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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 143
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 2 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, October 19, 2005 - 05:01 pm: | 
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Are there any Albert Murray fans on the board? I've just started his new novel - and have only read about 40 or 50 pages so far - but already I love it.
I guess what makes it so interesting is that I already recognize it as autobiographical, as least, somewhat autobiographical.
In the 1930s, Tuskegee undergraduate Albert Murray was a few years behind Ralph Ellison (although their age difference might have been a little greater because I seem to remember about a 2-year gap between Ralph's high school graduation and college enrollment).
Anyway, this is the 4th of Albert Murray's "Scooter" novels. Scooter is the jazz bass-playing (Who knows, but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?) protagonist who the author follows from his small town childhood in Albama.
At the beginning we learn that Scooter has left the road life and the employ of the "Bossman" (Count Basie to Ellington's "Daddy Royal"? -- just guessing), got married and enrolled at NYU grad school. In real life, I believe that Murray earned a graduate degree at NYU around 1940 and then returned to teach at Tuskegee, where he took an early retirement (as an Air Force officer) in 1962 and moved to NYC.
Scooter's living in Greenwich Village, which is where Murray always says he would have preferred to live, only the rents were cheaper in Harlem (and he lived on the upper floor of a building with a southern view of Manhattan. Btw, Jack McDuff lived in an east side high rise around 135th St., with a view looking south and east). Unrelated to the novel, but it was easy enough to find an online interview (this one from PBS) where he discusses this choice:
Albert Murray on His New York:
"Black Manhattan didn't mean the same thing to me when I came to New York as it meant back when I was younger and had discovered the new Negro anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. By the time I got to college I was concerned with Manhattan at large, and this was a section that I could find many, many idiomatic cousins and much of the romance still existed for me, but I was approaching Manhattan more from a WPA guide than from Black Manhattan or the New Negro, that's Albert Murray's take on Manhattan. So I was always trying to come to all of Manhattan, all of New York and then I had a special place. When I moved to New York this is the apartment that was most available, it's good, it looks right down just like the spyglass tree, like the chinaberry tree, so I live here because of that, and I'm used to the idiom, and my friend Ralph Ellison used to say, "you wouldn't want to be too far away from the idiom." I don't think I would ever be that far away from it wherever I was. That's how it really fits in. All the foundation is there, in the architecture."
But Chris hipped me to the fact that Ralph Ellison spent seven years writing "Invisible Man." So when Scooter meets his old classmate "Taft Woodrow Edison" (Ralph Waldo Ellison), I'm not sure yet what year it is, but I bet there's a lot of their conversations happened like this.
Well, as you can see, it's a very interesting book.
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Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 148
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, October 22, 2005 - 02:19 pm: |
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Finished it. Great novel.
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Mike_e
Newbie Poster
Username: Mike_e
Post Number: 14
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, October 24, 2005 - 12:43 am: |
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This is the first I heard of Murray's latest novel. I have enjoyed the previous installments, starting with Train Whistle Guitar. I will definitely look for this one. |
Steve_s
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 150
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 - 09:46 am: |
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About the name "Taft Edison," Albert Murray writes in a letter dated 9 Feb 52 to Ralph Ellison (Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray):
Taft Jordan plus Harry Edison equal a double-barreled trumpet player, plus Thomas Edison minus Wm. H. Taft equals light bringer equals shining trumpet.
Taft Jordan and Harry "Sweets" Edison were the star trumpet players with the Chick Webb and Count Basie orchestras respectively.
The novel's main characters, Scooter, Taft Edison, and Roland Beasley represent Murray, Ellison, and Romare Bearden respectively.
But there are also similarities (in name, at least), between other characters and real people, for instance:
Papa Joe States, the "Bossman's" drummer = ("Papa" Jo Jones, Count Basie's drummer)
Silent Partner = Billy Strayhorn (Duke Ellington's arranger and co-composer)
Old Pro, the Bossman's "chief arranger and straw boss in charge of rehearsals" = Buck Clayton?
Shag Phillips = Walter Page? (great Count Basie bassist)
Scratchy McFatrick LOL! = Milt Hinton? (bassist who may have replaced Walter Page at some later time).
Carlton Poindexter = Morteza Drexel Sprague? Legendary Tuskegee English teacher who taught a course on the novel.
Although it is fiction, I think it's entirely possible that Murray introduced himself to fellow alum Ellison on the street in midtown after which Ellison took him to the same oyster bar at Grand Central terminal where they had a conversation similar to the one in the novel.
I also think it's very possible that Bearden and Murray dogged Miguel Covarrubias in much the same way their the characters do.
Btw, Williams and Walker are mentioned twice in the novel, here's one instance in a phone call from "Eric Threadcraft" (Don't know who, if anyone, he's supposed to represent) to Scooter:
I distinctly remember you yourself using in a conversation we were having about "Sweet Georgia Brown" on the way back to Hollywood from a Central Avenue jam session one night. I kept talking about how those battling tenors kept leapfrogging each other and you said what you said as if any parody of James Joyce or Williams and Walker, or was it Miller and Lyles in a vaudeville skit?
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