2002 SAMLA
Blue Notes: Jazz History, Fiction, and Poetics
Roberta
S. Maguire
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
"The Seven League Boots: Albert Murray's 'Swing' Poetics"
Do not cite without permission of the author.
Albert Murray is an important and controversial figure in jazz studies
today. Since the 1960s he has been writing about jazz as the quintessential
American art form rooted in the African American "blues idiom"
and therefore a sign that African Americans are central to any conception
of the national character and culture. In seven books of nonfiction published
between 1970 and 2001 he has made these arguments, while also suggesting
that U.S. writers would do well to adopt "blues idiom-based"
jazz attitudes and stylistics in their work, a point he makes most clearly
in his two books of aesthetics, The Hero and the Blues (1973) and The
Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary Approach to Aesthetic Statement (1996).
Murray, not surprisingly, has followed his own advice, and his three novels
and one collection of poetry are saturated with references to the blues
and jazz as well as to the figures he sees as most important in the jazz
tradition-notably Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie. Yet
this part of his oeuvre has received markedly little attention, and, remarkably,
what attention it has received more often than not has failed to address
the implications of what must be termed Murray's jazz poetics. This is
particularly the case for Murray's third and most recent novel, The Seven
League Boots (1996). In the little commentary that has appeared on the
novel-primarily in review-essays published in the Sunday book sections
of major newspapers or in magazines such as The Nation-critics have faulted
the book for puzzling lapses in plot or character development. In this
paper I am arguing that such seeming "lapses" might better be
understood in the context of what is finally a coherent jazz poetics,
one modeled on the Kansas City swing of bandleader/pianist/head arranger
Count Basie and saxophonist Lester Young, who played in Basie's band in
the 1930s and 1940s. But I am also arguing that reading the novel through
such a lens does more than simply make sense of curious "lapses."
It brings into focus one of Murray's more controversial-and basic-positions:
that "race" is not so much an unstable, socially constructed
signifier as Michael Omi and Howard Winant in Racial Formation in the
United States have argued, but rather an empty one, which then makes "race"
and "culture" for Murray entirely separable terms. It is my
contention that the "swing" narrative style both accommodates
and reveals the limitations of such a position.
The Seven League Boots is Murray's most recent installment in what some
have termed the "Scooter cycle," a series of novels that follows
from boyhood into adulthood a son of the South nicknamed Scooter. Born
in Alabama in the late 1910s, Scooter spends his public school years in
a tightly knit African American community known as Gasoline Point, which
is on the outskirts of Mobile. The approximate year of his birth, his
interests, his cultural background and even his family background all
closely parallel Murray's, leading critics to refer to Scooter as Murray's
"alter ego." In particular, what he shares with Murray is a
somewhat complicated family history-he was raised by foster parents, having
been given up to them shortly after his birth by a young woman who then
went on to play an active role in his life as his aunt. That these foster
parents weren't in fact his biological parents is something Murray accidentally
discovered at the age of 11, as does Scooter in the first novel of the
cycle, Train Whistle Guitar (1974). This discovery is the highlight of
the book, and it solidifies Scooter's identity as the blues hero, which
in his discursive work Murray argues is a kind of epic hero whose most
salient trait is the ability to improvise on the break. The second novel,
The Spyglass Tree (1991), focuses on Scooter's experiences at college,
which, again, paralleling Murray's life, take place during the 1930s,
when swing became an enormously popular musical form in part because it
was an antidote for the psychological effects of economic hard times.
