Mr. Murray writes beautifully about the lives and technical achievements of the black musicians he so lovingly portrays…. — The New York Times Book Review, Charles Johnson
This book has honorable intentions and high ambitions. Murray wants to demonstrate the centrality of Black artistic achievement to the American imagination. He talks about the indomitable sense of style the great blues singers took from sufferings endured, about the ways Ellington, Armstrong, and Basie transformed country and city sounds into a national music unimagined by the conservatory-trained, and about how the jazz improviser draws on discipline the better to discover new freedoms. Jazz, Murray claims, is not just a kind of music but a way of feeling and knowing, the definitive aesthetic form of American life. So this is a work of practical criticism, unconstrained in its likes and dislikes, in its determination to make the reader see. That’s a good thing, but this is not a very good book. It subverts its own enthusiasms with a lack of humor, and for all its talk of improvisatory range, strikes for the most part one scoldingly earnest note. Murray promises a lot, but he lacks the chops to perform.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. — From The Boston Review
About the Author
Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place, Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.
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