Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues by Paul Devlin (ed.) (2016)

Together with Ralph Ellison, author, teacher, and  intellectual giant Albert Murray formed the heavyweight team that was to describe, analyze and honor the products of African American culture, most of all jazz and blues from the 1950s onwards.

The year of publication, 2016, also is the centennial of Albert Murray’s birth (1916 – 2013). In his lifetime he wrote the only  jazz novel tetralogy, a biography of Count Basie and a number of books on American “mulatto” culture, the “blues idiom,” and the particular role of the African American (Murray always preferred the term “black” instead) as inventor, not only of musical forms and language.

Most of the texts in this volume at hand are published for the first time, while others emerge now complete and unabridged. Even with all his published work that came out regularly, it is still a mystery why this giant of cultural studies, blues expert and theorist is so little known, even in the US.
While some say that it is due to the intellectual complexity of his texts, others see the political dimensions of his writing as the main hindrance; the “fakelore of black pathology” (Murray) may simply have been too much or too radical an idea for both liberals, academics and sociologists. Or it had to do with the date of his publishing, his first volume of non-fiction The Omni-Americans, 1970, came out when he was 54.
Nevertheless, Murray spent almost twenty years in the Air Force, retired as a major in 1962 and only then could devote his entire time to writing and researching.

As a great admirer of the American literary classics, John Dewey, Thomas Mann and many other important international writers, he, just like his protagonist Scooter, tried to find a blend of both Western and African American forms of “wisdom” and approaches to art, literature, visuality and life itself. Scooter, too, was being caught between different forms of perception with focus either on literacy and orality at the same time.
In this volume, we experience Murray in conversation with Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Wynton Marsalis, John Hammond, Robert G. O’Meally and others.
This is a treasure of expert writing on jazz and African American culture by one of its most critical researchers.
Well known jazz experts and writers Gary Giddins and Gregory Thomas provide the foreword and afterword, respectively. Paul Devlin, a friend of Murray and his scholar, carefully edited the publication This book, together with Shadow and Act by Ralph Ellison should provide for the first two volumes of any serious jazz researcher’s library. In any case, Murray Talks Music is very entertaining and informative writing. Wow!

Review by Dr. A. Ebert © 2016

Paul Devlin (ed.) Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues. Foreword by Gary Giddins. Afterword by Greg Thomas. University Of Minnesota Press, 2016, 280 p.