Y’dig?

Is there are metaphor here for something greater? Something at hand?

Jazz is American’s classical music. It’s a national disgrace that it is so rarely heard, so absent from mainstream culture. Whereas we’ll spend millions on opera, concert halls and theaters, if you want to hear jazz, go to a saloon. It is widely held that the early jazz musicians were primitives, uncouth fellows who couldn’t read music, who played by ear, but who just had that innate ability to play. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of jazz musicians could and did, read and write music at the highest level and their musical education embraced all forms of music, Western classical, South and Central American, popular music, folk music etc. The one thing they all had in common was that they loved good music, from whatever cultural tradition it came from.

What’s more, jazz initially, was an ensemble music, entirely democratic, each instrument playing with and off the others. Highly American, in fact.

As time went by, ego asserted itself and the era of ‘the solo’ arrived. No more was ensemble playing valued. A trio, say, of piano, bass and druns would accompany the Soloist – the same happened in rock music too, and the public were treated to intermnably long, boring solos that eventually almost killed off the form. Many will be familiar with the story of how John Coltrane asked his then boss, Miles Davis, “Miles, when I get on that bandstand, I just go off into a world of my own. I lose all sense of time. People tell my my solos are too long. How can I make them shorter?” Miles said, but less politiely than this, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.”

Loren Schoenberg, esteemed director of the National Museum in Harlem, and no mean player of the  tenor horn himself, says that the ensemble playing that the musicians of the past played, was extremely diffiicult to execute and that most modern players would find great difficulty playing it. He says it is technically much more difficult than soloing in front of a backing group. Indeed, he says, this being so, if audiences were more hip to what’s going on, it’d be the ensemble playing they’d applaud, not the solos.

Lee Konitz, a man they should be building statues for now when he’s still alive, and unquestionably one of the all-time great improvising musicians said to me yesterday, “in playing, more and more I feel like eliminating the concept of solo after solo, and the group really responding to each other. In the moment it becomes a compositional music that is great fun to play and sometimes, although it’s hard to evaluate the musical worth, it’s communicable too. Audiences appreciate not having to wade through these endless solos of mediocrity most of the time.” And he says, “To me that’s a revelation I’ve known all these years but somehow, people are willing to try that now, the young people. And I’ve had great fun doing that with young musicians. I’ll play with Brad Mehldau and Charlie Hayden in July and I’m hoping we can do that because they’re great at that, if they’re willing to do that, it’ll take Brad and all of us off the spot, of having to repeat what he’s famous for, playing great solos and things.”

By the way, Lee is playing with these guys at Birdland, for four days from July 20th.

Lee’s touching something profound in my view. Collective playing opens us up more, is spiritually fulfilling and is rewarding equally for the player and the listener. What are we waiting for? Maybe dancing together is about to come back too?

This could be the platform on which live music will enhance our lives and become commonplace once more, that our best musicians should be accorded the stature they deserve.

But I hope and pray, that these Obama years will be the prelude to something beyond our wildest hopes that human evolution will leap forward so that we all live together in peace and harmony, that this Mother Earth becomes a paradise for all God’s creatures, a place where true values are celebrated and where the rich, the greedy, the manipulators take a back seat for at least a few millennium. Their riegn has lasted too long and maybe the ensembe players are about to have a chance.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Spirit, Truth, Uncategorized, Understanding, human brain, ydig collectivity, ensemble playing, hope for the future, jazz, Lee Konitz

Attended an amazing chamber jazz performance today in the GML Auditorium in the Bronx Community College, amazing, not in the commonplace sense, but amazing in the eye-opener sense. The auditorium itself is a masterpiece of architecture, a National Historical Monument designed by Stanford White, incongruous in a campus replete with run-down, eyesore East European architecture complete with half finished verges and a general atmosphere of “Who cares?” My Russian wife strongly disagreed with this sentiment, she said the average Russian student would be more than grateful for such a campus, it’s buildings, it’s open spaces, sports field, handball courts and she observed that Russian students achieve a great deal from the little they have, that academic excellence is a product more of what the teachers and the students bring to the process by way of commitment and attitude.  In her opinion, the average Russian student would be in heaven in surroundings as excellent as those found in the Bronx Community College. I defer to the superior wisdom of my wife.

