The Blue Devils of Nada:

A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement

By Albert Murray
Pantheon, $25 and $23

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Review by Robert Fleming

Albert Murray, an Alabama native, writes of the countless nuances, colors, and rhythms of black Southern life as very few contemporary American authors can. With clarity and precision, he has persistently examined the richness and inventiveness of that way of being. With the release of two new books in the Murray canon, The Seven League Boots and The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, the author proves to be a double threat as a superb novelist and perceptive cultural observer.

The novel, The Seven League Boots, is the masterful conclusion of Murray's trilogy, which began with two other acclaimed offerings. In the two previous works, Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree, Murray chronicled the melodic memories of the young Scooter, who was seen first as a rambunctious child, then as a sensitive, rapidly evolving adolescent. With the latest book, Scooter, now a capable bass player with a traveling jazz band during the Age of Swing, has matured into a young man with big dreams and plans.

Scooter, renamed Schoolboy, falls under the wily guidance of the Bossman, also known as The Emperor of Syncopation, as the band travels on an arduous cross-country tour through Jim Crow America. The band is full of colorful characters, drawn with great style by the author. With this novel, Murray gives us a mythic quest, a young man's journey to enlightenment placed against the raucous backdrop of the jazz world. This is a true jazz book, full of the highs and lows of that splendid wandering life, similar to the best writing in this genre, including such books as John Clellon Holmes's bop classic The Horn, Evan Hunter's fabled 52nd Street tale, Streets of Gold, or James Baldwin's peerless short story "Sonny Blues."

Murray's writing shines throughout The Seven League Boots as he pays homage to his literary influences, specifically Faulkner, Anderson, and Joyce. With challenging and inventive twists and turns of language, Murray follows Schoolboy on his trek to emotional maturity.

Murray's The Blue Devils of Nada builds like a restless jazz riff on the aesthetic framework of his groundbreaking examination of the blues, Stomping the Blues. He has a wealth of information and insights at the ready in this solid collection of essays on art, music, and writing influenced by jazz and blues.

Using a writing style inspired by the spontaneous energy of the blues idiom, Murray details the artistic contributions of the great jazz band leader Duke Ellington in his piece "Duke Ellington Vamping Till Ready." In another essay, "Comping for Count Basie," Murray revisits his work on Basie's memoirs. Here he stresses the need to get the narrative voice right and notes that the writing of an effective autobiography is based on improvisation.

Trumpeter Louis Armstrong's place as a musical pioneer and his importance to jazz and American popular music are chronicled in "The Twentieth Century American Herald." In his survey of African American artists, Murray explores Romare Bearden's legendary use of color, rhythm, and image as he details the artist's evolution as a translator of the black American experience.

It is no surprise that Murray would close the book with an admiring look at writer Ernest Hemingway, who, he says, "writes a prose realistic and more accurate than most reportage." Papa's powers of narration and observation are given close scrutiny in the crowning essay, "Ernest Hemingway Swinging the Blues and Taking Nothing." Murray goes beyond the highly publicized macho image to dwell on the author's expert storytelling skill and strict attention to craft and character.

In each of the essays compiled here, Murray underscores the pervasive influence of jazz and blues in the innovations of musicians and writers. Not once during this odyssey does he falter in driving home his viewpoints.

Both The Seven League Boots and The Blue Devils of Nada attest to the exceptional writing technique and vision of Albert Murray, one of America's premier cultural commentators. ¦

©1996, ProMotion, inc.

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