Instead, we were treated to Margo Jefferson blithely taking the cheapest of all shots at "Paul White-MAN" and expressing the truly lunatic notion that Bix (who by 1930 was distancing himself from the cornet and hot jazz in general in a quest for broader musical horizons) would somehow have been a more fully realized musician if he'd worked in black bands.

I mention this only to illustrate the degree of manipulation and outright distortion that has allowed Burns and his advisers to put across their socio-political message. In a distant sense it echoes the drumfire of social-justice propaganda that informed (or blemished, depending on how it's read) so much of the earliest critical writing about jazz; back in those prewar days the social-justice propaganda of the New Masses regularly trumped any merely musical consideration. It's all there, self-evident, in the writings of Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, and any number of others, including the hallowed John Hammond.

It's been heartening, at least momentarily, to read Internet parodies of the Burns series, and easy to sympathize with protests at the cavalier neglect of jazz developments since the 1960s. I'll happily add my favorites to the roll-call of key musicians scanted and slighted, in particular the cadre of often extraordinary players who surrounded Eddie Condon. To a man, they've been swept from the picture, like Stalinist-era apparatchiks airbrushed out of a Politburo portrait into un-personhood after falling from party favor.

And, too, what of the songs, the great standards that provided the raw materials for dozens of nonpareil flights of jazz fancy? We hear Louis playing Stardust on the soundtrack, for example, but never the name of Hoagy Carmichael. Are we really to understand that Billie Holiday's chief claim to immortality resides in the blatantly political Strange Fruit! Albert Murray's pet conflation notwithstanding, it wasn't all the blues: whether emanating from the Brill Building or from the Broadway stage, the pop songs were essential and indispensable. They're hardly acknowledged.

I can't help wondering what Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, men of dignity and no little humility, would have made of so many distortions and fatuous sanctifications made in their names.

I'd like to think that increasing numbers of jazzfolk, players and chroniclers alike, are aware of, and exercised over, the mischief that's been worked here. I'd like to bury the Panglossian notion that all the media hype and saturation publicity will somehow have a beneficial trickle-down effect on those of us who have spent our lives trying to prise a living out of playing jazz. But I know better: the listening and recreational habits of the public aren't about to change. However momentarily consoling to think of an Armstrong or Ellington CD sharing shelf space with Madonna and Metallica in some twenty-something's luxury Manhattan duplex, it's ultimately cold comfort.

It's been a long uphill struggle bringing the rich and varied traditions, and the joys, of a century of hot music to the attention of a generally unheeding public. I regret that the wildly disproportionate success of Burns's Jazz is only going to make the grade that much steeper. Leni Riefenstahl has lived long enough to witness her own disgrace; I doubt we have world enough and time to wait for Burns and his accomplices to suffer a comparable, richly deserved, fate.”

— Richard M. Sudhalter

Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues - The JazzProfiles Synopsis

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

“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

After reading Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues, [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2016] I came away with the impression that I had read the work of four authors: Albert Murray and “three of his guys.” For as Gary Giddins explains it in his Foreword which he subtitles St. George and the Blues:

"This is one of my guys" or "These are my guys" was often how Albert Lee Murray would introduce to friends and colleagues the disciples he attracted in the 1970s, and we were all proud to bear the inclusionary tag. We were, in fact, his guys, which meant not so much reading his books, though of course we did, as absorbing his conversation and reading from his book list. Indeed, his guys (a modest, diverse group: men and women, black and white, young and not so young) recognized each other not by a secret handshake or a coded phrase but by our libraries. You might attend, say, a party thrown by a friend of a friend, and notice on the shelves volumes such as John A. Kouwenhoven's Made in America, Susanne Langer's Problems of Art, Constance Rourke's American Humor, Lord Raglan's The Hero, Roger Caillois's Man, Play, and Games, or Andre Malraux's The Voices of Silence mixed with the more usual suspects (Douglass, Mann, Melville, Hemingway, Faulkner, Al's friends Ralph Ellison and Robert Penn Warren), a book or three on jazz, and Murray's own work. You'd ask if the host happened to know Al Murray, and invariably his or her eyes would light up. Like Kilroy, Murray had been there.

