Crab in black bean sauce, at least as it is served in American Chinese restaurants, starts with a whole crab, most likely Dungeness here in LA, still in the shell, chopped into sections, and stir‑fried until the shells are bright red. It’s then simmered in a fermented black bean sauce. The sticky, unctuous umami bomb was among my father’s very favorite meals.
We observed his birthday this past week as a family by ordering a take-out feast in which this signature dish took center stage. As we sat around my mother’s dining room table, sharing updates on the extended family, job interviews, what’s going on in our fair city, and anything else that came to mind, I imagined my dad there with us, listening and smiling as was common in these kinds of situations, content with letting the loudest voices in the room ramble on from topic-to-topic as love, friendship, and warmth filled the space.
While I’m sure we all had at least a bit of melancholy visit us on that day, it didn’t find me when we were together.
Dave McMurray, a Detroit-born saxophonist, composer, and bandleader whose decades-long career spans jazz, rock, R&B, funk, and pop and includes work as a sideman with artists like Albert King, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan, offers a thesis statement about dealing with grief right at the start of his late 2025 release, I LOVE LIFE even when I’m hurting.
“I know despair don’t care, but be strong!”
It’s a matter-of-fact recognition of truth rather than an exclamation, yet it still stings like an unexpected slap back from the brink. McMurray’s album has been my soundtrack for finding a grounded sense of hope and optimism when those feelings of sadness and loss compound.
Throughout the work, he uses his mastery of the genre to show where and how he finds the will to keep going: in a smile, a joke, or a kind word (even if not explicitly for him), in music that can ignite something within. Beyond “This Life” and the title track, I’m drawn to “We Got By,” a cover of the tune from Al Jarreau’s debut album, with neo-soul vocalist Kem joining McMurray, honoring a lineage of Black resilience. The track is immediately followed by a cover of Yusef Lateef’s “The Plum Blossom” that knocks my socks off. McMurray picks up the flute here, and the performance never fails at lifting my spirits.
I first became aware of McMurray as a sideman on Kem’s debut album Kemistry, the 2003 release by the also Detroit-born singer and songwriter whose warm, romantic songwriting helped define a quieter, emotionally grounded lane of early-2000s R&B. Kemistry returned to regular rotation around this time last year because it was a connection between a friend who died unexpectedly and me.
The opposite of staying stuck in that loop of sadness and despair is to turn to our creative sensibilities. A loss of his own inspired McMurray to say, “I love life even when I’m hurting.” He told Downbeat Magazine’s Bill Murkowski that, a month later, he’d write the track of the same name as a way to give form to what he had been feeling.
The opening track, This Life, was written last. While its original intention was to reckon with physical trauma, that same pain he’d seen in a friend that inspired the title song, he now sees its connection to the precariousness of this cultural and political moment, both at home and abroad.
It is difficult these days to escape the doomscrolling. With a flick of my thumb, real-world turmoil—uncertainty, anxiety, and violence that feels both distant and imminent—plays on an endless loop.
On one of the social media apps, a painter I don’t know asked, “Does art really matter right now?”
A friend replied to her with a quote from the American writer, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara:
“The role of art is to make revolution irresistible.”
As McMurray’s work reminds us, living is not optional. Loving is not frivolous. Optimism is not a luxury reserved for easier times. Creating transforms that which ails us into something that might heal those wounds.
And sometimes you’re mended by wishing a silent happy birthday to your father while sharing one of his favorite earthly treats with the people he loved most.
