Albert Murray buys a chair

We often went further downtown. Once we stopped at a posh office-chair outlet on West Fifteenth Street that someone had recommended. A salesman glided over.

“I’m looking for something that’ll let me write another two, three books,” said Mr. Murray with his winning smile. Predictably disarmed, the fellow wound up telling us that he was an ex-junkie whose roommate in detox had been Billy Higgins, Ornette Coleman’s first drummer.

“I heard you gentlemen talking about jazz,” he said, “so I figured you might be familiar with Billy.” The guy didn’t know he was stepping onto a minefield. Mr. Murray had no use, none at all, for Ornette Coleman. Whether he couldn’t or wouldn’t, the man did not swing. Played out of tune, too. I braced myself for a trashing of Higgins’s former employer, but none came. Smiling pleasantly, Mr. Murray listened to the salesman’s tales of kicking with Billy. And swinging his arms wide and generously, our new friend insisted that we ask him anything about the merchandise. Murray settled on a top-dollar chair after which, on the drive uptown, he launched into a discourse on high standards and the importance of elegance.

Given Murray’s famous disdain for pop music, I was delighted to come across a January 1960 letter from Murray, then stationed in the Air Force in Los Angeles, to his almost lifelong intellectual colleague Ralph Ellison.

I went to two RAY CHARLES dance dates … Wonderful time … Man, that goddamned Ray ass Charles absorbs everything and uses everything. Absorbs it and assimilates it with all that sanctified stew meat smelling, mattress stirring, fucked up guilt touchy violence, jailhouse dodging, second hand American dream shit, and sometimes it comes out like a sermon by one them spellbinding stem winders in your work-in-progress [Ellison’s never-to-be-finished second novel] and other times he’s extending Basie’s stuff better than Basie himself.