Anyway, if anyone wants evidence that jazz is dying on its feet, or even dead, they need look no further that what was on offer today. The auditorium held about 1200 people, probably 100 students had bothered to turn up, and most of those came because they got credits for attending. (We saw them being checked off on the way out by a member of staff.)

If jazz were considered remotely cool by society at large, Dominick Farinacci, a master of trumpet and flugelhorn at the age of 27 would be a pin up, maybe even a movie star. For cool emanates from self belief and Farinacci exudes that in abundance. Yet, he is largely unknown in his own country although something of a star in Japan where his albums regularly top the jazz charts there. If that were here, it’d be a bit like saying he was a very tall dwarf, for whereas in the 50s and 60s, jazz accounted for about 40% of the average labels sales. by the 90s that was down to 4%. God knows what it is now.

Check him out, he’s more than just very good.

http://www.dominickfarinacci.com/

http://www.myspace.com/dominickfarinacci

also, see this interview with Russ Titleman, who’s produced Farinacci’s latest album: http://www.ny1.com/Default.aspx?ArID=86800

Farinacci attempted a rapport with his audience, who were in the same age bracket as himself. It was doomed from the outset by two factors. Firstly, he spoke without a microphone and those in the middle to rear of the hall couldn’t hear what he said. Eventually, one brave young lady halfway back shouted “We can’t hear you” and he took advantage of the hand mic. But sadly, when he told them a little of himself and asked them what they knew, the vast majority didn’t know what the Blues were, and had never heard of ‘standards’ that body of Broadway show tunes, the canon of American popular music, songs such as Body and Soul and Just One of those Things, which he played. I’d bet, If he’d offered $100 to anyone who knew who Cole Porter was, he wouldn’t have left the hall the poorer.

How comes there’s such a disconnect? The Bronx is a stone’s throw from Harlem where the greatest musicians of the 20th century lived and worked, the people who created America’s Classical Music less than half a century ago. Yet, as far as this audience was concerned, it might as well have been on another contintent and in the Dark Ages.

Farinacci was accompanied by a piano player, Dan Kaufman, and a bassist, Yasushi Nakamura. The drummer who was scheduled to accompany them didn’t show, clearly a man who knew not to cast his pearls.

Obviously, going on without a drummer leaves a hole in a quartet, especially if they’d rehearsed, and these gifted musicians coped and filled in the space so well one wasnt’ aware of the absence. However, one might question the program chosen. To play a selection of jazz standards was never going to lift this audience. Personally, I’d have gone for the jugular and attempted to get them out of their seats. Playing music that was deemed cool fifty years ago or more, just wasn’t cool in these circumstances.

Should we care? Of course. If values and asthetics matter and they do, it is a tragedy that these young people are so cut off from our collective roots from the well-spring of creativity that had this country dominate popular culture across the world for the last hundred years. And these aren’t the dregs of our youth, these are, after all, students in a community college trying to widen their perspectives, to improve themselves.

May God help them, and us.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, God, Knowledge, Meditation, Truth, Uncategorized, Understanding, human brain, ydig Dominick Farinacci, jazz

Let me be clear what interests me specifically in jazz. I’ve always loved good music, irrespective of what type of music it was. For example, in the late 1980s when I took my family on a trip up the Nile river on a felucca, an open deck sail boat, we stopped off in a village, in the middle of nowhere, between Aswan and Luxor, and there was a religious festival going on. Men, who had come on horseback and who carried first world war bolt action rifles, were ‘dancing’ to amazing music. They were dressed in long flowing robes, with huge hats and they swirled in school playgrounds and in private spaces in the village, such as the courtyards of private houses. They whirled, around and around, and amazingly, even though their eyes were firmly closed and they were in close proximity, they never actually touched, let alone bumped into each other. I was enthralled – how did they avoid collisions, how did they keep spinning around and around without falling over? To this day, I just don’t know, but it was the music was that really got to me. It transported me into some special place, which I later came to recognize as the absolute present, the pure moment between past and future that is so easy for kids to be in and so hard for adults. There was a dimension to the music that really touched my spirit.