A dazzling savant and a thoroughly original prose stylist, Murray was also a dedicated mentor, a responsibility that gave him much pleasure, bringing the world to enlightenment one person at a time. A master discourser (this book is proof) and an intellectually munificent friend, he could, at his best, radiate extraordinary charm and wit. ….

For a young jazz critic, Murray provided more than liberation. He provided a sword: the language and aesthetics to cut through the brambled triteness of borrowed prestige and establish a new domain in which blues music, as he writes in The Hero and the Blues, defines "the rugged endurance of the black American," and by extension everyone everywhere who understands that "blues-idiom dance music challenges and affirms his personal equilibrium, sustains his humanity, and enables him to maintain his highest aspirations in spite of the fact that human existence is so often mostly a low-down dirty shame." In 1976, he delivered the fullest measure of his aesthetics in Stomping the Blues, a novella-length essay, Aristotelian in its authority and expanded by dozens of illustrations into a paradigmatic purview of how blues music's values embody ritual responses to life; he explored the music's origination and the individual geniuses who stylized it into art of universal import, and he did it with a prose that makes you tap your feet. Stomping the Blues remains the foundation on which much contemporary music writing is built.

The copiousness of Murray's vision was such that, like the Constitution, it could accommodate other visions —even those that he tended to underestimate at the time he wrote it…..”

The mainstay of the book are nineteen 19 interviews, essays, and lists of recommended recordings [aka “The Canon”] by Albert Murray, but equally important for the perspectives they provide in helping us understand Albert Murray’s significance are the above-referenced Foreword by Gary Giddins, an Introduction by Paul Devlin and an Afterword by Greg Thomas. Naturally, Messrs Devlin and Thomas join Gary Giddins as “one of Albert Murray’s guys.”

Briefly, to better acquaint you with Albert Murray and “his guys:”  

ALBERT MURRAY (1916-2013) was a renowned jazz historian, novelist, and social and cultural theorist. Among his major works are The Omni-Americans [1970], South to a Very Old Place [1971] and a series of lectures that he gave in 1972 at the University of Missouri which have been collected and published as The Hero and the Blues [1973] Not only did his prizewinning study Stomping the Blues (1976) influence musicians far and wide, it was also a foundational text for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he cofounded with Wynton Marsalis and others in 1987.

PAUL DEVLIN teaches at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He is the editor of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones, as told to Albert Murray (Minnesota, 2011), a finalist for the Jazz Journalists Association's book award in 2012. Devlin is a leading Murray scholar who contextualizes the essays and interviews in an extensive Introduction to Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues, which doubles as a major commentary on Murray's life and work. The volume also presents sixteen never-before-seen photographs of jazz greats taken by Murray.

GARY GIDDINS is one of the world's foremost jazz critics. His books include Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams and Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (Minnesota, 2013), Visions of Jazz: The First Century, Satchmo, Weather Bird: Jazz At The Dawn of Its Second Century and Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation.

GREG THOMAS is an award-winning jazz writer, editor, educator, and broadcast journalist. His work on jazz has been published in the Village Voice, The Root, All About Jazz, Salon, The Guardian, American Legacy, and the New York Daily News, for which he was the jazz columnist.

The commentaries by Gary Giddins, Paul Devlin and Greg Thomas also provide instructive testimonials about the importance of Albert Murray in American arts and culture in the second half of the 20th century.

Frankly, I benefitted from such accolades as by the time Murray’s magnum opus Stompin’ The Blues was published in 1976, I had largely moved away from Jazz and its related literature to pursue other aspects of my life both personal and professional.

