Fasten your seatbelts. This week, we’re going on a rollicking, rhythmic, high-minded, and heartfelt ride through the core of the American experience.
Greg Thomas, our guide through the True but Partial Challenge on race and, more recently The Jazz Leadership Project with Jewel Kinch-Thomas, joins me again to steer us through this week’s journey.
Or should I say: journeys?
That’s how much territory we cover. Greg even coaxes me to steer out of my “interviewer lane” and riff on my own experience stomping the blues.
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The focus of our conversation is Albert Murray, the great 20th century American writer and close colleague of Ralph Ellison.
Haven’t heard of him? Neither had I until a few months ago.
But since when did lack of fame mean anything about a person’s wisdom?
Like me, you will learn to take Albert Murray seriously. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison does. She wrote, “Murray’s perceptions are firmly based in the blues idiom, and it is black music no less than literary criticism and historical analysis that gives his work its authenticity, its emotional vigor, and its tenacious hold on the intellect.”
Like me, you will get mesmerized by the ideas in Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans. Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates wrote in his New Yorker profile of Murray (“The King of Cats”) that the book was “so pissed-off, jaw-jutting, and unapologetic that it demanded to be taken seriously.”
Highlights
- 6:00 Albert Murray’s influence on American culture and art
- 13:30 American identity synthesizes multiple roots
- 20:00 Murray’s devastating critique of “ghettoologists” and “safari technicians”
- 35:00 Decoding ancient fairy tales and applying them to life today
- 39:00 The blues idiom as life compass
- 43:00 The hero’s journey in American cultures, e.g. Harriet Tubman
- 46:00 Hero’s journey is an alternative orientation from Ta-Nehisi Coates and James Baldwin
- 55:30 We fear difference and are attracted to it. Can we integrate this into ourselves?
- 59:00 The Jazz Leadership Project
- 1:10:00 Apprentice, journeyman, and master
Explore Additional Resources
- The Jazz Leadership Project, Greg Thomas and Jewel Kinch-Thomas’s business
- The Omni-Americans: Black Experience And American Culture by Albert Murray
- Albert Murray: Collected Essays And Memoirs
- “King of Cats,” Henry Louis Gates Jr’s long profile of Murray in The New Yorker
- “Art And Propaganda,” Interview with Murray by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Robert G. O’Meally in The Paris Review
- “Art Is About Elegant Form,” Interview with Murray by Wynton Marsalis
- Brian’s Lamb’s C-SPAN interview with Murray
- “The 6 Moods Leaders Create,” my podcast interview with Alan Sieler
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