Stomping the Blues

Albert Murray's "Stomping the Blues" is not an organized book in some kind of European sonata-style way, but rather much like what it talks about--a Blues tune. Beginning with a word "vamp" and ending with an outbreak, in between are a series of analytical riffs of the nature and function of the Blues Music disguised as chapters. Murray's riffs are connected by periodic restated themes, one of which is that Blues music is not essentially melancholy or depressing at all. Rather, Blues music is best defined as music that arises to "stomp" and beat away the blues with rituals of purification, ecstasy, and celebration. So for Murray, the music most might call Jazz is simply one more version of Blues music. Even when the lyrics are down, the music is often intended to highlight irony and audience participation (instead of commiseration). The dominant metaphor for Blues music in this book is a kind of 'ecstatic pagan incantation'--one that brings one of the important existential secrets of responding to difficulty and tragedy in life. As the Black Church brings it own mix of solemnity and reverence to African-American life, so Blues Music responds with its dialectical opposite. And since Blues and Jazz musicians were raised in the Church to begin with, there remains a link, however, tense, between the two spaces of life. Along the way, Murray argues that Blues instrumentation is much more important than lyric content, that ecstatic incantations of talking drums can't be properly understood in European musicological formalism, and that Blues music is distinctly African-American, and in many ways European, than anything African. Its "Afro-U.S." he calls it. Blues music is, like lyric poetry, more concerned with the personal than the political, more concerned with contrived stylistic mastery than raw emotional output, and more concerned with the aesthetic heroism of adaptive, innovative geniuses than folkart conservatism. Yes, he's harsh with white liberal critics. He's still grudging over the way that white media crowned Paul Whiteman, Bix Beiderbecke, and Benny Goodman--- over Duke Ellington and Count Basie. And he wants to at once claim the centrality of African-American experience and cultural contours to understanding the music, much like Amiri Baraka's famous "Jazz and the White Critic" article. Murray struggles with the same issues jazz and blues historians for years have struggled with--how to understand conservatism and innovation in art, where to place hierarchies such as "folk art" and "fine art," and how recently to take discussions of Blues music. At times he is less successful than others in this way. But to read this book is to understand one of the ideological underpinnings to the new conservatism of the Lincoln Center project, and that is vitally important for all students of cultural history. To dismiss it as "racist" is to misunderstand the cultural context Murray is writing from, and to overstate the absence of Anthony Braxton, as

"Stomping the Blues" is a sound and profound appreciation, history, aesthetics and anthropology of the music. Written by an accomplished novelist and essayist, it might also be the funniest and most well-written book on the music, if not the most original book to boot. To label Murray a racist simply because he is less than impressed with certain white jazz musicians is preposterous. What Murray implies, on p. 196 and elsewhere, is that because these white musicians have not been raised in black communities (in the black church, etc.) they have a less rich idiomatic musical vocabulary than the black musician. Murray does not claim that they cannot play the music so that a cultural insider will appreciate it, but that they tend not to. In any case, this didn't stop Murray and Benny Goodman from becoming good friends after "Stomping the Blues" was published. To call it a vision of "racial purity" is give it an absolutely base and scatterbrained reading. People who get so upset about the book because they feel it denies the historical place of the white musician tend, I believe, to condescend to and dismiss the tastes of the people (black people) who created the music in the first place. Indeed, "Stomping the Blues" was the initial aesthetic cornerstone of "Jazz at Lincoln Center", but J@LC has strayed from the book quite a bit in recent seasons. I do not think it's quite accurate to label the project "conservative" unless we're talking about it in the musical sense of a "conservatory" - to conserve the great classics, etc.. I would argue that Murray gives scant attention to Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane (and whoever else), not because their works became so "avant-garde", but because their works from another angle became "conservative", i.e., tended to sound too European; too much like young European/Eurocentric American composers of the time.

What is "Blues" ? Albert Murray says the Blues are those evil entities that attack our spirit, threatening to depress it. Blues music is the reaction - the means of which the blues is driven away. Actually it is the means African Americans have used to drive away the blues. There is no essential difference between Robert Johnson, Charly Patton, Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Count Basie or Charlie Parker - the all play the blues. Only their stylistic approach differs.This book talks about the different ways the blues were being stomped - driven away. Murray objects to the "purists" who limit their definition of blues to those played by rural - unsophisticated musicians (such as Blind lemon Jefferson or Leadbelly). While Murray acknowledges their value, his personal taste leans much more to the Louis Armstrong - Charlie Parker lineage. He concentrates on Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Morton, Young, Ellington, Basie and Parker. Murray seldom uses the word "Jazz" when relating to the music or the musicians. For him they are all "blues drivers", who provide their public with a stomping ritual that is totally functional. Their innovations are a result of the attempt to fulfill their role, to swing harder, and not necessarily a result of a personal desire, detached from their public role.Murray differs from most writers who have written on the subject. He comments on the mainstream critics - criticizing their glorification and condescending tendencies. He does not emphasize the inner divisions among the African Americans, as does Amiri Baraka in "Blues People".This is a remarkable book, recommended to all "Blues and Jazz" lovers.

do you ever get the feeling, when reading about jazz, that the writer is missing the point, or defending the music on terms inappropriate to it? albert murray never makes that mistake. what he describes is what you hear and see -- at least it was for me. for him, the blues is a great folk music, and jazz is what more sophisticated artists do with the blues -- an extension and elaboration of the blues that,at its best,brings together myth, storytelling, rhythm and improvisational grace. he treats jazz as a classic art form, but an art form whose terms aren't the same as, say, european classical music's, or pop's. and he does a great job of spelling out what jazz's elements are. if you respond to his writing, you're likely to find the whole art form of jazz opening up before you, even if you dug it before.bizarrely, albert murray is sometimes accused of having a "racial agenda" -- see other comments here. i don't understand why. i find his vision of race the most generous and noble i've ever run across, avoiding both antagonism and romanticism. (try his great collection of essays "the omni-americans," and see if it doesn't remind you of whitman in its breadth, humor and beauty.) in his vision, america is and always has been multiracial. that's its glory and strength, not its weakness. you'd be crazy not to dig duke ellington, and crazy not to dig thomas eakins. he's a great teacher, and can get you excited about art, performance, and ideas in the way only the great critics can -- pauline kael, for instance, or kenneth tynan, or matthew arnold.the title "stomping the blues" refers to murray's contention that the blues -- and that african-american music generally -- isn't simply about moaning low or expressing your despair. it's about being honest about "what a low-down, dirty shame" life is -- and then setting that fact to a beat, moving to that beat, and shaking the blues off, if only for a while. that's the heroism of the blues and of jazz -- they aren't about giving in to the blues, they're about "stomping the blues." charlie parker? it's "dance music for the mind."fyi, murray was a good friend of ralph ellison's, and fans of "invisible man" and of ellison's essays are almost certain to enjoy murray too. murray is often, and accurately, referred to as the intellectual godfather of the recent neotraditional movement in jazz. he has had a tremendous influence on stanley crouch and wynton marsalis, and his ideas are behind the founding of lincoln center's jazz program.

Albert Murray is the ultimate insider as far as jazz goes, and his knowledgeable observations here prove it. I sometimes wonder about his racial agenda, though.