So while I like all kinds of good music, what I’m always seeking is the aspect I’ve just described. It can be as rare as hen’s teeth if you don’t know where to look.

Last night I attended another wonderful program in the National Museum of Harlem, this time on Jazz in the 1960s. The guy who ran the program last night is a sincere, well-informed fellow who clearly really loves his music. His lecture, not a word I like, but can’t think of a better one right now, consisted of a series of video clips that he played from what must be an extraordinary collection.

He told us a lot of things I certainly didn’t know, that Louis Armstrong was the most successful jazz artist of the 1960s, as he had been in the 20s, 30s 40s and 50s. His Hello Dolly, at one point, toppled The Beatles off the number one spot in the Pop Charts. And he showed how Ella copied a lot of what Armstrong did vocally. And that the 60s was unique in that it was a decade in which you could hear music from every preceding era, all the way back to New Orleans jazz.

I certainly wouldn’t criticize the program, for it obviously depended a) on what the presenter had available to him,  b) his own personal loves, likes and dislikes and c) it would have been a boring, potentially miserable evening if what he played coincided solely and exactly with my own personal tastes and preferences – had this been so I could have stayed at home and listened to my stuff without driving to Harlem and back. But I found myself fascinated by what he didn’t play, or even refer to.

What I liked. First of all, that it was such a thought provoking program. The insights into Bill Evans, and Monk, and Ella. It was great seeing Monk with his quartet. The frisson of connection when Coltrane appeared and started playing. I loved seeing Bill Evans, I’d seen him live in Ronnie Scott’s little club in Gerard Street in London, I think in the early 60s, I got in, in those days, for half a crown, about a quarter, by showing my musician’s union card.

What I didn’t like. A lot of what he played showed genius playing alongside tradesmen. Maybe this was because so much of the clips were made from TV shows in Europe, and obviously, if you are Sonny Rollins, you couldn’t afford to take a band of equals to Europe and make any money out of it. Having seen some of the greats, they were best in the company of equals, or near equals, musicians capable of challenging, provoking or even stretching them into playing at their most creative. As it was, I accept that I am being unkind in calling the bass player who accompanied Rollins, who’s name I can’t remember, a tradesman. But while he is technically brilliant, he misses on what this music is about at its best, and interestingly, what Rashaan Carter,  a young guy who played at the event last week in the Apollo Theater, has in abundance, that spark that ignites something deep within the listener.  But many of the accompanists were tradesmen, and my overall point is valid in that what we got to watch was more akin to watching Sugar Ray Robinson in an exhibition bout rather than in a real fight, something approaching the real thing, but inherently different in many important aspects and ultimately, not the real thing. What we saw was some of the greats play well within themselves, against a pleasant, but none too inspiring backdrop.

What else didn’t I like? Well, the main thing I didn’t like is that even great jazz, played and recorded for TV is a shadow of it’s real self. It’s the sound that’s missing, that sibilance of the brass, the thwack of the bass being stuck, that feeling that reverberates right through you and causes the hairs on the back of your neck to rise, as genius expressing a fundamental truth touches something at the very core of your being. All that is missing, and unavoidably so, but people who never experienced the real thing just don’t know and cannot even speculate on what it sounds like.

It may sound churlish to make this point, but what if we had to look at the works of the great painters – in black and white?

