Stomping The Blues (Da Capo Paperback) [Paperback]

Albert Murray (Author)

Book Description

Series: Da Capo Paperback | Publication Date: August 1989

This study of the blues by one of America’s premier essayists and novelists will change old attitudes about a tradition that continues to feed the very heart of popular music—a blues that dances, shakes, shimmies, and exchanges bad news for stomping, rollicking, pulse-quickening good times.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A Flamboyant, insightful examination and evocation of the sources, styles, and mythologies of blues music." -- Newsweek

"An entire chapter is devoted to correcting misconceptions about the blues and to redefining the music and its connotations for American culture." -- Jason Berry, The Nation

"As striking a book about music as I have ever seen." -- Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone

"By far the most stimulating interpretation of the meaning of jazz in African-American life." -- Martin Williams, author, The Jazz Tradition

"It is a discussion of the basic aesthetic values of blues music, how those values embody ritual responses to life, and the manner in which they originated in American black communities and were stylized by individual geniuses into an art of universal import." -- Gary Giddins, New York Magazine

"Murray writes of the blues from the inside. His observations and conclusions show his authoritative comprehension of a blues musician's roots, the choices and adaptations he makes of existing material to form his own style, and the off-stage personal style he creates to go with it...Murray's preaching is sound." -- Amy Lee, Christian Science Monitor

About the Author

Albert Murray was born in Alabama in 1916. A cultural critic, biographer, essayist, and novelist, he has taught at several colleges, including Colgate and Barnard, and his works include The Omni-Americans, South to a Very Old Place(nominated for a National Book Award), The Hero and the Blues, and Trading Twelve: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He has also won the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for Stomping the Blues.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; Revised edition (August 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306803623
• ISBN-13: 978-0306803628
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #473,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars most essential work of jazz aesthetics, August 13, 2004

By 

Paul Devlin (Central Islip, New York United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stomping The Blues (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)

"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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Driving the Blues away, December 12, 2001

By 

nadav haber (jerusalem Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stomping The Blues (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)

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.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great vision of music and race, October 23, 1998

By 

Alonzo (Kansas City, MO USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stomping The Blues (Da Capo Paperback) (Paperback)

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.