`Briarpatch' is a provocative collection.

Byline: Paul de Barros

"From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity" by Albert Murray; Pantheon, $22

"I absolutely despise being called `African-American,' " declares novelist and critic Albert Murray, in a provocative interview collected in a new, somewhat uneven miscellany of his work, "From the Briarpatch File."

Among black writers, Murray is a maverick, though an attractively irascible one, and of enormous interest to jazz lovers, since he has single-handedly shaped the world view of the most powerful man in jazz _ Wynton Marsalis.

Simply put, Murray sees the black experience as far more American than …