What might have been legitimately included? Assuming it exists on DVD. Yusef Lateef’s Eastern Sounds, a seminal album from 1961 that directly led to the fusion of jazz with Middle Eastern and Indian music. But to look at the bigger picture first, the 60s were an age of rebellion, throughout the Western world. Europe, particularly France and Germany, looked as though they might descend, or ascend, depending on your point of view, into outright revolution. Student protest exploded and the streets of Paris were barricaded against the established order. In the USA, the Civil Rights movement was getting into full swing. Black Power was asserting itself. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, two black American athletes made history by staging a silent protest against racial discrimination. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, gold and bronze medalists in the 200m, stood with their heads bowed and a black-gloved hand raised as the American National Anthem played during the victory ceremony. The pair both wore black socks and no shoes and Smith wore a black scarf around his neck. They were demonstrating against continuing racial discrimination of black people in the United States. As they left the podium at the end of the ceremony they were booed by many in the crowd and white America was appalled. Such momentous events were reflected in the new jazz of the 60s, and none of this was reflected in last night’s program.

Was there really any reason not to mention Charles Mingus, not to even play a snatch of, say, Fables of Faubus, his musical protest at the ghastly, racist Governor of Alabama, Orville Faubus? Or his Town Hall concert, in New York in 1964 one of the best live recordings in jazz, but of great political as well as musical significance. Or, in keeping with the times, the experimentation of musicians like Archie Shepp, John Tchai and the New York Contemporary Five. Would Miles Davis not merit even a footnote in a program on jazz in the 60s, and was Ellington silent in that period? It wasn’t just the young. Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, notably Coltrane, were exploring the possibilities of a jazz without the usual orthodox restrictions of melody, harmony and rhythm. There was an overtly political element to all this. In the 1940s, the be-boppers, having watched their elder brothers, invent and play Dixieland and Swing at the highest level, only to see their work mimicked, diluted and the white musicians who did so, become rich and famous in the process, tried to create a music that was uniquely theirs. They failed, of course, for music isn’t the prerogative of one group. But there was an attempt at the same in the 1960s, and inevitably and rightly, it failed for the same reasons. And none of this got a look in? Maybe it’s because it isn’t on DVD, it could be as simple as that. But I left the place with the feeling that what had been served up was a watered down, sanitized version of what I remember.

And that leads me back to my main point. A lot of jazz can be as dull, boring and interesting as any other art form. But when jazz takes off, as it did last night, despite all the things going against it, the crappy sound, for example, watching Coltrane and Getz play ballads on the same bandstand, although not actually together, or Monk play Epistrophy, or Bill Evans play My Funny Valentine, almost without straying from the melody, but producing great jazz, at the same time. This leads to the element of the numinous, the spontaneity and creativity, that touching our very core, that connection to something divine, that’s what jazz,  at its very best, produces and more than anything,  that’s what I really dig.

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, human brain, ydig Add new tag, discrimination, genius, jazz, National Jazz Museum in Harlem, Rashaan Carter, transformation

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
JAZZ FOR CURIOUS LISTENERS
Jazz at the Apollo
7:00 – 8:30pm
Location: The Apollo Theater
(253 W 125th Street)
FREE | Seating is limited. Please call to reserve a seat.

The world-famous Apollo Theater in Harlem is a testament to the great African-American musical performers of the 20th century, regardless of genre. Yet the connection between this landmark venue and jazz is special. Rare if ever does a month go by during the various public programs at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem when senior music lovers and musicians don’t recall witnessing, for instance, the great Ellington and Basie big bands swinging with down-home majesty and emotive grace. The Apollo Theater is essential to the living history of jazz, and to the careers of legends such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Gloria Lynne, each of whom won the Amateur Night competition, launching their illustrious careers. Tonight’s Jazz on Film will take place at the Apollo Theater, FREE. See you there.  (Seating is limited. Please call to reserve a seat.)

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, ydig Harlem, jazz, music

found this on Lauren Schoenberg’s site:http://www.lorenschoenberg.com/

Check him out. He teaches at Julliard, is head of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, a great guy.

LET THERE BE JAZZ – AND LIBERAL RELIGION, TOO
Richard S. Gilbert – Ithaca, NY – 9/19/04

“On the 13th day of creation, God made the heavens and earth. And after God had rested and after the world had worked for a week and came to that first real weekend, God said, ‘Let there be Jazz!!’ And there was Jazz, and God saw that Jazz was very good.