I had grown-up on Gitler, Hentoff, Feather, Lees, Ramsey, DeMichael, Williams, Balliett, Dance, Harrison, Sales and, of course, Schuller, but the likes of Giddins, Gioia, Sudhalter, Cuscuna, Teachout and Kirchner had to wait until my retirement years which began almost thirty years after the publication of Stompin’ The Blues.

I was vaguely aware of the advent of Jazz at Lincoln Center but the names I heard most often ascribed to it were Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch. I truly had no knowledge of the importance of Albert Murray’s influence in bringing about the remarkable accomplishment of a concert hall environment devoted almost exclusively to Jazz.

As my many postings about their writings will testify, I’ve certainly made up for lost time as far as “my new guys” Giddins, Gioia, Sudhalter, Cuscuna, Teachout and Kirchner are concerned and now, thanks to Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues, I get to make the acquaintance of Albert Murray.

I also never knew that spending twenty years in the United States Air Force could prove so beneficial to 20th century American belles lettres, but as Gary Giddins explains in his Foreword, that’s exactly what provided the subsidy upon which Albert Murray began his writing career [he was pensioned off as a Major in the USAF]. And if you are, like me, a new to Murray, you’ll find that the USAF subsidy was well-placed.

The University of Minnesota press release to Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues notes that “for those new to Murray, this book will provide a perfect introduction, and those familiar with his work— even scholars—will be surprised, dazzled, and delighted. Highlights include Dizzy Gillespie's richly substantive 1985 conversation; an in-depth 1994 dialogue on jazz and culture between Murray and Wynton Marsalis; and a long 1989 discussion on Duke Ellington between Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Loren Schoenberg. Also interviewed by Murray are producer and impresario John Hammond and singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine. All of these conversations were previously lost to history. A celebrated educator and raconteur, Murray engages with a variety of scholars and journalists while making insightful connections among music, literature, and other art forms—all with ample humor and from unforeseen angles.”

The significance of Albert Murray and his zeitgeist as reflected in his writings, discourses and conversations can be surmised from the following excerpt from Paul Devlin’s Introduction:

“For Murray, art is neither created nor appreciated in a vacuum. These interviews are prisms through which to view his approaches to aesthetics, creativity, history, and ultimately, a life well lived. As Murray notes in one of these pieces, art has a particular existential function:

You wake up in the morning and realize that if you really look hard at what some of your possibilities are, life is a low-down dirty shame that shouldn't happen to a dog. You could either cut your throat right then and get it over with, or you could try to pull yourself together to be ready to stomp at the Savoy by 9:30. What is likely to help you to do that? Not money, power, all those things. Getting your head straight will help you to do that. And that's what the function of all art is. And of course, blues is an art form, and that's what it can do for you. It keeps you from giving in to the melancholy, or the sense of defeat, or the sense of uselessness that you have. You get it together so that you really want to do something elegant yourself. You're inspired to dance, to get with it, to get it on, to be yourself, to be with somebody else. . . .

Well, you know, one of the basic fallacies with so much twentieth-century art journalism is that they confuse art with rebellion and revolution. Art is really about security. The enemy is entropy, the enemy is formlessness. Art is about form. Art is about elegant form. If you're going to be just for tearing down something, that is as ridiculous as trying to embrace entropy, then you're gonna embrace chaos. If you want to try that, go down to the waterfront and try to embrace some waves coming in. You'll do much better trying to surf on the waves. You've gotta be elegant to surf. You go out there and hug those breakers coming in, that would be exactly the same thing as hugging a monster from the depths of the earth. They are always defeated by what Thomas Mann calls "life's delicate child." And man prevails through his style, through his elegance, through his control of forces. Not through his power, but through his control.”

The Afterword by Greg Thomas offers this perspective on Albert Murray’s contributions to American popular culture:

“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 under-informed 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. … Murray  … 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. …

[Albert Murray] 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 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.”

Thinker, teacher, talker … it must have been a ball being around Albert Murray and I’ll bet that being “one of his guys” was a privilege that those who were accorded it will never forget.

Order information can be located via this link to the University of Minnesota Press.