In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Devlin 212 and sounding boards that they became for one another, but I believe, using several anecdotal guidelines, it was in the mid-1970s. Mike and the man he affectionately referred to as “the Professor” or “Professor Murray” (though in person he called him Al) were around each other regularly starting in the 1960s: at concerts, studio recording sessions, and jazz clubs. They also had many mutual friends,JoJones in particular. Mike was fond of saying that back then, it would not be strange to see Murray in any corner of the city, at any hour of the day or night. Mike might see Murray catching Duke’s show at the Rainbow Room in the evening, then at an after-hours joint downtown, and then on a subway platform in Harlem first thing in the morning. They were both night owls par excellence.As an old Irish admonition says, “You’re a long time dead in your grave”; so get the most out of life. I was friends with Mike for the last several years of his life. He was famous among his wide circle of acquaintances for his marathon late-night phone sessions. I was on the other end of the phone probably hundreds of times. Often these conversations would range across a vast intellectual expanse, but they always returned to his profound love for “the Professor” and his work. Mike was divorced and did not go to a job every morning, so there was no incentive for Mike, as Murray would wryly note, not to talk until 4 a.m. From what I could gather, it was in the 1980s and 1990s that their telephone sessions became multihour rituals a few late nights a week. Murray would read to Mike from works in progress, and they’d discuss the latest reviews and essays in a variety of periodicals. Once, while I was shopping with Murray atTower Records, we saw that TheTrumpet Kings at Montreux (Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, and Roy Eldridge) had been released on CD. Murray said to me, “We’d better each buy a copy. Mike will be calling!” (Mike was very close to Roy Eldridge and Clark Terry.) They’d talk current events and nineteenth-century events; they’d speculate, philosophize, and sometimes argue.A frequent argument they had was overTolstoy and Dostoyevsky, with Murray taking “the Count” and Mike taking the side of “the Prophet.” For both of them the discussions were essential.They’d see each other at various events, perhaps at LincolnCenter or elsewhere around the city. If Murray was speaking or on a panel, Mike was sure to be there. Mike would also make the trek from his Upper East Side apartment near Sutton Place to Harlem once On James and Murray 213 in a while. In person, Mike andAl were electric and dynamic together.Around one another they knew they could really talk jazz with someone to whom nothing they knew—none of the aesthetic judgments or obscure details— was foreign. Mike was also a great champion of Murray’s writing, as evidenced by a letter to the editor of the NewYorkTimes Book Review in which he defended Murray’s latest novel against the criticisms of, in Mike’s estimation (and in my estimation as well), an improperly qualified reviewer. In his letter ofJune 2005 he wrote that having a pop music critic review The Magic Keys was “an insult to a writer of Murray’s stature” because according to Mike, Murray “is the most original stylist and technical innovator in American fiction since Hemingway and Faulkner.” He continued, saying that through Murray’s novel “for the first time in American fiction the heroism in black America is revealed. This sets Murray apart from Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison . Murray has relieved fiction of victimization so popular among white critics. In reviews such as this, the real racism and condescension from white intellectuals comes in—whether from radicals, liberals, or conservatives.”Although the Times didn’t publish Mike’s letter to the editor, that he wrote it and sent it illustrates his sincere appreciation for (and understanding of) Murray ’s literary objectives as well as the depth of friendship between them. In the weeks before his sudden and unexpected passing, Mike was excited about an essay he was going to coauthor with Annie Kuebler for Cambridge University Press on Duke Ellington and his relationships with his musicians, but he was even more excited about collecting his thoughts on...

Share