God saw that Jazz could lift hearts and gladden souls. God saw that Jazz caused people to clap their hands and shout for joy. And it was well pleasing in his sight!

Then God said, ‘Let there be saxophones and banjos and trumpets and drums.

Let there be clarinets and guitars, let there be trombones and big bass viols.

And let there be voices to sing lyrics and scat.

Let them jam together night after night, so that they might learn and experiment and change.

Let there be those with hands and hearts and breath and souls to play the music within them.

Let there be those who listen and respond from deep in their beings.

Let them come from the east and the west and north and south, and let them play and dance and shout and make festival.’

And God said, ‘Let the people feel the joy of the earth and the sky and the hills and the trees.

Let the whole creation clap its hands together to the beat of a song.

Let them be together and feel the goodness of life together.’

And God said, ‘Let it happen again and again, year after year.

And let them music play from the time the sun has risen in the sky until it goes down.

And let the music be around all of the night.

Let there be rest and sleep some other day.

For this is the time of Song.’

And God said, ‘This is the time for it to happen.

Let it happen now!! – - Let there be jazz!’”[i]

“Let there be jazz,” and liberal religion too. Jazz and faith have a long and intertwined history. Jazz emerged in the African-American community of New Orleans early in the 20th century. It had its real beginnings in the church. And while I am no jazz aficionado, I do enjoy it, and the more I come to enjoy it the more I note how much jazz and Unitarian Universalism have in common. Let me elaborate.

Explaining how he composed his music, Duke Ellington said that since his trumpet player could reach certain notes beautifully, but not other notes, and the same with his trombonist, he had to write his music within those limits. “It’s good to have limits,” he remarked.

We live within limits. Unitarian Universalism is at its heart a humble faith – and humility is in very short supply these days – culturally, politically, religiously. We dare to say we do not have the ultimate answers to religious questions: Why are we here? Where are we going? What is the meaning of it all? As a tradition rejecting creeds which claim to proclaim final religious truth, we pursue the answers to those questions with the same freedom within limits as does the jazz musician.

We live with the kind of curiosity which marks jazz players. There are times when they do not really know where they are going when they start a riff; they are curious as to where it will go. They discover that not only are they players, they are also composers – “the solos . . . require the same discipline as the written works of a composer.”[ii]

That is why I have made one of the cornerstones of my ministry the contention that each and every Unitarian Universalist is a kind of composer – in this case, a theologian. That is why I have developed the Building Your Own Theology adult education series – to harness our curiosity about ultimate questions and from that curiosity and our own experience create our own religious faith. As has been said, Unitarian Universalists “have open minds and big ears.”[iii]

“Jazz in an art form that depends on questioning, on challenging prevailing assumptions.”[iv] Jazz was not easily accepted in the conventional musical world, any more than liberal religion was accepted in the theological world. Any endeavor which encourages so much freedom of expression was suspect among those who believed they had a monopoly on the truth – musical or theological.

Furthermore, like jazz musicians, we are engaged in a “supremely collaborative effort.”[v] While it is tempting for contemporary spiritual seekers to have a “go it alone” mentality, we are wise enough to realize the need to be in community with other seekers. Otherwise, we will confidently gaze down into the well by ourselves, see our own image reflected there, and call it God.

“Jazz players all know the tune beforehand and the responsibilities of their chosen instruments. . . . Even when they are not soloing, members of a Jazz band have to be intimately attuned to the music at all times, because you never know what direction it might take. If you don’t, you may, as John Coltrane once put it, feel as though you stepped into an empty elevator shaft.”[vi]

In like manner there are not many of us who are so adept at life that we can go out there and do it all alone. We are not only individuals, we are members, members of a community, members of a religious community in which we each play our parts and play them better for enjoying the theological music with others. We play off each other, much as do jazz musicians. No one of us has a handle on the final life questions; no one of us knows it all, no one of us can make it alone. Like jazz, liberal religion is a collaborate effort.

