Jazz Service

October 31, 2004

PRELUDE: The Basic B-flat Blues

Good morning. I'm Tom Stites, a member of First Religious Society and I welcome you to our annual jazz service.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

This is a very talented congregation. Six FRS people, young and less young, will share their gift of music with us in today's service. Our band today is led by Lark Madden, who before the morning is over will play the piano, bass and guitar; Edson Worden on trombone; Justin Turner on clarinet; Tod Campbell on guitar and bass; and Tomas Havrda on drums. Their prelude this morning was the blues in B-flat, wholly improvised in the spirit of jazz.

Today's music will be rich with the spirit, and please remember that the musicians are here to help us worship, not to entertain us. So even though there may be lots of times that you'll feel the urge to applaud the musicians, please, please, in keeping with the spirit of worship, hold your applause. There will be an ample opportunity to express your appreciation later. Meantime, feel free to tap your feet with as much gusto as you are moved to muster.

It is good to be together.

CALL TO WORSHIP: Take Five, by Paul Desmond

Usually at this point in our service, the choir calls us to worship. But given our instrumental cornucopia today, the choir has the morning off, and today's call to worship will come from Derek Raschke and Lee Mehlenbacher, members of the Newburyport High School Jazz Band.

OPENING WORDS

Today, our worship brings jazz and the blues into our hearts. Let us bring our hearts to jazz and the blues, and to this congregation, to the world, to the universe, to what is ultimate and holy. Today we are honoring the blues and the spirit of the people whose gift to the world it is. For the Africans who were brought to these shores against their will, music was inseparable from their religion. So it is little wonder that when they were introduced to Christianity in America they adopted the structure of European hymn tunes - but mixed it with their African musical sensibilities. Today we are honoring the blues for its deep connection to the spirit, through spirituals and gospel music, and as the taproot for jazz, and rock 'n' roll, and so much of American popular music. Today we are honoring the blues, our country's greatest indigenous contribution to the world's art. Our opening words are by the great Delta bluesman, Son House, from his song Preachin' the Blues. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to sing like he did - I'll just recite:

Well, I met the blues this morning
Walking just like a man,

Ohhh-oh-ohhhh,
Walking just like a man:

I said, Good morning blues
Now give me your right hand.

Oh, I got to stay on the job
I ain't got no time to lose,

Yeahh
I ain't got no time to lose:

I swear to God
I've got to preach these gospel blues.

HYMN - Our opening hymn this morning is #30 in your hymnal - the spiritual Over My Head, whose form is a 16-measure blues. Please stand as you are able and join us, and remain standing for our Affirmation of Faith and Doxology.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH

DOXOLOGY

COMMUNITY PRAYER OF SORROW AND JOY

RESPONSIVE READING and PRAYER

Now, let us settle into a place of prayer and meditation.

O eternal spirit, who speaks to all peoples on all continents through the beauty of music, let us remember that in our Jewish heritage prayer must always contain both praise and lament. When we give praise and thanks for the joys in our lives, we must always pause to lament that others are suffering sorrows. And when we lament the misfortunes that inevitably bring sorrows to our lives, we must be sure to give thanks that others' lives go well and bring them joys. This morning we offer our prayer in music. First Edson will play Lament, which was written by the great jazz trombonist J.J. Johnson. And then we will all pray together in a song of praise. Please hold in readiness No. 395 in the hymnal.

[Edson and the band play Lament]

Let us hold Lament in our hearts, and add on our praise: Please turn to No. 395 in the hymnal for our group prayer of praise, Sing and Rejoice. Even though we're going to sing our response today, it is a prayerful response, so please remain seated. It's short and simple, and we'll sing it through three times. Frances, will you play it through for us?

[Congregation sings]

Now let us enter a place of silence, silence in this meetinghouse and silence in our hearts. Without silence, music would lose its meaning. In jazz and the blues, the rests are as important as the notes, the implicit is as present as the explicit. In this morning of music and worship, let us now appreciate the rests, and join in the silence.