Scooter is a very serious student at his college, modeled on Murray's
alma mater Tuskegee Institute, taking advantage of the school's excellent
library and finding intellectual mentors in an especially well-read and
inquisitive roommate and a bright, young English professor. But he is
a student who recognizes that what he is gathering is "equipment
for living," to use a phrase from Kenneth Burke, a theoretician Murray
has long admired, which requires Scooter to extend his learning beyond
the campus. He becomes a regular at a local jazz club, intent on studying
the music he hears there as seriously as he studies his books at school,
and as a result befriends the "main attraction," a blues singer
named Hortense Hightower, and her partner of sorts, Giles Cunningham,
a local businessman who owns the club and several other establishments
in and around town. Impressed with his ability to listen to the whole
band, Hightower at the novel's end gives Scooter a bass fiddle, telling
him that he ought to try his hand at playing the kind of music he has
taken the effort to educate himself about. We are left quite certain that
Scooter will take her advice, and The Seven League Boots opens to confirm
that: Scooter is on the road, heading toward California, as a temporary
replacement for the bass player in one of the country's best swing bands.
This occurs at what seems to be the height of the nation's infatuation
not only with the band Scooter joins, but with the musical form as well.
Scooter leads a charmed life in the novel, beginning with how quickly
he catches on to the band's way of playing (which also contributes to
the appropriateness of his new nickname, "Schoolboy"). For mastering
the band's sound so soon, he gathers accolades from the other band members
and anyone else who hears him play, for that matter, including other bandleaders
and the occasional record producer. His luck continues after he leaves
the band in Los Angeles to strike out on his own for awhile (even as it
is understood that playing the bass is a temporary gig until he figures
out what he is really going to do with his life). At that point he so
impresses a movie star who happens to hear him that she has him move in
with her for a time to teach her about the music and, even more importantly,
the blues idiom that serves as the basis for the music. That leads to
a trip to Europe-another stroke of good fortune-and an introduction to
a Marquis who had inspired the movie star's exploration of the blues and
jazz. After Scooter wows his European audience in a small jazz club, he
heads for home in the U.S. (where he expects to see the college girlfriend
he temporarily left behind) and wonders what life will offer him next.
The synopsis of the most recent installment of the Scooter cycle suggests
why critics have been at best lukewarm about it. The main character is
"idealized," according to John Litwiler, author of The Freedom
Principle: Jazz after 1958, as are the band members: These musicians,
whom Litwiler notes make up a band strikingly similar to Ellington's road
bands, "get along famously, never gripe about life on the road and
are devoted to realizing their leader's compositions," whereas Ellington's
actual band members were "as cranky a bunch of iconoclasts as ever
grated on each other's nerves" (Chicago Tribune March 17, 1996).
Richard Bernstein in a fairly positive daily New York Times review faults
the pace of the novel as "too languid" (April 3, 1996), which
The Nation's Gene Seymour seconds. Seymour sees the pace as more of a
problem than Bernstein, arguing that it combines with a failure to differentiate
voices among the characters (they all seem to speak with the same Murrayan
voice, he complains) and an "obliviousness to history" (the
time of the book should be the 1940s, but the distance from a World War
and the ordinariness of transatlantic flight mark it as the 1950s). The
result is a "hermetically sealed novel of values whose sole purpose
is to Uplift and Improve" (March 25, 1996). Perhaps Charles Johnson,
writing in the March 10, 1996, New York Times, sums up the critical take
on the book best: The Seven League Boots does not satisfy as a novel because
it is "without tension" (Book Review 4).
These criticisms of the book are true enough. There is no overt conflict
in the book, there is no dramatic character development, and there is
very little plot, since what orders the novel are Scooter's travels through
the country with the band, around L.A. on his own, and across the ocean
with the movie star. But if we shift our focus from story to technique
and read The Seven League Boots as a serious experiment with narrative
form-as Murray's effort to render in language the sound, texture, and
meaning of Kansas City swing as promoted by Count Basie and Lester Young-the
novel becomes a much more interesting and, finally, culturally important
book.
But, first, to define Kansas City swing, a task made fairly easy since
there is general agreement among jazz historians and aficionados not only
on the nature of swing but on Basie's contributions to it as a bandleader
and Young's innovations as a soloist. It is a jazz style that began evolving
in the 1920s, dominated the 1930s and a good deal of the 40s, and, because
of bandleaders like Basie, continued to have a significant presence into
the 50s and beyond even as other styles like bebop began to evolve. As
Gunther Schuller explains in his study of the Swing Era, "swing"
in general refers to how notes are played-how they are begun, ended, and
connected to other musical notes (225). Mark Gridley offers a fairly concrete
description of these hows: When eighth notes are treated neither as tied
triplets nor as even eighth notes, but as something in between, what is
produced is a sound that is at once loose and rhythmic, a musical phrase
that "swings" (90).
