He handed me an old margarine container filled with something brown and icy. I scratched the ice and sniffed my fingernail.
“Gumbo!”
“Yeah, man, Mama just sent it up.”
Art Blakey lived upstairs from the brothers, and the writer and jazz critic Stanley Crouch was a near-constant fixture there. The Marsalis apartment was a never-ending artistic salon, a New York jazz version of Gertrude Stein’s famous gatherings at her Paris apartment in the 1920s. Through Wynton and Branford, I met jazz greats—artists like Elvin Jones and Sarah Vaughan—and got to spend time with them in intimate settings, talking about music and art. It’s hard to overstate how much a young actor from New Orleans learned simply by being there among them.
I remember one occasion hanging out with Wynton and Stanley, when they pointed out that I was the one actor in their circle and put me through my paces. “Do you really know your theater history?” they asked. Yeah, I said, I know.
“Okay,” said Stanley. “Tell me about the African Grove Company.”
“That was the all-black theater company started in New York City in 1821,” I said. “They staged a famous production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, starring James Hewlett, who, by the way, was the first black actor in theater history to play Othello.”
I hit my friend Stanley with more historical facts, concluding triumphantly, “So, yeah, that is the African Grove Company.”
This sharp-edged discussion and debate was challenging, but it was the kind of intellectual camaraderie that fueled me. This was New York, and it was a kind of culture shock that jolted my heart and electrified my mind. I had had some of it at NOCCA, but by comparison, that experience was very insular. These conversations about art and its meaning and place in life didn’t just happen in living rooms and cafés but were documented in newspapers and magazines. They were part of public life. And so was I. In just a few short years, I had gone from playing ball in Pontchartrain Park to rubbing shoulders and trading insights with performers and writers who were at the top of their craft, at the center of the artistic world.
It was exactly where I wanted to be.
I’ll never forget the day in 1983 when Wynton got his first Grammy nomination for his solo instrumental performance on his second album, Think of One. When I stopped by the apartment to congratulate him, I found him listening to Miles Davis on the stereo. I was excited for Wynton’s big news, but he didn’t want to talk about that.
“Shhh, shhh,” he said. “Listen to him, man, his use of space. If I could just play one note and capture what he captured in that single note . . .”
“Yeah, that’s great,” I said, “but congratulations on the Grammy nomination!”
“Man, I appreciate it. Thank you,” he said. “But you know we don’t do it for that.”
That was a reminder: For a true artist, the awards are not the reward. The reward is being able to play a single, solitary note like Miles. That, not popular acclaim, is the moment of truth for an artist. That’s what it’s all about—and the only way to reach that summit is through study and shedding. Wynton helped me to see that.
Over the years, I watched Wynton’s professional trajectory, and learned from how he worked to keep fame and fortune from compromising his artistic purity. Unlike most artists, he didn’t have to compromise much. One time, CBS Records called him and said that Mick Jagger wanted to do an album with him. Wynton said he wasn’t interested in that.
The people at CBS couldn’t believe it. Do you know who he is? Yes, Wynton told them, I know exactly who Mick Jagger is. But I’m not interested in playing pop music. The record label told Wynton that he would get a big paycheck from this. That didn’t move him either. Wynton could not bring himself to compromise his art.
When he told me about that conversation, I couldn’t believe it. “Skain,” I said, using his nickname, “are you crazy, man?”
No, he said, it’s like this: As the artist, you have to make the decisions about your work. Don’t let the businessman make decisions about your work.
Over the years I came to recognize the truth of this principle in my acting. There’s the craft, and there’s the business, and they rarely meet. You as an artist have to make that call. When I talk to my agents and my manager and tell them I want a particular job, I always know that I’m prepared to walk away from it if I come to believe that it will compromise my artistic integrity. No matter how big the paycheck or the promise of awards, you have to be able to turn your back on something if you believe it will compromise your art.
“You’ve worked hard at NOCCA and Juilliard,” Wynton said to me once. “Why would you do that if all you want to do is something simple and easy?”
Wynton has long been criticized for being such a purist and so hard on pop music and rap. He and I were talking about this once, and how his critics call him an elitist. “But I know the level of artistry that so many people have created with jazz,” he said. “The bar’s been set high. I have the same expectations of myself. Pop music is fine, but that’s not the same thing. I eat at McDonald’s from time to time, but that’s not the same thing as fine cuisine.”
One of the best gifts Skain gave me was introducing me to Albert Murray, both the man and his work. Murray, who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-seven, was a great African American writer, jazz critic, and public intellectual once described by Duke Ellington as “the unsquarest man I know.” Wynton first met Murray in 1982 and was captivated by his traditionalism, which seemed radical at the time. He made a habit of heading up to the apartment Murray and his wife, Mozelle, shared at 45 Lenox Terrace in Harlem, where she would cook southern comfort food and they would talk about art, music, and ideas late into the night.
