TEXT: PSALM 98
It’s Jazz Sunday! It has been said that the Blues is high school and Jazz is college. I love Rock and Roll, and everything I like about Rock and Roll is owing either to Blues or Jazz. Rock and Roll is probably Preschool or Elementary School. Actually Preschool would be punk rock . Or polka.
We’re going to talk about Jesus Jazz today. As we prepare to come to the table, I’m going to offer just a few thoughts about what Jazz is. And I so love Jazz. I’m a huge fan of some of the Jazz greats and especially those who practice improvisation and invention on the spot. I’m in awe of these musicians. I’ve been playing guitar for nearly 50 years, and I’m still awful. They say that 10,000 hours at a craft makes you an expert. Balogna! I’ve been playing 20,000 hours and I still feel lost with every lick. Yet I remain in great awe of people who play really, really well—Bob Summers among my heroes, of course. We’re going to look at Jazz and I will submit that it plays into what we do here every week. We have music and we give God praise.
So our text comes from Psalm 98. Listen and hear God’s word.
MUSIC STUFF
I’d like us to look at a couple of these verses again. In verses 4, 5, and 6, notice these instruments: the lyre, the trumpet. There are other instruments mentioned in the psalms—the trigon—what is that?. Psalm 33 is made for rock players because it says “play skillfully on the strings with loud shouts.” That sounds like Rock to me, but it isn’t just making noise for our own sake. It has a purpose: the praise and glorification of God.
Let’s go to the next two verses: I love these lines—deeply poetic and wonderful.
Let the sea roar and all that fills it.
Let the floods clap their hands and the hills sing together for joy.
The idea here is once God’s people acknowledge God as God and praise Him—that the whole Creation joins in. When we look at the world around us we can see all of nature struggling, stretching, and longing to send praise back to God—just for the gift of existence—just for being here.
Let the floods clap their hands—let the hills sing together for joy.
When we praise God we become participants and sharers in an enormous chorus of creation and we find ourselves becoming immersed in music that begins now and lasts eternally. And for this purpose—verse 9—it says that God is coming to judge. When it says this in the Old Testament—that he’s coming to judge the earth he will come with righteousness—remember that the Day of the Lord, Judgment Day, wasn’t bad news. On the contrary, It was most excellently good news. The judges were those who brought righteousness—who brought justice and goodness, wholeness, and peace. The longing for God to return was something that the people did with joy; something we, too, do with joy. We long for Christ’s return and we do so with great joy. That Great Day is not a fearsome day, not a frightful day—not for us. It’s going to be the most excellent day, and it is the source of our singing even now.
IMPROVISATION
Jazz is the unique American contribution to world music. There’s nothing more American—musically-speaking—nothing more American than Jazz. I’m sorry marching bands, they’ve got those in Europe. So Souza—you’re right out—kind of boring, frankly. Nazis had marching bands. (Okay, so I’m not Harold Hill, give me a break here, okay?) Jazz is wondrous and it is to us College and even Graduate School because it plays on that edge of constant invention. Ken Burns has a quote that I very much appreciate:
The genius of our country is improvisation and Jazz reflects that.
It’s our great contribution to the Arts.
Invention and innovation, beginning with imitation and then improvisation. And improvisation is the key to great Jazz. We need to talk about improvisation. It is something that doesn’t happen in all music. When most musicians play, you’ll notice they’re watching their scores and playing close to the script. In classical music, people sit down with their instruments and read the notes on the paper, and their role is to adhere to that script as precisely as possible. But with Jazz, we have that thing that happens when people go off-script. It is that amazing, marvelous, magical flight of the spirit among people can improvise and touch our souls.
PAN AND APOLLO
Mythically, there’s an old story about a contest between Pan and Apollo. Apollo played the lyre and Pan played the pipes. It is a musical contest. There are several difference s between these two characters, but some differences are more important than others. First of all, Apollo. Apollo was the son of Zeus and he is the golden boy, the first born, the straight-A student, the athlete, the one who did everything right, Apollo plays the lyre, and when he plays, he plays Classical music. And he plays perfectly—according to the notes—with great technique. When he plays, everybody says: There is a musician’s musician! He is wonderful, his playing perfection. He has mastered the instrument and the gods all marvel at his precision and technical talent. That’s Apollo.