Several additional characteristics combine to create Kansas City swing.
Nathan Pearson names three: "a strong 4/4 rhythm, fluid soloists,
and most important, riffs"-short musical phrases that repeat throughout
a tune, typically having slight but important variations (114). Or, as
Gene Ramey, once a member of the Basie band, explains, "It's the
solo playing and the moving background below it, and a strong rhythm section"
(Pearson 117). That strong rhythm section contributed to the overriding
sense of swing as up tempo music. But in contrast to East Coast swing,
that which evolved in Kansas City "was lighter and more relaxed,"
according to Gridley. And, as all commentators point out, it never forgot
its blues roots.
Count Basie's swinging can be even more particularized. Gridley describes
it as "very light and extremely precise" (134), and, most importantly,
smooth: "Basie led the first rhythm section in jazz history that
consistently swung in a smooth, relaxed way," obviating the need
for "a hard-driving, pressured approach." As a result, the hallmark
of Basie's sound was "buoyancy rather than intensity" (134-35),
simplicity and quietness rather than "complexity and colorful sounds"
(145), all of which added up to a "high level of polish." This
was an excellent complement to Lester Young's playing in the 1930s. One
of the most important and innovative tenor sax players of all time, Young
sought to create a sound on the tenor that was a rough approximation of
Frankie Trumbauer's sound on the C-melody sax. The result was a "light,
breathy style," according to Pearson (197), one that focused on working
and reworking melody, what Young referred to as "telling a story"
(Russell 1971). As Schuller puts it, Young had a pronounced "distaste
for loud, aggressive, noisy ostentation" (549), preferring smooth
transitions from note to note and de-emphasizing the vibrato, which his
contemporary, Coleman Hawkins maximized. Or, in Gridley's estimation,
whereas Hawkins favored a "heavy tone, fast vibrato, and complicated
style," Young used a "light tone, slow vibrato, and buoyant
phrases" (141). That buoyancy was attributable in part to the fact
that he "generally avoided the traditional blue notes, preferring
instead . . . the more 'open,' the more 'positive' major steps of the
scale" (Schuller 553). But what helped him create his distinctive
swing was something else he had in common with Basie-an ability to manipulate
silence. Basie "used silence to space his [solo] lines"-a technique
that has led Basie admirers to claim that he was a man who could make
one note swing; similarly, Young "sometimes purposely ignored the
notes in chords" to alter "the effect of both the tone and chord"
(Gridley 141).
I offer such details about Kansas City swing in general and the Basie-Young
style in particular because I think they offer a framework for understanding
the tone, pace, and texture of The Seven League Boots. Murray himself
suggests we might think about the sound and feel of his text in such terms
by including in the novel several pointed references to swing and also
subtle as well as overt references to Basie and Young. One band member,
Joe States, who serves as Scooter's mentor while he's with the band, calls
up Young when he explains, "It's always that little story that counts"
with both Old Pro, the band's clarinetist and arranger, and the Bossman,
the beloved bandleader (32). When Scooter is tutoring the movie star,
Jewel Templeton, about jazz, he speaks of "the infinite flexibility
of Kansas City four/four" and then demonstrates it by playing a recording
of "The Dirty Dozens," "with Count Basie on piano with
his rhythm section of Walter Page on bass, Jo Jones on drums, and Freddie
Green on guitar" (176-77). And when Scooter is in Europe, sitting
in with a small combo in France, he plays at the Marquis's request "Indiana"
in such a way that causes the Marquis to think of Basie and Young. Immediately
after complimenting Scooter's live playing as well as the recording of
it he made with the Bossman, the Marquis remarks, "On the recordings
of Count Basie's radio broadcasts from the Famous Door it sounds like
the perfect place for a holiday romp. And there are the Lester Young combo
recordings that make you feel as if you are somewhere being caressed by
an elegant lullaby" (306). But it is Jewel Templeton who suggests
that Scooter himself is an embodiment of the Basie-inflected swing style
when she describes him in this way: "Always the completely charming
proportion of ever so tentative but undeniable naughtiness and irresistible
enthusiasm," adding "no wonder you became such a wonderful bass
player in such a short time" (299). No wonder indeed.