(long pause) - Amen

OFFERTORY

This is the time in our service for the announcement that for the crucial work of First Religious Society, the morning's offering will be given and received. Today this announcement will be made instrumentally, by the band, with a tune that applies to this church as much as it does to a person -

[Band plays Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out.]

We want everybody to love First Religious Society, right? So dig deep - and remember that a third of the cash you put in the plate - not pledge checks or cash in pledge envelopes, but loose cash - goes to support worthy social causes. This month our contribution goes to support the YWCA of Newburyport, which offers desperately needed services in our community including financial assistance, literacy programs, affordable child care, low-income housing, racial justice programs, and programs specifically for girls and families. Please be generous. As the ushers make their rounds our band will play something more subdued, All Blues, by Miles Davis.

READINGS

We have three readings this morning. The first is from the musician and writer Tom Piazza:

In a jazz group, as in any community, certain roles need to be filled. Someone has to play the melody, someone has to keep time, someone has to suggest the harmonic context. In jazz, each instrumentalist has to understand his or her role in the group well enough so that he or she can improvise on it and not just follow directions. Playing in a jazz group involves both responsibility and freedom; freedom consists of understanding your responsibility well enough to act independently and still make the needed contribution to the group. As such, a jazz performance is a working model of a democracy.

Musically, the blues is fundamentally a harmonic progression. Just as fundamentally, it is a form of poetry, and it is always in iambic pentameter. When mixed together, these elements summon a magical kaleidoscope of feelings and set them in an extraordinarily rich atmosphere. This atmosphere is rich with irony, the irony of lyrics that can make you want to lie down and cry and music that makes you want to get up and dance.

Now our second reading, from the writings of Ralph Ellison:

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly reminds us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go.

Good mornin' blues, blues how do ya do?
Good mornin' blues, blues how do ya do?
Babe I feel all right, but I come to worry you.

I woke up this mornin'
Couldn't get outta my bed
Oh I woke up this mornin'
Couldn't get you outta my bed
Went to eat my breakfast and
The blues was all in my bread

Good mornin' blues, blues how do you do?
Good mornin' blues, blues how do you do?
Well I'm doin' alright this mornin' how are you?

(Instrumental)

Why I'm singin' good mornin' blues, blues how do you do?
Good mornin' blues, blues how do you do? (yeah yeah)
Well I'm doin' alright this mornin', how are you?

"Good morning, Blues," we just heard Mona sing, "Blues, How do you do?" In classic blues form, the lyrics repeat the question: "Good morning Blues; Blues, how do you do?" And then the answer comes back:

"Babe, I feel all right," Blues says, "but I come to worry you."

Who was Mona talking to? Who, or what, is Blues? And what about Son House in this morning's opening words, who also reports a morning encounter with the Blues, who was "walking just like a man"?

If you listen carefully to the lyrics of old blues tunes, you'll often hear people addressing Blues as a person, and sometimes even expecting an answer. That harks back to the African pagan religion that came to these shores as Voodoo, but all of us can relate to it. The word blues, singular not plural, came into the American vocabulary because it expresses something truly universal, the suspicion that there is some force out there that's completely devoted to gumming up our lives. Some people call it a string of bad luck, some call it the devil, or depression, or obsession, or addiction; others cast themselves as victims of this or that, some people believe in elaborate conspiracies - or the Curse of the Bambino. One way or another, all of us get the blues, which, in Voodoo and the blues tradition, is often referred to as the blue devils.

Albert Murray's splendid, book-length essay, Stomping the Blues, begins like this:

Sometimes you forget all about them in spite of yourself, but all too often the very first thing you realize when you wake up is that they are there again, settling in like bad weather, hovering like plague-bearing insects . . . and yet perhaps as often as not it is also as if they squat obscene and vulture-like, waiting and watching you and preening themselves.

"Not that they are ever actually ever seen," Murray goes on. "They are always said to be blue, even as common-variety ghosts are always said to be at least somewhat gray. . . . They are there because they have already come . . . and they go, mostly when driven. But never soon enough. Nor do they ever go far enough away."