Then there’s Pan. Pan, by the way, looks like our idea of the devil, you know—goat horns, pointy beard, the hooves—this is largely where we got the idea—our comic book idea of the devil. It’s from Pan—as in the word panic. And Pan, he didn’t play by the rules. He played against the rules. But when he played his pipes, the spirits came out from the trees and danced. Even the gods listening couldn’t help but swoon with his playing because it was so utterly charming. It captures their hearts. But Pan is kind of a bad guy—he doesn’t play by the rules, and so the gods always, always, always rule in favor of Apollo—even though you sense they actually like Pan’s music better. But they have to rule for Apollo because you can’t build a civilization on Pan. You have to build it on Apollo. You have to have rules.
THE CHAOS THAT ISN’T
While Jazz music may be closer to Pan than Apollo, there’s a lot more Apollo in it than people would recognize. People who don’t care for Jazz tend to hear Jazz improvisation and say, Ugh! It all just sounds like a mess! As though the musicians are just doing whatever and playin’ all over the place. Well, they are, but it’s not really a mess.
Jazz great, Miles Davis, says:
It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note.
It’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.
That is what makes a great musician—one who can hit an experimental or accidental note—perhaps a note not in the normal scale—and yet redeem it with the next note. That’s genius—and that’s part of the art of improvisation.
Wynton Marsalis says of improvisation:
Jazz is not just, well, man this is what I feel like playing.
It’s a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study. You can put a saxophone in my hand and I can’t improvise, ‘cause I don’t know the instrument. You can’t improvise until you’ve done your homework.
Art Tatum, a Jazz pianist, said this:
You have to practice improvisation, let no one kid you about it!
Art Tatum one of the great Jazz pianists. You have to practice improvisation. Really? What sounds so free and loose and playful—how could it be that there’s all of this hidden structure in it? In short, it is hard, hard, hard to improvise. I have been trying for nearly 50 years to improvise. I ain’t close. Still fumbling away at it and looking for lots of help.
Dizzy Gillespie said this about improvisation:
It’s taken me all my life to learn what not to play.
So it isn’t just about playing the right notes or playing on the scales; it is about playing free and wild. It is about flying to the upper atmosphere with your music, but it’s also about knowing when to be silent and knowing what not to play.
COVENANT MUSIC
Jazz improvisation has something to show us today about the relationship between the Law and the Spirit in the Bible. We have the Old Testament with its rigid laws that must be adhered to note-by-note. And we have this marvelous, strange thing that happens at Pentecost where people speak in tongues and are going off-script. And Paul—Paul’s theology is largely about going off-script. And is that okay? Can we do that? Can we have a Jazz improvisation Christianity? I’m arguing yes, we can. We read in Romans 8 these words:
There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you FREE from the law of sin and death.
The key word there is “FREE.” We are not bound to the Law. We are not bound to the old covenant. You must start with the rules and learn the scales to be a good Jazz musician (which is why I’ll never be a good Jazz musician). You have to know the scales and play them over and over. There are famous stories about people like Thelonious Monk and others who spent hours going over the scales, going over them in different keys, and hours and hours of practicing the scales. This is like you and me singing the alphabet to ourselves over and over. You have to have the basics nailed solid, backwards and forwards before you’re going to improvise worth a whit. A fool thinks he can improvise immediately, but no—it requires great background and much practice.
So we have the Law, the Old Testament, that is our background in righteousness. It is the Law, it is to us our scales, it is our ABC’s. But our life in Christ gives us a freedom to fly—to go into that upper atmosphere where we pursue the heart and the Spirit of Love, of Kindness, of Faith that can’t really be written into the rules in the same way. We are like both Pan and Apollo. Apollo, because the Law is still good and must be known. We still have to be able to play the scales. We teach our children what is righteousness and what is wrong. We learn from the Old Testament what it is that God requires of humanity and we also know where and when we have fallen short of the script. And like Pan we have to have some music coming out of our hearts.
There are guitarists I deeply and highly respect. Eddie Van Halen is an amazing technician. He flies all over the fingerboard like noone else—an amazing, amazing technician. But I have to say his compositions—the melodies and particular musicality of his lines—don’t do so much for me. On the other hand there are people who play very simply, like David Gilmour of Pink Floyd or Eric Clapton, whose lines, though simple and even slow, can make my heart soar. Bottom line? It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. We’re looking for that inner element, that item of soul.
