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Jazz service at First Unitarian
Each year for the past quarter of a century, First Unitarian has hosted the Annual Jazz Service on the Sunday closest to July 4.
2006 Annual Jazz Service
The 2006 Jazz Service featured a "sermonette" by Everett Hoagland, former poet laureate of New Bedford and member of First Unitarian.
Jazz as a Unitarian Universalist 4th of July Church Service
Delievered by Everett Hoagland, July 2, 2006, at First Unitarian.
Jazz as a Unitarian Universalist Fourth of July church service -- Why not? What is more American and/yet more universal than the widely varied music known as jazz? What music is a more democratic kind of artistic expression? Or more simultaneously humanist and ensouled? Or more manifestly "multicultural"? What better demonstrates our nearly limitless inventiveness or better celebrates the creative spirit than improvisation-based jazz? What musical work is more spiritual that John Coltrane's "Ascension" or his "The Creator Has A Master Plan: a love supreme"? The latter was movingly played and sung at the 2006 jazz concert in our church.
Incidentally, the Africanisms in much of jazz are undeniable. And the inclusion of traditional African call-and-response drumming, the musical modality in which the antecedents of jazz were/are rooted, was entirely appropriate for our church's 25th Annual 4th of July Jazz Concert, as well an exciting supplement.
Getting back to jazz, to paraphrase poet Victoria McCabe and cultural critic Stanley Crouch, excellent jazz requires that its players have the discipline, energy and technical mastery requisite for masterful misicianship in any serious musical tradition.
Additionally, instrumental jazz also requires an independent attitude, as well as a willingness to be vulverable mixed with stand-up artistic courage, because jazz is improvisation-based. And improvisation is inherently risky. Every note, chord, riff takes risks toward seemingly seamless, spontaneous composition, coherence of voice, toward perfect pitch, toward mesmerizing moments when every note and even every silence is absolutely musical and the nodding, or swaying, or finger-popping, or foot-tapping listener feels as if he or she is witness to magic in the making.
What's more, the traditional jazz group performance -- in which soloists alternately emerge from the group's collective musical effort to give an individual version of that group effort, and afterward go back into the ensemble -- is a classic American symbolic action for this bandstand called the world, for this grand jam session called life, for these improvisations that are our individual lives. And, as fiction author James Balwin superbly demonstrates at the end of his compelling, lyrical short story, "Sonny's Blues," it is the classic symbolic action for African American life, the historical human experience in which this wonderfully inclusive music is rooted and from which it rose, stemmed, and continues to blossom so beautifully among nearly all of the diverse and varigated peoples of the world.
Indeed, "music is often a connection to and expression of the spirit(ual)." Be it by Bach or Bechet, by Beethoven or Basie, Bartok or Bird, or be it Billie singing "God Bless The Child," or the original works our own church's late member and co-founder of the annual concerts, jazz composer/arranger/saxophone virtuoso, Bobby Greene, or be any one of the famous Sacred Concerts of Duke Ellington.
Rhode Island's poet laureate emeritus, Michael S. Harper, tersely puts it this way:
A friend told me
He'd risen above jazz.
I leave him there.
For a more authoritative opinion about jazz as a UU church service, see the September/October 2003 issue of UU World magazine [link] and read the affirmative essay on "Jazz Theology" written by Tom Stites, the long serving, widely respected, just recently retired ex-editor-in-chief of UU World. He and his wife were my guests at our 2004 4th Of July Jazz Concert Service and commended it as an "... engaging, spiritually uplifting, wonderful!!" experience.
So be it!
Copyright (c) 2006 Everett Hoagland.
2007 Jazz Service
For the 26th Annual Jazz Service, the New Bedford Music Ensemble was joined by the Kekeli African Dance and Drumming ensemble from UMass Dartmouth.
Photos from the service...
July 1, 2007, saw t he New Bedford Jazz Ensemble playing to a full house.
Kekeli African Drumming and Dance ensemble from UMass Dartmouth.
Armando Chrestian (vocals) and Danny Schwartz (percussion) of the New Bedford Music Ensemble.