The blues do keep coming back, to worry us, each and every one of us.

Here's Murray again: "All too often they are back again for exactly the same reason that they came to be there the times before. . . . The mishap of the moment is but the latest episode in a string of misfortunes that are so persistent as to amount to a curse, and maybe even an ancestral curse at that."

Can anybody here relate to that?

Ever hear of Oedipus? Ever hear of Hamlet?

If Hamlet were alive in the 21st Century, how could he drive his blues away? He might try what Murray describes as the "old downhome Saturday night function," with music and dance and ecstasy - to get in touch with the power of the holy drum. In short, go hear some blues to drive away the blues. He could head downstairs at The Grog.

Suzanne Meyer, senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of St. Louis, gave a lot of thought to blues theology during her decade as minister of First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans. Her blues theology draws on Voodoo, among other sources. Meyer has this to say:

In Voodoo, the drum is holy. More than a sacred symbol, more than a musical instrument, the drum is holy because through the voice of the drum the gods and goddesses are called to be among the people. And through the voice of the drum, as well as its hypnotic rhythm, the god and goddesses literally enter the dancing bodies of the worshippers and communicate themselves in a form of spirit possession.

That's because no matter how sad the lyrics of a blues song, the music is happy - it makes you want to get up and dance. This irony, this friction between sadness and ecstasy, is what gives the blues its power to drive our demons away. It is this irony that gives the blues its healing power, its religious power.

Now here's the band with a short example of a happy blues - a blues waltz, just to add another layer of irony. The tune is Bluesette, by Toots Thielemans.

[The band plays Bluesette]

The blues just glistens with irony. James Baldwin thinks so, anyway. "In all jazz, and especially in the blues," he writes, "there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tendency comes."

And Suzanne Meyer says, "Blues theology begins by shaking up this kind of dualistic thinking. The first truth of the blues is that things are seldom either/or - more often or not, theological truth is discovered hidden in seeming contradictions and unorthodox combinations."

Is it possible for us to speak of those things we hold sacred - freedom, reason, and tolerance - using a different vocabulary, images and metaphors? What if we were to search for and discover these same values in a completely different cultural context? Is it possible to gain a deeper appreciation for the universality of our faith by attempting to describe it through an entirely different set of metaphors?

And what a powerful metaphor blues and jazz make for all of Unitarian Universalism. What the music and our religion share is that both, at their cores, are inclusive rather than exclusive - everybody is welcome, and everybody is welcome to improvise.

In jazz, improvisation means spontaneous composition of music in the moment it is being played. In Tom Piazza's words from this morning's reading, this entails responsibility to the group as well as freedom.

In Unitarian Universalism, improvisation means that we all determine our own truths - like jazz players, we draw on many sources of inspiration. This too entails responsibility to the group as well as freedom. Neither form of improvisation, jazz or Unitarian Universalism, is for the faint-hearted. It requires real courage to take responsibility for our own religious lives, both as individuals and as a congregation.

Jazz and blues are a music of great wisdom born of the suffering of enslaved people, and from their great gift to all of us we can tap into a great sense of hope. The music is a song of resurrection, of triumph of the human spirit, of justice. It offers us a new door to enter new roomsful of truth and meaning beyond the wall of dualistic thinking. The music brings us together in fellowship with each other and with all peoples. Even though it took shape in rural jook joints and big-city bars, it is holy music.

As Fred Wooden, minister of First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn, who was trained as a composer before turning to the clergy, says "Jazz flows through the cracks into the hidden places of the heart that are as real as the known places, but are too wounded or angry or frightened to come out." So in jazz and the blues there is healing. Long may this music be a part of our religious lives.

Amen.

CLOSING HYMN: No. 149, Lift Every Voice and Sing, sometimes called the black national anthem, sometimes called the best anthem our nation knows.

UNISON BENEDICTION

Usually at this point in the service the choir sings an Amen. But today, with so much music, let me just say AMEN and turn to Bob Allison to amplify that with his postlude.

POSTLUDE: The band plays The Saints

Tom Stites