Murray, who was in his mid-sixties when he took Wynton under his wing, tutored the young musician in the Western intellectual canon and taught him how the African American experience fit into the broader cultural and artistic history of the West. Murray cultivated in his eager pupil a reverence for tradition, and an insistence on the importance of knowing it and being committed to it. For Murray, “tradition” wasn’t the same thing as “traditionalism.” The historian Jaroslav Pelikan once said, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” Albert Murray couldn’t have agreed more.
It was hard to characterize Murray, who managed to offend white and black people both with The Omni-Americans, the 1970 book that made his reputation. The title referred to African Americans—a term that Murray rejected, by the way, saying, “I am not African; I am American.” In the book, Murray contended that the Negro experience was the quintessential American one. Ours is a pioneer nation, he argued, made by people who had to learn resilience in the face of hardship. Nobody had it harder than the African slaves, and the music that emerged from slavery—the blues, and later, jazz—was the purest expression of the American spirit.
“Frederick Douglass is a better illustration of the American story—the American as self-made man—than the founding fathers,” he wrote. And: “The blues is not the creation of a crush-spirited people. It’s the product of a forward-looking, upward-striving people. Jazz is only possible in a climate of freedom.”
Murray had no patience for people he believed reduced African Americans to victims, either of the white man or of their own social pathologies. He denounced Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s controversial report on the Negro family as “propaganda,” and “part of the new folklore of white supremacy.” But he also strongly criticized the writing of prominent Negro intellectuals like James Baldwin, who in Murray’s view did violence to the complexity of black lives and black history by representing it as nothing more than “oppression and repression.”
“They are playing the other man’s game rather than looking into the experience that he has lived, that his father and grandfather and great-grandfather have lived,” Murray wrote. I suspect Mamo and Papo would h
ave understood his point.
For Murray, though, whether or not the black man was socially invisible, as his great friend Ralph Ellison had it, he was also everywhere in the American imagination—hence “omni-Americans.” In America, the national culture was “incontestably mulatto,” he wrote, adding that “the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”
In the 1960s, Murray and Ellison both reacted strongly against an emerging separatist sensibility among African Americans. “Both men were militant integrationists,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote in a 1996 New Yorker profile of Murray, “and they shared an almost messianic view of the importance of art.” Gates astutely observed that for Ellison and Murray, integration was not “accommodation” to white-dominated culture, but rather “introjection” of the black sensibility into the broader culture.
As Murray would later put it in a public radio interview, American art reveals “how it feels to be an American, with American aspirations.” Just as black folks are the most American of all Americans, the art they produce is the most American of American art. For me, discovering Albert Murray was like finding the intellectual version of Amos Pierce, war hero, who stood at the Municipal Auditorium singing the anthem of the nation that denied him his medals, affirming his Americanness in the face of his nation’s determination to render him invisible. And it was like discovering the artistic iteration of Amos Pierce behind the wheel of the family sedan, taking to the wide-open road with joy and confidence, saying that you can’t get lost in America.
I met Albert Murray only twice—once at Jazz at Lincoln Center, and on another occasion, back in the 1990s, at his Harlem apartment. Wynton kept telling me I had to meet the man, and at long last I made the pilgrimage uptown to sit down with the master.
We talked about jazz and about the music he heard as a young man. Born in Alabama in 1916, Murray had lived through virtually the entire history of jazz. The two of us spoke about how wonderful it was that Wynton was keeping up the tradition while at the same time exploring new avenues for jazz.
Murray told me about his long friendship with Ralph Ellison, which began when they were both undergraduates at Tuskegee in the 1930s. That made a deep impression on me. As a young man in your twenties, a lot of your pursuits are trivial. I plead guilty to that myself, but with me and the young black artists whose circle I was a part of, there was a lot more to our lives. We were trying to be serious about art and our calling as performers and creators. What a comfort to know that we were not strange in our dedication to high art, that black men as gifted and as accomplished as Ellison and Murray had walked this path before us, at our age.
On that visit, Murray showed me a sheaf of sketches by his friend Romare Bearden, the Harlem Renaissance painter. One of Bearden’s most famous paintings, The Block, is a big, boisterous collage depicting Harlem street life. It now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it had its genesis on Albert and Mozelle’s balcony. “Go take a look,” Albert said. I stepped out onto the balcony where art history had been made. It was sublime.
TO HAVE THAT KIND of give-and-take with Albert Murray was one of those New York moments that I had only heard and read about. But it was my life back then: a big, boisterous collage of high and low and everything in between, all of it a gift, none of it lost, and every bit for the making of my own perspective.
Murray’s way of thinking about art had a profound influence on my own aesthetic. In The Omni-Americans, Murray defined art as the stylization of life experiences. “More specifically,” he wrote, “an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk, or communion of faith embodies its basic attitudes toward experience.
“And this is not all,” he continued. “Of its very nature, an art style is also the essence of experience itself, in both the historical and sensory implications of the word.”
