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Albert Murray, a self-described “riff-style intellectual” whose novels, nonfiction books and essays drew on the free-wheeling spirit of jazz and whose works underscored how black culture and the blues in particular were braided into American life, died Aug. 18 at his home in New York City. He was 97.
His executor, Lewis P. Jones III, confirmed the death but said he did not know the exact cause.
Mr. Murray was a man of letters whose works interpreted and illuminated African American culture and how it has transformed American society, often through the metaphor of blues and jazz music.
In books such as “The Hero and the Blues” (1973) and “Stomping the Blues” (1976), he saw the musical idiom not as a primitive means of expressing sorrow and pain but as “a sound track for an affirmative lifestyle” in spite of the existential chaos.
In short, he wrote, the blues were saturated with creativity, resolve and improvisation — the equipment of life. The cadence of the music also influenced the art of jazz musicians such as Duke Ellington, artists including Romare Bearden and writers such as Ralph Ellison, author of the widely acknowledged masterwork “Invisible Man.”
Mr. Murray was a classmate of Ellison’s at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the late 1930s and mentored a later generation of writers and scholars including Stanley Crouch and Henry Louis Gates Jr. In a statement, the trumpeter and jazz ambassador Wynton Marsalis called Mr. Murray, who helped conceive Jazz at Lincoln Center, “one of America’s great cultural thinkers and one of our original champions.”
Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/albert-murray/2013/08/19/ac4f9630-08e1-11e3-9941-6711ed662e71_story.html?wprss=rss_local
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