McClendon On Church And Jazz

February 1st, 2007 by Fernando Gros

“Some fea­tures of jazz wherever it appears cor­res­pond closely to African Amer­ican free-church (i.e., baptist) life. Par­ti­cip­a­tion: In Jazz the roles of com­poser and per­former are not sharply dis­tin­guished. Some early jazz musi­cians could not read music — or read at all. The music they learned from others was mem­or­ized, and this itself invited vari­ations when memor­ies clashed. Coöper­a­tion: poly­phonic per­form­ance required of each player impro­visa­tion that pre­served the har­mon­ies and rhythms while allow­ing, indeed requir­ing, each to embel­lish it in line with the unique­ness of his or her instru­ment and ima­gin­a­tion. No two rendi­tions of a piece were identical. The res­ult­ant poly­phony (call and response, in baptist wor­ship terms) was the coöper­at­ive achieve­ment of all play­ers. Sup­pressed in the swing era, this com­munal and impro­vis­at­ory struc­ture has returned, as we will see in today‚Äôs jazz. Recog­ni­tion: Radio disk jock­eys typ­ic­ally announce the name of every per­former in a jazz band. This con­trasts with the custom in clas­sical (European) music, where play­ers remain anonym­ous save for a few stars. Equal­ity for all in the church was matched by equal­ity for all in the band. Inclu­sion: Jazz reached across ethnic, racial, and cul­tural bar­ri­ers; it was the product of this cross-ethnic inclu­sion. It equal­ized peoples as well as indi­vidu­als. Here again an ori­ginal Chris­tian idea stands behind the prac­tice (‚Äúno such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free­man, male and female: for you are all one [body] in Christ Jesus: — Gal 3:28). Par­ti­cip­a­tion, impro­visa­tion, coöper­a­tion, recog­ni­tion, inclu­sion — these are the require­ments for Chris­tian wor­ship of the sort com­men­ded by Paul in 1 Cor­inthi­ans 14. They were the fea­tures of black baptist church life — which formed many of the early musicians.”

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Posted in Jazz, Missional Church, Music and Music Technology, Theology and Culture, Worship | 7 comments

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7 comments on this post.

  1. jay upp:

    February 2nd, 2007 at 1:28 am

    wow. coolest thing i’ve read in a long time. donald miller should have included this in his open­ing mono­logue in “blue like Jazz”, this one para­graph is much better in explain­ing this con­nec­tion. speak­ing of con­nec­tion, i would add con­nec­tion to that list, as jazz, and wor­ship a soul con­nec­tion is made between play­ers and between God.

  2. Phil Reilly:

    February 2nd, 2007 at 11:05 am

    Ok, this is good… thanks for post­ing this Fernando. More rich food for thought. I’ll let this digest a little longer before I come back.

  3. Fernando Gros:

    February 2nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    Jay — yes it is a bril­liant quote. I agree that con­nec­tion should be in there some­where. McClendon does allude to that in the paes that sur­round this pas­sage, but it is worth high­light­ing it directly.

  4. Fernando Gros:

    February 2nd, 2007 at 3:46 pm

    Phil — yes, it really does build on the jazz and lead­er­ship dis­cus­sion. I’ll be inter­ested to see what thoughts it sparks for you.

  5. C. Wess Daniels:

    February 6th, 2007 at 10:46 am

    Fernando — I was won­der­ing if you could let me know where you got this from? Is it in “Wit­ness” it’s really good.

  6. Fernando Gros:

    February 7th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    Yes, it is from Wit­ness. Chapter 4, the sec­tion called Groov­ing the Gospel — pages 173–4 in my edition.

  7. Thinking Bloggers 2007 | One Top Five List:

    June 28th, 2007 at 9:00 pm

    […] Fernando Gros — Fernando keeps a great blog. Not only does he write about “Faith and Cul­ture an Era of Glob­al­isa­tion” an instant hit with me but he does so in a way that keeps things inter­est­ing. He covers a number of dif­fer­ent sub­jects well, links to short videos and reg­u­larly links to a number of great blogs he’s recently enjoyed or has respon­ded to. The first time I ran across his blog I knew it was going to be good, he had recently writ­ten about James McClendon, late hus­band of one of my favor­ite philsophers. […]