Of course, such references in and of themselves do not a swing text make.
What more accurately signals Murray's technique is the book's opening:
Scooter is on a bus with the Bossman's band en route to California, and
he is recalling his first bus trip with the band, when, having joined
the group in Ohio, they were continuing on to New York, stopping along
the way to play dances in nearly every state they passed through. Murray
sets up a relaxed, light rhythm with the opening paragraph, whose details
signal the Basie precision:
When road band buses used to go west by way of Memphis and Little Rock
in those days you picked up Route 66 on the other side of Oklahoma City.
Then six hours later you were through Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle
country and on your way toward Tucumcari and across New Mexico with a
short service stop in Albuquerque and a layover in Gallup, which was thirty-two
miles beyond the Continental Divide and not more than thirty minutes from
the Arizona state line. (3)
Recalling Basie band member Gene Ramey's description of swing-solo playing,
a moving background, and a strong rhythm section-we might think of the
landscape the bus cuts across as the moving background, the traveling
bus itself as the strong rhythm, and the conversation of the band members,
inspired by what they see out their windows, as the solos. A good example
of this occurs when the bus is moving through southern states along the
East coast:
Well, there's old man Johnny Jim Crow, Schoolboy, he said just loud enough
not to disturb anybody else. And I knew that we had recrossed the line
and were back in the section of the country that had been a part of the
old Confederacy and that we had stopped for a traffic light in a courthouse
square that had a gray monument of either a CSA officer on horseback,
or a pack bearing rifleman, facing north.
Still up there, Ike Ellis said; and Alan Meadows said, Still up there
trying to make out like them people didn't get the living dooky kicked
out of them. And Ike Ellis said, Man, did they ever mo. Man once them
Yankees got all of their stuff together and got them gunboats rolling
down the Mississippi and then cut across Tennessee to Georgia and the
sea, kicking every living and swinging ass until times got tolerable,
I'm telling you, mister. (62)
In addition to suggesting solo voices, the call and response exchange
between Ellis and Meadows also shows them to be making their own riffs
on the meaning of the statue that they see out their window. And as indicated
earlier, riffing is considered to be a central component of Kansas City
swing, and especially in Basie's version. It is a central feature of The
Seven League Boots as well, with some riffs contained within single scenes,
as with the Ellis-Meadows exchange, and others occurring over the course
of the whole text. One that recurs throughout the book is what I might
call a "location riff," used to underline the book's problem,
which, although it is presented loosely through the text-Basie-like-can
still be described as Scooter's need to find his place in the world. The
riffs "I said I come from Alabama" and "I said California.
I said Hey California" are both introduced in the book's first chapter;
they first re-emerge in the thirteenth chapter ("And I said, California.
I said, Hey California. I said, Here I am from Alabam. Me and my expectations
and my obligations and now my speculations" [84]); they come up again
in the fourteenth chapter ("I said, California. I said Hey, California.
I said, Me and my postbaccalaureate contingencies. I said, All the way
from the spyglass tree and dog fennel meadows and the L & N canebrakes
and Hog Bayou. I said, This many miles from Chickasabogue Swamp and Three
Mile Creek Bridge" [93]); and so on periodically throughout the book,
until the final chapter, which offers a commentary on that riff: "Rover
boy, rover boy, where have you not been? Not yet to any castle with the
true princess therein" (369). That commentary signals that Scooter's
story, the swing tune that is his life, is still in process, a point that
the shape of the text nicely underlines. A swing text that has not forgotten
its blues roots, The Seven League Boots is made up of many small chapters-"bars,"
if you will. Recalling that the twelve-bar stanza is standard to a blues
tune, we might think of the novel's organization as mirroring that. The
book is broken into two parts, "The Apprentice" and "The
Journeyman." "The Apprentice" consists of 24 chapters-two
sets of twelve bars-and "The Journeyman" consists of 23-one
full set and one as yet unfinished-underlining that Scooter's quest remains
incomplete at the novel's close.
