Murray Talks Music: Albert Murray on Jazz and Blues

329 Pages·2016·2.34 MB·English

by  Albert Murray

Murray Talks Music
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Murray
Talks
Music
Albert Murray
on Jazz and Blues
Albert Murray
Edited by Paul Devlin
Foreword by Gary Giddins
Afterword by Greg Thomas
university of minnesota press
minneapolis | london
The publication of this book was assisted by a bequest from Josiah H. Chase
to honor his parents, Ellen Rankin Chase and Josiah Hook Chase, Minnesota
territorial pioneers.
All photographs are reproduced courtesy of the Estate of Albert Murray.
Foreword copyright 2016 by Gary Giddins
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
isbn 978-0-8166-9955-1 (hc)
isbn 978-0-8166-9842-4 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this title is available from the
Library of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
“We shall hear music, wit, and oracle.”
— Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, and epigraph
to the The Thomas Mann Reader (1950)
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Contents
Foreword: St. George and the Blues ix
gary giddins
Introduction. Albert Murray: Making Words Swing,
on and off the Page xvii
paul devlin
MURRAY TALKS MUSIC
“Art is about elegant form”
Interview with Wynton Marsalis, 1994 3
“Finding ourselves in the role of elder statesmen”
Interview with Dizzy Gillespie, 1985– 86 32
“How did Basie come by the name Count?”
Interview with Dan Minor, 1981 71
“Human consciousness lives in the mythosphere”
Interview with Greg Thomas, 1996 84
“Hear that train whistle harmonica!”
Talk at St. John’s University with Paul Devlin, 2003 96
“A real conservative? I’m not one. I’m an avant- garde person.”
Interview with Russell Neff, 1989 105
“The blues always come back”
Liner Notes to Revelations/Blues Suite, Alvin Ailey
Dance Theater, 1978 114
Second Lining, Third Liners— and the Fourth Line
Notes on a Jazz Tradition, 2003– 2004 119
“Basie’s a special guy”
Interview with Billy Eckstine, 1983 122
“It’s not bad being Huck”
Interview with Janis Herbert and Foreword to The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing: The Life and
Times of Delta Bluesman “Honeyboy” Edwards, by David “Honeyboy” Edwards, 1997 130
Three Omni- American Artists
Foreword to Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz, by William Zinsser, 2000 134
“I know the world that these sounds come out of!”
Interview with Paul Devlin, 2006 138
“Flexibility, the art of adapting, and the necessity of
continuous creation”
A Talk on Jazz, Delivered in Morocco, 1956 or 1958 150
“We really integrated Fifty- second Street”
Interview with John Hammond, 1982 153
“No better example of the ungaudy”
Biographical Sketch of Count Basie, 2004 161
“It’s a mistake to think of any art form in terms of progress”
Interview with Susan Page, 1997 166
“There was no gap: educational gap, cultural gap, between music
education and what Negroes were doing in music”
Interview with Robert G. O’Meally, 1994 174
The Achievement of Duke Ellington
A Discussion with Loren Schoenberg and Stanley Crouch, 1989 186
Murray’s Final Published Nonfiction Statement
Jazz: Notes toward a Definition, 2004 219
Afterword: The Blues and Jazz as Aesthetic Statement 227
greg thomas
Acknowledgments 239
Appendix A. Albert Murray’s Canon of Jazz
Arrangements, 2001– 2002 243
Appendix B. American Patterns and Variations on Rhythm and
Tune: An Ellington–Strayhorn List, 1990s 255
Index 259
Foreword
St. George and the Blues
GARY GIDDINS
“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 inclusion-
ary 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) recog-
nized 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. Kouwen-
hoven’s Made in America, Susanne Langer’s Problems of Art, Con-
stance Rourke’s American Humor, Lord Raglan’s The Hero, Roger
Caillois’s Man, Play, and Games, or André Malraux’s The Voices of
Silence mixed with the more usual suspects (Douglass, Mann, Mel-
ville, 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, Mur-
ray 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. He
disdained the old Freddie Keppard myth of the trumpet player who
puts a cloth over his right hand so no one can steal his stuff. Al loved
ix