Search - Various Artists :: Ralph Ellison: Living With Music

Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) was one of America's most accomplished writers and intellectuals. Jazz and the blues heavily influenced his novels (Invisible Man, Juneteenth) and essays. This CD, produced by Ellison scholar Robert G. O'Meally, the author of Living with Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings, compiles many of Ellison's favorite jazz selections. There's Louis Armstrong's rendition of the Andy Razaf/Fats Waller classic, "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue," and Duke Ellington's ragtime-fringed and dirge-like numbers, "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" and "Black and Tan Fantasy," representing the multihued American democracy Ellison championed. Count Basie's "Moten Swing" and Jimmy Rushing's "Harvard Blues" recall Ellison's driving, wide-open Oklahoma City musical heritage, as does the down-home, spiritual vocals of Billie Holiday and Mahalia Jackson. The lone spoken word on this collection is a 1964 tape of Ellison reading from his essay, "Hidden Name and Complex Fate." As O'Meally writes in his liner notes, "This collection echoes the work of Ellison the trumpet player and composer-in-training who became a writer, and offers Ellisonian equipment for those deciding not only to shun the noise but to live with the momentum implied in jazz music." --Eugene Holley Jr.