If the foregoing indicates that Murray has indeed sought to create a narrative
form that is modeled on swing technique, what remains to be explored is
its applicability to the kinds of arguments Murray uses both his fiction
and nonfiction to further. As noted earlier, Murray has Scooter remark
to Jewel Templeton at one point in The Seven League Boots-appropriately
when he has assumed the role of teacher-that what swing, in particular
"Kansas City four/four," demonstrates is "infinite flexibility"
(176). As such, it would be to Murray's mind the most democratic of musical
forms, able to accommodate a range of sounds, textures, and attitudes.
Murray is an ardent admirer of the idea and ideal of American democracy
as stipulated in the nation's founding documents, an ideal that he acknowledges
remains to be realized but toward which he believes American history continues
to move. At the vanguard of that effort to reach the ideal formulated
by the nation's founders Murray places African Americans, who, he has
consistently argued for over forty years, must never be seen as having
been victimized by slavery but rather as having responded to the "peculiar
institution" in such a way as to have emerged as exemplary freedom
fighters and therefore quintessential Americans. Swing becomes a testament
to such African American heroism. Its optimism, signaled by its up tempo
beat, reflects what Murray sees as the nation's progressive march toward
realizing the democratic ideal, a march that moves forward even as obstacles
such as segregation and racism, both subtle and overt, persist.
Murray's approach to addressing racism in the U.S., or more accurately,
his approach to ameliorating it, is to argue for an absolute distinction
between the terms "race" and "culture." In his first
book, The Omni-Americans (1970), he set out the position he has maintained
ever since: "That U.S. Negroes make up a very distinct sociopolitical
group with discernable cultural features peculiar to itself goes without
saying, but by no ethnological definition or measurements are they a race"
(124), he insists in one essay. Not only do black Americans fail to constitute
a distinctive race "by ethnological definition," but even by
legal definition-the notorious "one drop rule"-"most native-born
U.S. Negroes, far from being non-white, are in fact part-white" (79-80).
Given those facts, racism to Murray's mind is just silly. And smart people,
both black and white, realize that, Murray repeatedly insists in his work,
including The Seven League Boots, when he has Scooter reflect on his public
school years and favorite teachers in Gasoline Point while he is traveling
in France:
Certainly the most basic of all things about universal free public education
in the United States is that for all its widespread and longstanding entanglement
with racial segregation it is predicated on the completely democratic
assumption that individual development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment
is [sic] a matter of inspiring learning contexts not of one's family background
and certainly not a matter of one's ancient racial forebears. So assumed
Miss Lexine Metcalf and Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, neither of whom ever confused
race with culture. (321-22)
While virtually none of Murray's readers would disagree that racism is
unsupportable, they-and he-would be hard-pressed to deny that racism (here,
I mean specifically the belief that there are distinctive human races
that "differ decisively" from one another in terms of characteristics,
traits, and/or capacities ) exerts enormous influence. Omi and Winant,
I think, best articulate this problem: "Race," they argue, has
"no fixed meaning" (71); it is a "construction" that
is "continuously being disputed, transformed, and eroded" in
the U.S. (157). But it nonetheless "continues to play a fundamental
role in structuring and representing the social world" (55), which
means that in this country "race is present in every institution,
every relationship, every individual" (158). It is therefore not
something that can be denied as an "illusion," but rather must
be recognized for what it is: "a dimension of human representation"
(55).
