I am very aware that there are many people in this world who do not like jazz - and will say so. Many a time I have heard people say they hate jazz , or say something like, “Well I like some jazz but I can’t stand that modern doodly doodly do stuff, I like to recognise the tune.“ Well, I have been listening to jazz since teenage years, I can cope with doodly oodly doo and I don't worry too much about the tune. But we’ll come to that later.
The purpose is to talk a little about the similarities I see between jazz and the kind of liberal, specifically Unitarian religion that I have been involved in from being a young teenager too. I am at a bit of a disadvantage because I am not a musician.
There is a certain amount of snobbery in my being a jazz lover. As a teenager, pop music was very much in the ascendant and I quickly came to feel that most if not all of it was dreadful - and I still do not know what people see in Elvis Presley and countless others. So, along with a tiny handful of likeminded pop-music haters I took to disappearing into a quiet corner to listen to jazz. That is perhaps a first clue to my theme. Most of my contemporaries would have nothing to do with jazz and nothing to do with organised religion. So to me, both are to do with being involved in an odd or even despised minority!
Another similarity is the fact that it is difficult to define, both jazz and Unitarian or liberal religion. But in both cases there is enough of substance and meaning for Unitarianism to be a form of religion and jazz a form of music. But also, both keep changing, both keep evolving, neither of them hold still, both constantly have to be thought through - again and again.
Both jazz and religion have a wonderful history. Most people here know that jazz has its roots in the music of the black people that were brought as slaves to North America, to what we call the deep south, around New Orleans. The slaves, and then liberated slaves began to play their kind of music, and this evolved into jazz. At first it was rather crude and hard for white listeners to follow. But the historians love to tell the story of one young black boy who at the age of about 11 or 12 in about 1900, was caught by the police one new year’s eve, running around the streets of New Orleans firing a pistol into the air. He ended up in a reformatory for orphans, where as luck would have it he was taught to play the cornet. When he emerged he joined some jazz musicians in the local bars, developed his skills, and one night, stood up and played this. The opening bars of West End Blues….
The historians will tell you that the world stood still and listened. The boy's name was Louis Armstrong, and the rest is jazz history or mythology.
Another way of getting into this is to look at the characteristics of jazz
Rhythm. All sorts of music has rhythm, but for jazz the characteristic beats are of 4/4 or 8/8, whether fast, medium or slow, giving the music a vitality, an energy. But other rhythms have been introduced too.
Then there is he blues, and I shall come back to this in some depth later. And then there is swing - impossible to define, but you know it when you hear it or feel it.
Then there is improvisation. Now this means, making up melodies, or creating variations on melodies. And this is where people who do not understand jazz start to confused, often because they don't know what’s going on. But jazz musicians see no real point in just playing a tune the same way every time. So, they improvise, they change it, they twist it around and vary it and reshape it, to the point where it doesn't quite sound like what it was.
Sometimes a musician will play and practice a tune, and improvise their variations on it, and then commit those variations to memory. Then each time they play the tune they will vary it in that way, or something very like it. (Some people preach sermons that way!)
Then there is what is sometimes called ‘the bag of tricks’. A musician will have some particular tricks of playing, a certain ways of re-shaping or varying or decorating a tune, and will improvise, using those tricks with whatever they play. (Some people preach sermons that way!)
Then there is spontaneous improvisation - this is when a musician will start with the original - and then quite spontaneously improvise - actually composing new music as they play. This is perhaps the highest form of improvisation- it is regarded as an art form - pure, spontaneous creativity. A very risky, courageous thing to do, but for the musician and the jazz lover, when it happens, it is truly wonderful, almost miraculous. (Some people preach sermons that way!)
Then there is collective improvisation. A band of musicians will chose a tune, play it through a couple of times then take it in turn to improvise, and then play together, all of them improvising at once. It’s at this point that people sometimes get confused because they have lost the tune! But usually, the original tune is in there somewhere and that collective creativity is truly wonderful to the jazz lover’s ear.
And I think that there is an analogy with our kind of religion at this point. There are basic religious themes or ideas, but individuals are allowed the freedom to improvise on the basic belief or truth, and create their own expression of it. And we do this together. So there is the collective improvisation, which can sound like a jumble, but there is enough to hold it together. And no musician says, You must all play it the way I am playing, - this is the right way.
To do that or say that - would not be jazz.
Listen to Chris Barber’s Jazz Band playing All the Gals Go Crazy ’Bout the Way I Walk.
Now, the blues. This is something that is part of jazz, or jazz is part of the blues or the two go together or whatever - the jazz enthusiasts debate this forever.
The blues is often thought of as simply sad music, but there is more to it that that and people get confused because sometimes the blues can get to sound quite joyful, exciting and uplifting.
The black people of the deep south were slaves and even when they were liberated they were oppressed. This comes out in their work songs, and then in the blues. But the amazing thing about the blues is that it will often start sad, but after a while it starts to change. The musician or singer expresses the sadness, the lament, or frustration or oppression or grief, and then the sadness will turn to frustration and then determination and defiance, even anger - and then- the very fact of expressing it, the physical or emotional experience of expressing it, provides a release from it, and the spirit of the person comes bursting through - sometimes as a wonderful expression of the triumph of the human spirit. Joy and hope come through - in the end. Daring to do this is a matter of freedom and social justice. So it is not just a sad song - it is at its best an expression of what it means to be a free person. And that breakthrough of release of the spirit is what jazz fans mean by the indefinable quality called swing. It’s hard to create artififally, and when it occurs spontaneously - it is artistic and the triumph of the spirit.
A simple illustration - Here is a song called The Postman’s Lament - played by Ken Colyer’s Jazzmen. he is suicidal - but joy comes breaking through!
Now I see similarities in this to the experience of worship - which is an opportunity to bring and share your joys and sorrows, dreams and frustrations - in the hope that the experience of expressing them and sharing them will relieve them.
Jazz music spread out from New Orleans, to Chicago then New York and around the world. As is spread it evolved, developed and changed - and there are now countless different styles, and then eras when the old styles are revived, but they are never the same - and there are similarities with the history of religion - and there are traditionalists and progressives, and even heretics (like Theolonius Monk - who once said There is no such thing as a wrong note!)
I must add that it was through listening to jazz as a youngster that I became interested in classical music. For me it is a fairly easy step from, say, Rachmaninov piano music - add the rhythm and the improvisation, and there we have Errol Garner’s piano jazz. There is a depth and serious-mindedness in jazz that is there in classical music too.
So to try to sum up, jazz and Unitarianism, liberal religion, have these things in common which are important to me:
* Freedom - freedom of expression
* Rootedness - the roots of music and religion are there - there is an appreciation of the past
* Individual expression - who you are as a person matters - you can make your personal contribution
* Creativity - and all the risks that that entails
* Improvisation - you do not have to be bound by what the past has thought and done.
* Collective improvisation - if we agree to be ourselves, together, then the collective creates something new and unique.
* The energy - the zest for living
* The hopefulness, the knowledge that the future will bring new ways of understanding and expressing even old and familiar themes.
A final piece to play, Dave Brubeck and his son, Chris - Black and Blue.
John Midgley
