Spirituality in a Minor Key
Editor's Note: Saturday March 5, Bethel hosted Spirituality in a Minor Key: Connections Between Faith and Jazz & Blues. The outreach featured top Virginia jazz musicians. The story and song format alternated between the musicians and Pastor Hammond who showed the spiritual roots of this quintessential American music and its relationship to the gospel. Bethel welcomed about 140 attendees including at least 100 from outside the church’s membership.
People spoke positively about what they heard and even suggested another event next year. Rather than accepting tips for the musicians -- many of whom gave up paying gigs for the evening -- the event raised about $1500 in donations for Ukrainian war refugees.
A week before the event, Pastor Hammond sat down for an interview with a journalism major from Patrick Henry College who wrote a story for the school newspaper. Below is a distillation of the interview.
PHC: I’ve never really thought of jazz as Christian music. What makes the music performed by these artists Christian?
GCH: As Dr. William Edgar, noted apologist, theologian, and musician has pointed out in his book Taking Note of Music, there really is no such thing as Christian music, any more than there is Christian mathematics or Christian auto repair. In all spheres of life people respond to God either in faith or in alienation. That includes music. The ones who write the music are not necessarily the ones who play it. This is true especially with jazz, in which songs have become standards and are played by various people. It’s not like music today where people write and perform only their own music. Both writers and players do their work either in faith or in alienation.
PHC. So it’s not specifically Christian music then?
GCH: The story of jazz begins at the turn of the 20th century. It grew out of the Mississippi Delta blues which in turn grew up after emancipation (1862) out of the gospel music and call-and-response style of the black Baptist church. Jazz and the blues were at first excoriated and demonized by the churches both black and white; by black churches because of the associations with where it was often played, and by white churches because they were afraid the music would lead to a societal acceptance of African American people and culture.
Jazz is uniquely American music. So is the blues, which gives a powerful voice to the woes of people who suffered through slavery and Jim Crow segregation. One of the peculiarities of the uniquely American church is its distaste for lament. From the health and wealth gospel to the subtle guilt suffered by Christians who experience persistent hardship in life, American Christianity wants fast solutions and can’t much stomach suffering. But the New Testament is clear that suffering will be the lot of people who are united to Christ (Phil. 1:29).
Esther Fleece has written: “Spiritual maturity does not mean living a lament-less life. The songs of lament are the very songs we need for healing [but these are not what we sing in church]. We often call worship music “praise songs,” and these are good and necessary songs guiding us to praise God . . . But where are the songs expressing the harsh realities of the world we live in? If we begin to believe that God only accepts “happy” songs, our perception of God and the life of faith will be skewed. There were times when I had to awkwardly walk out of church [in the middle of the service] because I could not honestly sing, ‘I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.’”
The Bible is full of blues that do not resolve. Two examples are the book of Ecclesiastes, which ends with a call to trust God, but not an end to suffering or getting it “all figured out;” and Psalm 88 which never resolves but ends with the dreary line, “My closest friend is darkness.”
The blues, whether pristine or preserved in later jazz, serve to remind us that God is Lord not just of our “Sunday experiences,” but of all of life, even our misery and suffering. Jesus told us “Blessed are those who mourn.” The Psalmist proclaims, “God is near to the broken-hearted.”
Professor Hans Rookmaaker has pointed out that there are often prayers expressed in jazz and blues (“Lord have mercy on me;” “Ain’t nobody care but You”), and these are not perfunctorily included, but are sincere expressions of faith by people who often had been abandoned by the church because they were “sinners.”
Some people got the connection between gospel and blues. Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929) is often considered the father of the Texas blues. A believing man, he also sang gospel and his own church would sing both. He recorded both gospel and blues but had to record gospel under the name Deacon J.L. Bates (JLB, “Blind Lemon Jefferson” backwards), for few people would tolerate the same man singing gospel and “the devil’s music,” even though many of those people had the albums of both in their collections, hardly suspecting they were the same person.
Duke Ellington, arguably the greatest American composer to ever live, was brought up in a home where his mother daily read the Bible to him, and took him to two different churches on Sundays, sending him to Sunday school when he was older. Ellington would later say that he got three educations, one from school, one from the pool hall, and one from the Bible. “And the education from school and the pool hall would have made no sense if it weren’t for the Bible.” Judged by the church for being a jazz musician and coldly welcomed there, Duke seldom went to church. But Janna Tull Steed in her book Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography relays accounts of his musicians walking in on him in his dressing room and finding him reading the Bible or kneeling in prayer. Toward the end of his life, Ellington wrote a series of three Sacred Concerts which were performed in cathedrals in the U.S. and abroad.
PHC: What are your thoughts on the sacred vs. secular distinction prevailing in our society today?
GCH: Attempts to make distinctions between sacred and secular is certainly not new. William Edgar has noted that music is highly emotive, and yet by itself it conveys no meaning. The meaning comes largely from association. There are certain hymns that westerners consider majestic, but we do so because of the association with the lyrics and with the activity of worship we hear them in. Someone who never heard those hymns before and hearing only the music may have a sense that they are majestic, but they would be able to attach no content to it. Music is emotionally evocative but does not convey content by itself. And even the evocation of emotion varies from culture to culture. What certain African or Polynesian or Asian people groups regard as august, or sad, or joyful music may not evoke such emotions in westerners.
I think we need to make a distinction between what is appropriate for formal worship and what is not, but even in that there is not an absolute. Music that is trite or trivial should be avoided in formal worship, but what music is trite or trivial will vary from culture to culture. Sound guidance comes to us from the Westminster Confession of Faith (1648): “There are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence, according to the general rules of the word, which are always to be observed.”
If you are asking me if I think there is any kind of music that is irredeemable and incapable of being taken captive to Christ, my answer is “no.”
PHC: What prompted you to organize this event?
GCH: My own love for jazz and blues, and a desire to bring people together, particularly unchurched people and people who may not feel welcome in church, to enjoy the good gift of God in music, to consider the connections between jazz and blues and faith, and to provide opportunities to make strangers into friends, and give friends opportunity to become disciples of Jesus.
PHC: What are you hoping people take away from this event?
GCH: I hope that unchurched people will lose their apprehensions about stepping through the doors of the church, and I hope that Christian people who tend to be far too isolated in their Christian bubble (Jesus certain was not) would become comfortable with meeting and interacting with people who are not churched.
PHC: Could you describe the type of setting you are hoping to create for the event?
This is a Story-and-Song event. There will be music introduced or followed by some of the history of jazz and blues as well as indications of the spiritual connections to it. Sometimes that connection comes from the writers of it, sometimes by some of its performers, and sometimes simply by reflection of biblical truths.
PHC: Who are the artist coming to perform?
I can give you a tentative list. Others may come. Jazz trumpeter and educator Wynton Marsalis has noted that jazz is a conversation. Other music may be likened to a poetry reading, where people are reading off of a page, or a recitation, where something has been remembered verbatim. Jazz (excepting big band) does not work that way. There is a “topic” of conversation, a melody and a chord chart. If there is a singer and musicians have to adjust key, transposition must be made on the fly. No one knows what anyone else is going to play. Like a conversation, musicians have to listen and respond with improvisations on the spot. That’s what I like so much about it. Someone will start us in, the “conversation” will take place in the middle, and we’ll determine how it ends when we get to the end. It’s exhilarating!