The Kansas City swing style, democratic as it is, demands that Murray
address in The Seven League Boots the racial dimension of American experience,
especially since Scooter is for much of the book traveling with the Bossman's
all-black jazz band through the U.S. during the early 1950s at the latest,
when the nation was moving toward an era that would dramatically reshape
its racial discourse. And Murray indeed does address that dimension: Early
on in the novel, Scooter is taken to meet Royal Highness, a legendary
showman-dancer, specifically-and mentor of sorts for the Bossman and therefore
also Scooter's artistic ancestor. On one level, because he is a dancer,
he represents the important origins of jazz as dance music, something
Murray feels strongly is a crucial aspect of "authentic" jazz.
As Royal Highness says, "Tell them I say if they don't know what
to make of what I'm all about, shame on them. Because I'm a goddamn fact,
and when you deny me you denying history" (61). But he also serves
as an advisor to Scooter about how he as a black man should deal with
racist whites, whom he calls "jaspers":
"Don't you ever let nobody tell you that you were put here on God's
earth to spend your life worrying and bellyaching about some old jaspers.
. . . some of them are always going to be looking for ways to deny your
talent. Hell, that's the game of life, young soldier. You ever played
any game in which there wasn't somebody trying to deny you something?"
(47-48).
"Bellyaching"-playing the victim-Royal Highness discounts as
an appropriate response. We surely never see Scooter playing the victim,
but neither do we see him confronting anyone who might "deny [his]
talent." Scooter, as Murray's alter ego, is the consummate bandleader;
his smooth, relaxed, Basie-like manner is rendered in smooth, relaxed,
Basie-like prose, which could not accommodate the hero in such a confrontation.
But there are scenes or, better yet, using Lester Young's language, "little
stories" that do bring characters closer to racial confrontation-at
least confronting the effect that racial construction has had on them,
even if they themselves appear to believe such a construction is bogus,
as in revealing nothing about who or what they are. One such example is
the story of Gaynelle Williams, who has two solos in the novel. She is
a "downhome girl" from Mississippi Scooter has a date with shortly
after he gets to California, a date that the Bossman Himself set up. Gaynelle
we learn came to California not to get into the movies but to experience
the culture-"the clothes and the places and the houses and all of
that" (240). She's unmarried, but has had a series of relationships
with white men, the first of which was a rich Hollywood producer who "was
sure enough toted out about that old African queen jungle princess stuff"
(239) and insisted that she sit and have her picture painted in a variety
of poses-as a "Coptic" princess in one and "with her breasts
bare and her hair done up . . . a la Josephine Baker" in another
(236). The relationship finally broke up because his imaginings were too
hard on his heart.
The next white man Gaynelle became involved with she met at a party for
the Basie band; he was a "very rich city boy" who didn't "believe
in any of that old Jim Crow stuff," but nonetheless wanted to play
out his Southern plantation fantasies, which he thought were realities,
with her. At times in conversation he'd bring up "that old unreconstructed
moonlight and molasses stuff about what the South was really all about,"
denying that her information, gathered from experience, couldn't possibly
be truer than his, gathered from books (244). But a more disturbing part
of their relationship occurred in the bedroom: he would have her "take
all [her] clothes off and stand on a hassock and he would just walk around
looking at [her] stroking his chin and feeling [her]" (245)-continuing
his fantasy about the unreconstructed South and treating Gaynelle like
a slave at auction. Most disturbing, however, is that such bedroom antics
were not for Gaynelle the last straw: She tells Scooter that it wasn't
until he wanted to pay her for having his child that she finally ended
the relationship.
These stories are all told to Scooter one night when he visits Gaynelle,
perhaps out of loneliness because his actress-girlfriend is out of town.
The two of them spend the night together, during which she gives him a
hard time about his relationship with Jewel Templeton, signifying on him
for being involved with a rich white woman and on herself for allowing
Scooter to spend the night with her, since she knows that she is a temporary
replacement for his temporary white girlfriend. Their situation is rich
in racial dynamics, but Murray, true to his swing beat, declines to go
there. He has Scooter keep the situation strictly up tempo. Scooter tells
Gaynelle the next morning in response to her continued and somewhat serious
teasing, "I never argue with beautiful people. Not in the morning.
