Albert Murray, novelist and literary, cultural and music critic, lectures to an audience of about 140 people in McGraw Hall on Oct. 7. Adriana Rovers/University Photography
Albert Murray has crafted an aesthetic out of the blues.
The novelist, writer and critic was on campus last week talking about the basic elements of his own writing and the relationship between the blues and all great art.
During his lecture "Some Literary Implications of the Blues" on Oct. 7, Murray discussed the various literary and musical influences on his artistic development, played recorded jazz pieces to support some of his arguments and read passages from his books "that illustrate," he said, "the kind of American literature I'm trying to create."
After an introduction to a McGraw Hall audience by Cornell President Hunter Rawlings -- one of his fans -- Murray talked about the blues and jazz as art forms.
He began by pointing out the difference between "having the blues" and "playing the blues" and laid out one of his well-known critical theses: Jazz comes from, and is a form of, blues music.
"The blues is a device for transcending, or at least coping with, adversity," Murray observed, calling jazz the music used to "stomp away the blues." In fact, he said, far from being maudlin, the blues -- as anyone who has been to a blues club knows -- can create an atmosphere that is "downright aphrodisiac."
"You play the blues to get rid of the blues," he said.
Great jazz artists, like all important artists, derive their styles from their predecessors, Murray argued. One could, he said, describe the legendary founder of jazz, turn-of-the-century New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, as the music's Chaucer, and Louis Armstrong, "who influenced all the rest," as its Shakespeare. "There wouldn't have been a Shakespeare without a Chaucer," he said.
Finally, Murray compared the effect of jazz/blues on its listeners to the effect of literature on its readers.
"One of the devices of fiction is to take you back to something desired," he said.
With the help of Kenneth McClane, the W.E.B. DuBois Professor of Literature, who served as DJ for the evening, he played a recording of Duke Ellington's Harlem Air Shaft -- a composition that, with its onomatopoeic horns and rhythms, "really encapsulates a certain section of Manhattan," Murray said.
Using his own art as an example, the 80-year-old Alabama native, who now lives in New York City, described his autobiographical South to a Very Old Place as being a book "organized like a jazz composition," containing elements that "carry you back home to Alabama."
Interspersed with recordings by Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson and Charlie Parker, Murray read passages from his novels The Spyglass Tree and Train Whistle Guitar.
The title Train Whistle Guitar, he pointed out, describes the basic sound on which the blues was developed by its African American pioneers -- the sound of a passing train. "The basic thing in the blues is locomotive onomatopoeia," he said.
Through his readings and discussions, Murray made it clear that he developed his artistic sensibility from a range of sources, in music and literature.
"You process the idiomatic particulars that impinge most intimately on your inner life," he said. Among those "particulars," for Murray, were the writings of the great authors he grew to love in his youth. He realized early on, he said, "If I could get Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and Duke Ellington into words with the help of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Faulkner, then I would be in charge."
Murray remained on campus for two days after his lecture, meeting with faculty and students in the Creative Writing Program and participating in a seminar on black leadership taught by Robert L. Harris, assistant professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center. He also met individually with students and other members of the community interested in his work.
Murray, who was born in Nokomis, Ala., grew up in Mobile and was educated at Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, which he attended with his long-time friend and some-time adversary, novelist Ralph Ellison. He has been the O'Connor Professor of Literature at Colgate University, visiting professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts, writer-in-residence at Emory University, and Paul Anthony Brick Lecturer at the University of Missouri. His most recent novel is The Seven League Boots, published this year.