Annual Jazz Service

November 27, 2005

Our readings this morning, words composed by the novelist Ian McEwan in his novel Saturday and music composed by Charlie Parker, introduce us to three very interesting and very different people. Two are fictional and one is legendary:

The fictional Henry Perowne is an upper middle-class neurosurgeon in contemporary London,

Henry's son Theo, a blues guitarist, has inherited his father's surgeon's hands but puts them to a very different use,

and Charlie Parker, who was born to an African-American cleaning woman named Addie in the segregated Kansas City of 1920, was a seminal musician nicknamed Bird who was two generations, one ocean, and vast social gulfs removed from Theo, his fictional descendent.

By reading the rest of the novel you can learn much more about Henry Perowne and somewhat more about Theo. There is way more to be learned about Parker, who was jazz's greatest soloist and one of the handful of musicians who invented the jazz form known as bebop. All halfway serious music stores offer a bewilderingly large selection of Parker CDs, and his tunes show up sprinkled all through the CDs in the jazz section. Clint Eastwood has done a movie of Parker's life, and Parker is the subject of a shelf of books; when he died shortly before Easter 50 years ago, at the age of 34, he inspired graffiti all over the world that said, simply, Bird Lives! If you have a sharp enough eye, you still see one now and then. And since we are in church - a good, pluralistic UU church - it is germane to report that when Parker was asked his religion, his response was that he was a devout musician.

As different as Henry, Theo, and Parker are, they are unified by the blues. This morning, we are all unified with them through the blues.

When Theo was only 9, McEwan tells us, his father had introduced him to the three chords spread across 12 measures that are the unshakable foundation of the blues; in this meager but magical musical form, Theo had matured to find certain blues phrases that "contain for him the key to all mysteries." And even though McEwan didn't tell us this, we know that Theo had listened to Charlie Parker, because his runs "have the tilt and accent of bebop" - the form that Parker helped to invent.

Parker wrote the tune Parker's Mood, which the trio just played, in a recording studio one afternoon when another tune was needed to complete a session. Like the music Theo plays, it is based on the same three chords spread across 12 measures - but, characteristically, Parker adjusted things a bit to give them more of a jazz feel, and Gay, as an improviser, adjusted some of Parker's adjustments. That said, is there anyone here who doubts that what we just heard was the blues?

Henry Perowne and Charlie Parker had something else in common: both were tormented. Parker was a larger-than-life figure, a genius, a chameleon of personalities whose hues ranged from tender-hearted to con man, and a heroin addict who died young due to the impact of epic excesses that, like his musical achievements, are beyond most people's imaginations. The scale of Henry Perowne's personality is a bit easier to grasp. Yet McEwan writes that for all his success as a neurosurgeon, Perowne was "pierced" by Theo's guitar - pierced! - because hearing him play the blues constituted "a reprimand, a reminder of buried dissatisfaction in his own life," a reminder "of the missing element."

The narrator does on, "There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing . . . a sense that he's denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in [Theo's] songs." The son's playing of the blues, McEwan writes, "carries this burden of regret into his father's heart."

Can anyone here this morning relate to that? Did you hear a longing in Parker's Mood? A burden of regret? Did you hear it with your ears, or did your heart hear it too? Are there people here this morning who relate to Henry Perowne's lament that he had been "simply processed, without question or complaint" into the life he was leading? How many of us yearn for an open road, for the life of the heart?

The blues brings Henry Perowne to the great religious questions, and it brings us along with him: Who are we? Why are we here? What are we to do with this one and only life that we have? Are we, like Henry, disciplined and responsible career people? Or are we like Bird and Theo, people of the open road, of the life of the heart? Are we, like Parker, driven inventors of new forms? Or are we, like Theo and his father, the clipper of aneurisms, interpreters of unchanging themes?

Answering these questions, searching for just what it about us that makes us the one-of-a-kind person that each of is, coming to understand what our true gift is and how best to bring it to the world - this is the quest of a lifetime. It is the quest for integrity, the quest to grow into harmony with the Divine, as we say in our affirmation every Sunday.

The blues, and its sophisticated younger sibling, jazz, help with this quest. Jazz and the blues open us to the holy quest to be who we really are, and not just who we were processed to be, who others wanted us to be. In the words of the Rev. Fred Wooden, who was trained as a composer before entering the UU ministry, "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." Henry Perowne, processed as he was to be a neurosurgeon, certainly experiences this; listening to his son play the blues reveals the hidden place in his soul where the missing element goes. As for his son, the blues contains "the key to all mysteries." And as for the devout musician Charlie Parker, the jazz writer and pianist Tom Piazza observes, "I suspect that the only time Bird felt in one piece was when he was playing."

The blues, a noble gift to the world from the descendents of African slaves, brings together the parts of us that Western culture tends to separate - mind and spirit, lament and praise, sacred and profane, the disciplined life and the life of the road and the heart. In the words 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 . . . art . . . which constantly reminds us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go."

So the blues asks each of us, How far can we go? What is our true gift? Who are we, really?

We drew on our Jewish heritage for prayer this morning, and in the same spirit let's remember the story of a great rabbi, Rabbi Zusya. One day a young man saw Rabbi Zusya sitting on the steps leading up to the synagogue. His head was in his hands and he was obviously upset. The young man approached the Rabbi and asked, "Rabbi Zusya, why are you so distraught?"

Rabbi Zusya responded, "Because I am concerned about the day that I will have to go before the great throne of judgment."

"Rabbi Zusya," the young man said, "you have nothing to worry about. You have been a great scholar and rabbi to so many people. You strive to meet all the needs of so many people. You might even be compared to such a scholar as Moses!"

"Yes," Zusya responded, "that is what worries me. For when I go before the throne of judgment, they will not ask me, 'Why were you not more like Moses, our teacher?' Instead, they will ask me: 'Why were you not more like Zusya?'"

When the time comes for each of us here today to go before the great throne of judgment, however we may define that, will we be able to measure our lives based on who we were and not what someone expected us to be? May jazz and the blues, and all music, help us find the elusive path to being who we really are, to giving our one-and-only gift to the world.

Amen

Tom Stites