Born in Nokomis, Alabama, on 12 May 1916, Murray received his BS from Tuskegee Institute in 1939. He joined the air force in 1943 and retired with the rank of major in 1962. During his period in the service, Murray earned his MA from New York University (1948) and taught literature and composition to civilians and soldiers both in the United States and abroad.
The Omni-Americans (1970), Murray's first book, His next book, South to a Very Old Place (1971), In 1972, Albert Murray was invited to give the Paul Anthony Brick Lectures on Ethics at the University of Missouri. These lecturers were published as The Hero and the Blues (1973). Here Murray develops his concept of literature in the blues idiom, a theory he eloquently practiced in the novel Train Whistle Guitar (1974), which won the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction.
Murray and the American painter Romare Bearden were also close friends and influenced each other's art. Bearden's 1971 six-panel, 18-foot collage The Block was inspired by the view from Murray's Harlem apartment.
In 1976, Murray turned the concept of the blues idiom back on itself, writing perhaps the best book ever published on jazz aesthetics, Stomping the Blues.
Murray collaborated with Count Basie on his autobiography, Good Morning, Blues (1985), and in 1991 published The Spyglass Tree, the long-awaited sequel to his first novel. A catalog essay on the paintings of Romare Bearden (Romare Bearden, Finding the Rhythm, 1991), extends Murray's concepts of improvisation, rhythm, and synthesis even to the realm of the visual arts. Blue Devils of NADA (1996) contains further meditations on blues and jazz greats, while Murray's third novel, The Seven League Boots (1996), brings the hero of Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree to maturity as a bass player in a touring jazz band.
As detailed in Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s New Yorker profile "King of Cats" (April 8, 1996) and in Sanford Pinsker's article in the Virginia Quarterly Review (linked below), Murray received greater attention in the 1980s and 1990s due to his influence on critic Stanley Crouch and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. After detailing Murray's insightful engagement—in non-fiction and fiction—of history, politics, aesthetics, painting, music, and literature, Gates concluded his profile by noting: "This is Albert Murray's century, we just live in it."
With Wynton Marsalis, Murray was the co-founder of the program and institution known as Jazz at Lincoln Center.
He died in Harlem in 2013, aged 97

Source: Wikipedia.org