Taking the Measure of His Soul : FICTION : THE SEVEN LEAGUE BOOTS,<i> By Albert Murray (Pantheon Books: $25; 369 pp.)</i>

Here’s a book steeped in nostalgia for a time that has come and gone, a grand and sprawling novel of a young black man’s maturation in the company of a traveling jazz band making its way by bus across 1930s America.

Here are the endless miles of highway, the burger joints and late-night gigs, the romantic encounters, the recording sessions, the rich and idiomatic banter of a musical fraternity.

Here are men named Joe States and Milo the Navigator, Malachi Moberly and Old Pro and Osceola Menefee, their conversations echoing the impromptu twists and turns of their music, the music itself rendered as joyful speech, as “jive time lying, signifying and tall tale telling and retelling.”

And here is the band’s composer, its leader and inspiration, the Bossman himself, the emperor of syncopation, “walking his crotch-airing, knee-loosening, back-straightening, shoulder-adjusting sporty limp walk.” The Bossman possesses the sophisticated air, the coy and clever manner of jazz’s greatest composer, Duke Ellington. He wears cashmere pullovers, gray worsted slacks and fleece-lined slippers. His hair has that “special footlights sheen.”

Nostalgia seems an improbable and complicated guide for a writer steering through African American life in the first half of this century, but that’s just what Albert Murray is up to in “The Seven League Boots.” Murray’s novel is a work of joy, of celebration, of looking back to a time of grand invention. It’s a work that declares the freedom that this great music signified for those who, in so many other ways and for so long, were not free at all.

As in his two earlier novels, “Train Whistle Guitar” (1974) and “The Spyglass Tree” (1991), Murray’s hero is the ever-inquisitive soul-searcher named Scooter, fresh out of college and aiming to use his musical skills to save some money before heading on to graduate school and figuring out what to do with his life.

Born in Alabama, raised with the notion that the world holds great promise for him, Scooter reels with wonder and delight at every new stop along the road while also engaging in his own act of remembering, of nostalgia for what he has left behind: “I said, California. I said, Hey, California. I said, Me and my post-baccalaureate contingencies. I said, All the way from the spyglass tree and dog fennel meadows and the L&N; cane breaks and Hog Bayou. I said, This many miles from Chickasabogue Swamp and Three Mile Creek Bridge.” Scooter sees himself located not only in the here and now but also in the past. He is possessed by what his college roommate called “the ancestral imperative” to find his place in a continuum stretching both forward and back.

When a novel begins, as this one does, with an epigraph from Kafka’s “The Castle,” you figure the protagonist has got little chance of getting to where he thinks he’s going, and that’s certainly true for Scooter. Murray’s interest is in the search itself, in the grand quest for finding meaning in experience and history. If there is a single unifying notion that runs through not just the trilogy of Murray’s novels but also his nonfiction writing--including his brilliant memoir, “South to a Very Old Place” (1971)--it is the notion that men’s lives are formed from the total of human experience, from the inheritance provided not just by a single race but by all races. And so while the band’s travels retrace the path of both the Underground Railroad and Sherman’s march, Scooter spends his free hours visiting museums and architectural landmarks. He has read the great works of Western literature, from Homer to Melville to Twain to Joyce. He knows what hitting the road can mean, and before too long he leaves the band, sets out on his own, becomes literally and figuratively a journeyman and craftsman, finding in music and art and history the measure of his own soul.

With all of its historical and literary allusions, it’s not long before we recognize the grand ambition that lay behind “The Seven League Boots.” The title is itself allusive, referring to a fairy tale where the hero is able to take giant strides by slipping his feet into a pair of magic boots. And Murray’s novel is nothing if not a step-by-step account of such giant strides, a fable serving up its moral in generous positions, a young man searching for meaning and finding it not in a single experience, a single piece of music, a single historical fact but everywhere he looks and again and again. And it’s only then that he can go home again, back to Alabama, and try to become whoever he will become.

Near the end of the novel, Scooter asks himself: “What are the expectations of a brownskin boy from the outskirts of Mobile, Ala., when it comes to basic questions of the human proposition and the expansion and elevation of horizons of human aspiration?”

Scooter’s answer--and it’s Murray’s answer, too--is as simple as it is affirmative: “No less than is expected of any other boys elsewhere.”

It is this answer that makes “The Seven League Boots,” and the two novels that preceded it, not just an exercise in nostalgia but a great work of art, a rich and moving song of the human spirit.