There is in jazz an openness, a tolerance, a freedom that has its counterparts in our liberal faith. But there is in both a fundamental discipline, without which the freedom leads to anarchy. One musician compared free jazz to playing tennis without a net. That has been the charge against liberal religion – that in our freedom we have gone too far and there is no structure in what we do.

I am reminded of an article written many years ago by then-Director of the Eastman School of Music, composer Howard Hanson. He was bemoaning the huge salaries heaped upon pop and rock musicians whom he felt had only a modicum of musical knowledge and talent. These he compared with serious Eastman students who would play for a pittance in some orchestra or work as an underpaid music teacher. Then he suggested that popular jazz musician Chuck Mangione provided a useful model. Mangione, an Eastman school graduate, could explore jazz freely and creatively because he knew the fundamental principles of music. That grounding made his freedom in music meaningful and gave rise to his creativity.

Likewise, I believe Unitarian Universalists need to be grounded in fundamental religious knowledge and experience. We need to know our Bible, the history of religions, the basic issues, the core questions. Equipped with this knowledge, we are free to create our own faith. There are those religious fundamentalists who believe the Bible to be the word of God – absolute and unassailable. Then there are those among us who reject this surety – one who opined that he would believe anything so long as it was not in the Bible. Both are wrong-headed.

Unitarian Universalists are heretics – meaning those who have chosen their faith. We rebelled against Calvinism with its theological theories of trinitarianism and pre-destination. We contend that Jesus was man, not God. We hold that no sensible and compassionate God would condemn at birth some to heaven and others to hell. But we rebelled against Calvin for many reasons, not the least of which is musical. John “Calvin tied music to the sinful culture and restricted its use in worship to a unison line without polyphony or instruments.”[vii]

But Martin Luther, another redoubtable reformer, said:

“A person who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.” I’m Lutheran here.

Music is a magnificent expression of who we are. This morning we have modeled our theological and musical diversity. We sang our own contemporary words to the tune of Old Hundreth, the doxology from the 1551 Genevan Psalter, recognizing our religious roots. Then we sang “Now Let Us Sing” by an anonymous writer to a tune named in honor of singer Paul Robeson. Both the text and tune of our Hymn of Healing, “Voice Still and Small,” were composed by my friend and colleague John Corrado. And what we shall sing for our Hymn of Dedication, “We’re Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” is a traditional tune which calls for spirited participation. And, of course, we have heard or will hear jazz from John Coltrane and Billie Holiday, among others, and will listen to Bach at Postlude time. An eclectic mix, but lively and interesting and indicative of the openness of our musical and spiritual taste.

Truth comes not only in propositions of logic and science, not only in words of prose and poetry. Truth can also be conveyed in stirring sound which cannot be put into words. The great jazz artist Louis Armstrong was once asked about the meaning of his music, to which Satchmo replied: “Lady, if I could say it, I wouldn’t have to blow it.” Sometimes we express our faith by words, sometimes it is simply too powerful for words and we need to sing and play it.

One intriguing form of jazz is the blues. Jazz evolved out of the daily experience of African Americans whose legacy was the brutality of slavery. Blues were created as a “medium of transcendence – one plays or sings the blues to vanquish them.”[viii] In the same way each Sunday we share both our joys and our sorrows in public – in this religious community – not that we can vanquish them by merely expressing them, but we can transcend them by sharing our burdens with others.

There is this rich sense of participation in jazz – certainly among performers, but also among auditors who have a hard time sitting still. Liberal religion, like jazz, is participatory.

Relaxing between sets in a 52nd Street bar, the blind jazz pianist Art Tatum sat at a table, drinking beer from a bottle. A missionary wandered in from the street and came over to talk to him.

She said, “Joining the flock is your only salvation.” Without answering, Tatum took another swig of beer.

“If you don’t join the flock, you’ll be a lost child of God,” she insisted. Art went on sipping his beer.

When the musician decided that the evangelist had pestered him long enough, he shrugged and answered softly:

“All God’s children are lost, but only a few can play the piano.”