. . . Not on a beautiful morning like this. Not in such delightful circumstances
as these"-a line that we learn comes straight from that master of
swing, the Bossman. "And she let me get away with it," Scooter
reports to us. In other words, once again the swing form allows, even
demands, that discord be introduced, but such discord is rapidly overtaken
by the smooth, up tempo beat. And there are no more opportunities to probe
the racial dynamic Gaynelle introduces. She never again appears in the
book.
And even in smaller moments of the text, other characters indicate that
their lives have been dramatically affected by the way race has been constructed
in the country. For example, just before the band's bus pulls out from
L.A. after Scooter has decided to stay behind to try making it on his
own for awhile, several of the musicians give him stern directives about
how to behave, especially if he turns to making movies. Ike Ellis, for
example, tells him, "don't be letting them have you up there beating
out no hot jazz with no shoeshine rag. And don't be letting them pull
off all them fly clothes and smearing no jungle Vaseline on your brown
velvet skin." Herman Kemble adds, "Boy, if I ever see you up
there talking about Yassir Mr. Charlie and rolling your eyes and flashing
your pearly teeth your natural ass is going to be my personal shit stomping
ground" (158). These seem to be men who know from whence they speak.
But, perhaps using the Basie-Young emphasis on silence, those stories
do not become part of the book. Instead, this "little story"
ends up tempo with winks and slapped palms and waves as the bus pulls
out and Scooter discovers that the band has given him a "substantial
bonus" in his last paycheck.
* * *
Schuller's evaluation of the Basie-Young sound, while generally complimentary,
also points up its limitations. Young was a brilliant innovator who created
astounding music with a "small range in terms of pitches and notes"
(230), something that could be accomplished against the background of
the Basie band's sound. But Basie and his band's "formula for success,"
Schuller suggests, was finally "extracted at a price," with
that price having been the need to "forgo initiative, innovation,
and creativity in a large sense" (234). The Basie style, he goes
on to write, finally "suffer[ed] from considerable neglect of dynamics
and lack of harmonic invention" (252). As a result, the band's music
was "rarely memorable thematically," although most enjoyable
for "its swing, its often exciting call and response brass and reed
exchanges, and above all its superior soloists" (263). The narrative
style of The Seven League Boots I think might be seen in similar terms.
On one hand, I see the novel as an artistic triumph in terms of style.
Murray has found a way to create in language the sound, the very texture,
of Basie swing. In part because he has been so successful, his novel also
points up why bop would go on to supplant swing as the favored style of
jazz musicians. Swing's propulsive rhythm, buoyancy and overall up tempo
attitude did not permit prolonged agitation or, finally, deep reflection,
at least not deep reflection about discordance. The Seven League Boots,
like swing, demands that discordance be introduced. And for Murray, there
is no greater discord than racism. But such discordance cannot be probed
in an up-tempo narrative, something Murray no doubt fully realizes. Probing
racism, indeed probing race at all, Murray has made clear is not something
he is interested in doing, for the danger it opens up is that his work
will only be read in terms of what it has to say about race relations.
His intent, he has argued, is to create black characters who stand for
the American ideal, an ideal that is thoroughly democratic and inflected
with the blues idiom of the black community. But the idiom, even his work
suggests, grows out of the social reality of race, an idea that a narrative
style based on bebop might be better equipped to explore.
Notes
1 Wolfgang Karrer is the exception to this lack of attention to Murray's
narrative transcription of African American musical idiom. In "The
Novel as Blues: Albert Murray's Train Whistle Guita " (1974), he
indeed reads Murray's first novel as a blues novel, but as a failed blues
novel. A major problem here is that Karrer has not accounted for Murray's
take on the blues. I would instead argue that the novel actually functions
as an extended Murrayan definition of the blues-its philosophy, its tropes,
its techniques-and that one would do well to read it as a companion piece
with Stomping the Blues.
2 I am paraphrasing
the definition of "racism" found in Webster's Third New International
Dictionary.
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