#AlbertMurray - "Stomping The Blues"

Thursday, November 30, 2017
by Steven Cerra

"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.

read more at: http://jazzprofiles.blogspot.com.br/2017/11/albert-murray-stomping-blues-40th.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+JazzProfiles+(Jazz+Profiles)

What Albert Murray Taught Us About Jazz

by EUGENE HOLLEY, August 24, 2013 5:27 AM
Craig Herndon/The Washington Post/Getty Images

An essayist, cultural theorist, novelist, educator and biographer who died on August 18 at 97, Albert Murray spent more than five decades developing his thesis that America is a culturally miscegenated nation. His contention was that blacks are part white, and vice versa: that both races, in spite of slavery and racism, have borrowed from and created each other. In all of his writing, jazz music — derived from the blues idiom of African-Americans — was the soundtrack at the center of his aesthetic conception.

For the Alabama-bred, Tuskegee Institute-educated, New York-based Murray — and his Tuskegee classmate and aesthetic fellow traveler Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man — jazz was "the embodiment of the American experience, the American spirit, the American ideal," he is quoted as saying in Jazz: A History of America's Music, the companion book to the PBS documentary series for which he served as commentator and artistic consultant. It was the creation of a sepia panorama of black, brown and beige people, partially descended from Africa but fully Euro-American in outlook, character and aspiration.

"The omni-Americans are the Americans. My conception makes Americans identify with all their ancestors." —interview in American Heritage, September 1996
To fully understand Albert Murray's jazz aesthetic, a vital part of the worldview he called "Cosmos Murray," you have to read his first book, The Omni-Americans (1970). The collection of essays counter-states "the folklore of white supremacy and the fakelore of black pathology" as social-science fictions that dehumanize black people as inferior. "American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite," he writes.

In The Omni-Americans, Murray critiques black authors Richard Wright and James Baldwin for creating clichéd views of black life; Afrocentric romanticism and the separatist tendencies of Black Nationalism; and well-meaning but paternalizing U.S. inner city social programs. Murray's answer to such folly is the blues: home-grown black music that acknowledges the "essentially tenuous nature of all human existence ... through the full, sharp and inescapable awareness of them." In the subsequent essay collection The Hero and the Blues (1973), Murray celebrates the bluesman as an epic hero who, in his tragicomic lyricism, confronts the difficulties of life through the creation of a resilient art.

"We invented the blues; Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need." —interview in American Heritage, September 1996
Musically speaking, all this leads up to Stomping the Blues (1976). Beautifully illustrated with vivid period photos, LP covers and broadsides of black jazz icons, Stomping represents the zenith of his writing on the subject. Eschewing a bleak sociological approach for affirmative, literary prose, Murray celebrates jazz as the most advanced and comprehensive blues-derived art form, one which ritualistically provides people with "equipment for living." The music serves as a "stylistic code for representing the most difficult conditions, but also provides a strategy for living with and triumphing over those conditions with dignity, grace, and elegance." In other words, one does not kill the blues, but one can, by what he called "the velocity of celebration," stomp the blues to keep them at bay.

Read more: http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2013/08/24/214831904/what-albert-murray-taught-us-about-jazz?ft=1&f=1039

Albert Murray, author who drew on the free-wheeling spirit of jazz, dies at 97

Photo: (Craig Herndon/The Washington Post)

By Adam Bernstein, Published: August 19 E-mail the writer

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