“All God’s children are lost – but only a few can play the Piano.” I agree all God’s children are lost in the sense we are all spiritual seekers. But I have also read that “If you grow up in African culture, you have no concept of anyone not being a musician. Music is just joyful sound-making, celebration-like movement, and dance. It’s part of a ritual honoring life, honoring our parents, honoring the community. Every human being has the potential to be a musician.”[ix]

Translated into liberal religion it means that each of us is a celebrant – a theologian. In a church where the minister’s task is not handing out a theology to be regurgitated, but helping people build their own theology, everyone has primary responsibility. Just as everyone is responsible for singing hymns, everyone is responsible for their own faith.

Jazz critic Loren Schoenberg, whose NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Jazz has informed this sermon, said “Jazz swings . . . jazz is fun . . . (a) juggling act between the planned and the spontaneous.”[x] So it is with liberal religion. Despite the fact some say the Unitarian Universalist emotional range runs the gamut from A to B, “free from the taint of enthusiasm,” the “bland leading the bland,” a sense of “ordered inertia,”[xi] we are a feeling as well as a thinking people. We laugh in church! While we carefully plan the structure of the service, we are never quite sure exactly what will happen – what joys and sorrows will be spoken – what feelings will be evoked in response to spoken word or music.

Now, it is true that our hymns should not go through the eye and out the mouth without passing through the brain – and I should add – the soul. Of course, it has been said that our singing is weak because we are always reading ahead in the text to see if we agree with the words. However, one of my learnings about our faith is that there is nothing irrational or intellectually compromising about deep emotions and celebratory feelings. Religion is both of the head and of the heart. When we are at our best, we can also sing! We shall see – and hear.

Our religious premise is not a foreboding one, complete with “sinners in the hands of an angry God,” or replete with doomsday scenarios of Armageddon. We are an upbeat bunch who call worship a celebration of life; who believe meaning is created in this life, not deferred to an improbable future; who believe life is to be enjoyed to its fullest; who believe that one of our obligations is to extend that possibility of joy to all people no matter their religious orientation.

We are something like Duke Ellington who spoke of jazz and the terpsichorean urge, after Terpsichore, in mythology the muse for dancing and choral song. The Duke recognized that the urge to dance in life is fundamental, whether it be with the body or the mind and spirit. And, of course, the psalmist reminds us to celebrate with timbrel and dance.

These are tough times and many are discouraged and tempted to give up with the religious and political cacophony surrounding us. I think of the scene at the premier of one of 20th century composer George Antheil’s early avant garde pieces. His Ballet Mechanique, scored for automobile horns, airplane propeller, fire siren, ten grand pianos, and other instruments scored quite a sensation. When it was performed at Carnegie hall in 1924, a concertgoer near the orchestra could stand no more than a few minutes of the racket. Tying his handkerchief to his cane, he raised the white flag.

There are times we are tempted to raise the white flag ourselves – for life is too much with us. It is then that the soaring song of the spirit can be heard, out of the chaos, out of the cacophony, out of the irregular rhythms of life, transcending the dissonances, reminding us that life matters, we matter in the great celestial chorus of humanity.

And so I conclude that Jazz is a musical form especially suited to Unitarian Universalism. Within that disciplined musical structure jazz musicians are free to transcend it – to give the spirit play. Likewise Unitarian Universalists, within the rich structure of humanity’s faith traditions, are likewise free to transcend – to give the spirit play.

And so, “Let the people feel the joy of the earth and the sky and the hills and the trees.

Let the whole creation clap its hands together to the beat of a song.

Let them be together and feel the goodness of life together.

Let it happen again and again, year after year.

And let the music play from the time the sun has risen in the sky until it goes down.

And let the music be around all of the night.

Let there be rest and sleep some other day.

For this is the time of Song”

This is the time for it to happen.

Let it happen now!!

Let there be jazz!”

admin Awareness, Enjoyment, Knowledge, Meditation, Understanding, human brain, ydig belief in God, jazz, spirituality