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Maguire 200 pulling some books off the shelves and turning the pages. I had never seen anything like it.That’s not to say I didn’t think scholarship was important before then, because I always made good grades; I liked to study and learn. But Al is somebody you can hardly believe exists. He knows so much. Albert Murray gave me an education that no amount of money could buy. If you had $2 million and you said, “I’m going to pay for this education,” you wouldn’t have gotten what I got. He was willing to talk with me day and night. He’d suggest books for me to read, and I’d read them, then call him, maybe at 10:30, 11 o’clock at night. “You up?” I’d ask. “Yeah, man, I’m up,” he’d say. “Come on over.” I’d go over, we’d sit down, I’d pull out my notepad , and he’d start talking.We’d talk about interpretations of poems.Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers: “A blessing is also a curse.” Or Doctor Faustus : “Do you know of any emotion stronger than love? Yes, interest.” The function of education. Or Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Or mythology: he had me read Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, John­ Kouwenhoven’s Made in America and Beer Can by the Highway. If I asked him a question over the phone, by the time I got to his apartment, he’d have five books laid out to help explain the answer. But our relationship wasn’t only about studying. It was more familiar, like family. We’d talk about so many things, all of it interconnected. I remember once we were talking about Picasso, and I was saying, “Man, you know I love Picasso.” I had read John Richardson’s biography of Picasso. “But what I can’t figure out is why none of the people in his paintings are ever smiling.”To me that took away from what he was doing. So you know how Al is. He started talking about smiling and what it means in terms of human emotions and the depth of emotion. I just told him that I like to see people smiling. That’s the sort of quirky conversation we would always have. But even there, his genius would be undeniable. He always has something to tell me that I need to know. And he’s honest. I don’t do anything serious unless I get his perspective on it. I didn’t know if I wanted to go up to Lincoln Center because I had my own band. I was working . I was making good money. Going to Lincoln Center I knew would mean making much less money, having much less freedom to do what I wanted to do while dealing with a lot more people and having to work within the con- Marsalis on Murray 201 straints of an institution—things I didn’t necessarily want.This was a very serious decision for me. So I went to see Al. I sat down with him, and we talked for four or five hours about it. And he was just laying it out for me, what the meaning of an institution is, what you can do, how. He just laid out the whole thing that made me really understand what was happening because he put it in a context.That allowed me to make a decision the next day. He didn’t tell me what to do. He gave me clear information. “You can do this or you can do that. This means this and this means that. And this came from this and that became that.” He gave me historical references. He’s so rich with that information . When I started with Lincoln Center, there wasn’t really anything to be on board with. It was just three concerts I was asked to do in the summer. ButAl developed the intellectual foundation of what was to become Jazz at Lincoln Center. He said, you all should have four components: curatorial, archival, educational, and ceremonial.That foundation came from him. But that doesn’t mean he likes everything I do there. He treats me like family, he tells me stuff, and I listen to him. But I do what I have to do because I’m the one who has to do it.That’s a point he also makes...

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