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Jazz: Art Digging Into Life
Rev. Sharon Dittmar
January 26, 2003

Introduction to Jazz

Creating a service about jazz quickly taught me how little I know about jazz, how much I have misunderstood jazz, and how much everyone has an opinion about jazz.  The style of music known as jazz is approximately 100 years old.  Jazz was first created out of the experiences of black Americans, out of the slave spirituals, and then the blues, into jazz.   Some people say jazz began in New Orleans, music originally played in brothels in the old Storyville district of that famed city.  No one knows for certain what "jazz" means.  Was "jazz" originally slang for sex.  Is "jazz" an African word?  A French word?  Another word?  In 1913, Ernest J. Hopkins wrote, "If there were another word that exactly expressed the meaning to 'jaz,' 'jaz' would never have been born . . . This remarkable and satisfactory sounding word, however, means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of the spirit, joy, pep, magnetism . . . oh, what's the use?  JAZZ."[1]

I have never seen a definition of jazz that everyone could agree upon, and most seem to lead to annoyance, if not argument.  When I met with Phil in planning for this service I read him a quote I had found by Jean-Paul Sartre who was writing about his experience with an evening of jazz in New York in 1947.  Sartre's adjectives were effusive and Phil all but rolled his eyes.  The one thing Phil could agree with was Sartre's opening line "Jazz is like bananas – it must be consumed on the spot."[2]

Jazz also incites disagreement about race.  There are books with pages full of essays by musicians, music critics, and others arguing is jazz African American music?  Is it American music?  Is it jazz, with its roots in the black experience?  Can white people play jazz as well as black people?  Both David and Phil shared with me that among jazz musicians they know, the issue of race rarely arises today.  People who play and hear jazz want to play it and hear it, not define it.  Many people seem to want to control jazz for a variety of reasons (and this may have been more true forty years ago when America was engaged in a profound struggle for civil rights).  But jazz is larger than all this.  One writer called it a "commingling of European concert music, brass band marches, African strains, and Latin tinges".  Fundamental to its identity, creation, and success, it cannot be controlled, or maybe even ultimately owned.  It is what it is.

Most people who know jazz seem to agree that the three fundamental hallmarks of jazz are, its foundation in the blues with sliding notes and blues chords, the importance of rhythm which comes from its African roots, and improvisation.  Improvisation (making things up as they come to you) makes jazz unique – that banana experience that must be consumed on the spot.  And while this might be stretching it too far, I think that jazz and Unitarian Universalism have this in common, they both evolve quickly because players/members share languages but do not have to make rigid faith statements. Within Unitarian Universalism, we have no creed statement that includes or excludes members so our theology and style of worship evolves quickly.  We improvise.  Likewise, jazz has its roots and common language, but after that it changes, from classic to swing, to bebop to cool to fusion because improvisation is so fundamental.  Welcome to the roller coaster of jazz and just maybe life.

Jazz Conversation

I grew up playing a classical instrument, French horn.  But for marching band I played a mellophone, a sort of large trumpet.  I have a very vivid memory of struggling with one jazz style piece of music.  The band director noticed and told me to go talk to the saxophones.  I remember talking to my saxophone friend, and him demonstrating the style we were looking for.  He said to me, "Can't you feel it?"  I said, "No, I can't."  Of course I couldn't, it wasn't written down.  Jazz scared me.  I didn't know what was going on.

This memory came back to me when Phil explained to me that you just can't play jazz – you have to learn the language first, the "dialects of improvisational language", including the jokes (superimposing melody over musical composition).  David explained to me that when jazz musicians sit down to play they agree to some fundamentals, like what key they are going to play in and what style jazz or song they'll be working from.  Then the conversation can begin, but no one totally knows where the conversation is going, that's the improvisation, creativity, and spontaneity.

I once heard jazz bassist Ray Drummond say, "musicians have an inner dialogue going on.  In playing together players reach points where they jump over cliffs so that the music can go on."[3]  Phil said, "Jazz is people communicating in real time, people looking at each other.  I love playing jazz because of the improvisational part.  You can change the rules as you go.  You can respond immediately.  It is very conversational.  It does mean taking chances, trusting that things are going to work out.  You can't pre-calculate all your moves." 

When I talked with David later, he explained to me that not everyone can play jazz (and to my surprise he included himself in this category).  He showed me how a jazz pianist generally uses the left hand to play harmony and the right hand to improvise, unless of course they decide to switch it around for variety.  When I watched David do this, I saw that his two hands are doing different things at the same time.  It seems like a river of thought, feeling, memory, and response flowing out, perhaps transcendent in the concentration of conversation in the present moment.  As Miles Davis said, "I'll play it first and tell you what it is later".  

Jazz as Sacred Music

A traditional definition of sacred music might be "solemn music written for a religious occasion, such as a requiem or mass."  When I asked our office administrator Lynn Bayley about jazz, she quoted me the definition above.  When I asked her for her personal definition she said "Music that comes down from something inside of you."  Then she went on to paraphrase jazz musician Bill Evans who said, "All inspiration for music comes from the universal overmind."  All music, including jazz has the ability to go beyond words which can just be a distraction, and take us to deeper understandings and expressions.  Aldous Huxley wrote, "After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." 

For many years, jazz was considered the antithesis of sacred music.  Phil remembers playing at a church service several years ago, and being chastised by a member afterward for playing disrespectful music.  Surely it was the association with brothels, sex, alcohol, drugs, and late nights in clubs that gave jazz a "bad" reputation.  But jazz also broke a lot of musical rules.  Jazz has dissonance, and uses a tri-tone that is called the "devil in music". 

Jazz can be celebratory or dissonant, moody or rambling, not the usual fare for Sunday mornings when people come expecting stability and familiarity.  It is an irony of worship that people expect and need the stable and familiar in worship, and they deserve it too because life is chaotic and troubling.  Yet the irony is that a life of faith is dissonant and moody, celebratory, rambling, and unpredictable.  When people describe moments of transcendence they are often shockingly spontaneous and may or may not offer comfort (Moses, Paul – our fantasy that life of faith is quiet vespers, faith is troubling).

Because of the necessity of improvisation jazz draws the player and listener even closer to dissonance, intuition, transcendence, grace, God, some sort of unspoken connection with life or divinity.  (Look people in the eye, surprising open up).  Ray Drummond says, "There is an other-worldly side of jazz.  It happens while playing in a band and I have seen it happen to the audience too." 

Something I learned while preparing for this service is how important it is to experience jazz live, not just classic live recordings, but live in person.  The music calls for a one moment in time, in person experience.  A sort of call and response can take place between participants and musicians.  Art Blakely said that the audience is 70% of the performance.  So jazz offers a vehicle for all of us to enter the river of present conversation created by the music.  I heard one jazz musician say that the creation is more important than the composer.  What an extraordinary testament to our creative experience here and now.

But even beyond this, jazz has a universal ability to express life.  I always remember Ray Drummond saying that he used to teach a class where everyone had to write and sing the blues of their own, even if they were tone deaf.  Any music form can become remote, the terrain for trained experts only.  If the unpredictable spontaneity of jazz is frightening, its bottom-line testament to human experience is comforting.  Everyone can sing some blues, everyone can sing some jazz, not that everyone would want to hear it happening, but it is a profoundly human story to tell.  There is no one here who has not known joy or suffering.  It is no surprise that some jazz musicians are classically trained and others can't read music.  They don't have to.  The music is inside, and once you find an instrument, whether that be voice, piano, drums, or harmonica, if you let it, it can flow on out telling the story of life.

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