My own artistic style, then, if it was to be genuine, had to come out of my own experience, but also transcend it. Murray taught me to see myself and my future as an artist in both particular and universal terms. There is something that an African American man born in the middle of the twentieth century to a working-class New Orleans family can bring to the human dialogue. But if it is going to be a contribution that lasts, it must speak to the great conversation all humanity has been having with itself about life for millennia. You must recognize as an artist that you are one link in the invisible chain that connects us all, across civilizations and eras.
Murray impressed upon me that art is the tangible intersection of the consciousness of an individual and a people, and how they deal with the joys, the sorrows, the pleasures, and the pains presented to them by life in their own place and time. The artist dwells in that intersection and makes the ideas, the emotions, and the spirit of that crucible concrete, and accessible to all.
His point, ultimately, was that in exploring our diversity as artists and human beings, we must never lose sight of the fundamental unity of human experience and how that is expressed in art. I still think about that when I travel. Once I was at a funeral in Thailand and picked up a vivid sense of celebration coming from the mourners’ parade. Then it hit me: This was the Thai version of a New Orleans jazz funeral.
Even though the music was different, how those Thai people dealt with death intersected in the way we in New Orleans deal with death. They had the dirge march toward the cemetery, with cymbals and drums. When they left the newly interred dead in the grave, the mourners returned to the world of the living with the whirling sound of wind instruments. They came back swinging hard.
Here I was in Thailand, in Phuket, in 1988, and I saw and heard the Thailand version of that old familiar cycle and realized that, six thousand miles from home, I had stood at a spiritual crossroads of humanity and known exactly what these strangers were saying with their sound and music and movement. The impulse was the same. This moment of recognition, of connection, brought clarity to Murray’s teaching. The way you engage with life is your culture, and when you interact with other people in other cultures, if you have eyes to see and a heart that’s open, you will recognize your common humanity. And when it reaches the highest degree of authenticity, this spirit will connect you across time to other human beings from centuries past and, if your own creation is pure and true, to peoples yet to be born.
Don’t give up your identity as an artist speaking out of the Negro experience, Murray taught, but don’t give up your identity as an American either—and if you would be an artist and a man in full, never forget that you are part of the human diaspora.
That’s a powerful discovery to make as a young artist. Being with Albert Murray in his Harlem apartment was like going to the mountaintop to be with a guru. He instilled in everyone in our New York circle a craving for excellence and a fierce determination never to compromise in its pursuit. His was the Moses generation, the liberators who brought African Americans through the desert of Jim Crow after slavery. He handed responsibility to us, members of the Joshua generation, to lead our people into the Promised Land.
Skip Gates was right: Murray did have a near-messianic view of art. For Murray, art was the trait that made us human because it distinguishes us from animals that need care only about the bare elements of survival. The creation of art involves a constant struggle to raise what is beastly in ourselves out of the mud and to call ourselves to embrace and be transformed by what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”
If art is both a sign of our humanity and the means by which we embrace it, there could scarcely be a more serious undertaking than to become an artist. Murray’s theories went hand in glove with the training I was receiving at Juilliard. As my instructors there taught me how to enter into the mind and historical circumstances of a character to find his particular humanity, so too did Murray teach me to dig deep into art to find our common humanity. Juilliard taugh
t that this would help us actors understand the ground of character; Murray taught that this would help me understand the ground of human life.
My Juilliard teachers drew out and refined my talent. Before Juilliard, I thought my training was there to boost my natural talent and to give it an outlet. Juilliard taught me that there is actually a developed talent, through implementing technique. One can evolve as an artist and a performer at the same time, as the practice of technique and the understanding of theory perfects one’s natural gifts.
My time in New York was teaching me that art and artistry don’t just happen. It was teaching me that art is not a sideshow to the real business of life, it is at the heart of what it means to live as a human. At its best and highest, art changes people’s hearts, minds, and even their lives. Art reveals truths of the human condition that, lost in our everydayness, we cannot see. It transfigures the ordinary. Because we must see a thing before we can love it, art clears our vision so that our hearts and minds can follow the right path out of chaos and hatred and hopelessness, toward order, love, and redemption.
A philosopher might do this for some. A theologian might, as well, and so too might a great orator. But no one can accomplish this as artists—poets, musicians, painters, filmmakers, and yes, actors—can. After our rigorous training perfects our natural gifts, we emerge with the near-miraculous power of alchemy, having the potential to take the plain stuff of life and transform it into gold.
This discovery was a visceral epiphany for me. I felt a sense of great optimism as a young actor in training. It opened my eyes to the ability of what an actor and an artist can do.
I started to see how much impact Shakespeare had on the world of his time and place. In a time of constant political positioning between factions, his insight burned like a lantern, illuminating his audiences about the workings of greed, of hubris, of the flaws of leadership, and the workings of power. Because Shakespeare spoke as no one writing in the English language ever had about the depth and the breadth of humanity’s encounter with life itself, his art will live as long as men draw breath.
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