MUSIC FROM HELL
I wasn’t going to tell this story, but I have to. I have an image of hell, And it is of a band that came to Oklahoma—Edmond High School—and they were called the Foggy Mountain Boys or something like that. It was a bunch of guys from Arkansas or Missouri or Branson or something. And they all came and they were a big family band and they converged in the high school auditorium and everybody in my church was like, You gotta come! I’ll buy you a ticket. What I saw was one of my images of hell.
First of all, they had some of our high schoolers who from the school’s “Jazz choir” band open it up. These kids were all made up to look like they were from 40s—which the older folks loved. They sang songs dressed like adults, looking like adults, and I remember they sang (this was the first level of hell)—they sang Roll Over Beethoven but they sang it without any soul. It was awful! They whited it up and took out all the soul to this great rock song! I thought, “And how dare they sing Roll Over Beethoven! Both Chuck Berry and Beethoven have a lot more soul than this!” They blasphemed both Berry and Beethoven in a single stroke!Both these guys had to be turning in their graves! So to me this is hell—the semblance of faith without any of the soul.
And then the Foggy Boys, or whatever they were called, came up and they did three or four measures of every genre of music they could and milked the audience for applause the whole time. “And who remembers the Swing Era? C’mon people, put your hands together!” Put your hands together, they kept saying. I’m thinking, Aaaaghh, I don’t want to do this!
Music doesn’t work that way! Like our Jazz today, it just moves us. It’s supposed to have its own language. It’s supposed to speak to us with a language of its own. It’s supposed to speak to our heart and our soul.
HEART AND SOUL
With Pentecost I proclaim Pan is redeemed. Because what God gave to the Church was not another law to abide by, but his own Spirit. This means heart and soul and flight—that amazing thing we hear when someone like John Coltrane plays — that amazing , soulful, spiritual height. We—you and I—are given that same spirit by God.
We are all called to be able to do jazz improvisation, when it come to our faith. So how is the Christian Life like jazz, particularly like jazz improvisation? I’m going to suggest four ways. First of all, we learn the basics and practice the scales. Practice is key. We rehearse over and over and get it right.
As well, our Faith is something we “practice” the way a lawyer practices law. We practice the Faith. It is central to our life and we should be rehearsing ourselves in the scales of Faith, Hope, Love, Gentleness, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Self-Control with every day. We should work at it.
Secondly, we listen to the other players. The thing about great Jazz Musicians is that they don’t listen to themselves. But something marvelous happens when they’re listening to everybody else in the band and playing into that. And so we are not to experience our faith in the vacuum of solipsism and narcissism and selfhood, but rather in relationship with one another—with people in our family—brothers and sisters in the faith. We listen to the other players in order to tune our song correctly.
Thirdly, we walk by faith, not by sight. I say we play by faith, not by sight. The great musicians—they can go into the wilderness without knowing what note they’re going to play next. And you know something? They don’t need to know! They don’t need to have it written down at that moment. And the brilliant thing about that is that is the perfect analogy to living by the Spirit. We don’t know. We don’t go into the world with a script. People want a script but that’s not the way it works. We live by the Spirit.
If you are ministering to somebody in your family, or a friend, or in your neighborhood who is outside of the faith and relatively lost, Im not going to stick a Four Spiritual Laws pamphlet in your face and have you shove that under their nose. No. You have to play. You have to play and there’s nothing more frightening to a mediocre musician like myself than, when playing with a group and they give me the look that says, "Okay, your time to solo—GO!”—and being able to just relax and play into that. You know something, I can do it with the Faith—I can’t do it with guitar yet, but that day is coming.
In faith we have to play by the Spirit. It means that we step out, simply trusting in the Spirit to work though us. We have to improvise, live in the moment trustingly and find the notes.
And fourthly, we play Soli Dei Gloria (which is how Bach signed every piece). This means To the Glory of God Alone. Another quote from Miles Davis:
Me and my band, we don’t play for audiences ever. We play for the music. We’re playin’ the music. The fact that a lot of people want to watch us play, that’s secondary.
I’m thinking, that’s it! That’s exactly right. We don’t play for any audience other than the Lord. And what we do, what we offer—what comes out of our heart and our spirituality and our life are Love, Faith, Hope—all of those things—and we give them as a form of praise. As we clap our hands with the floods and sing with the mountains—that is what our life is like. We are participating in the music, in the song that God has woven us into.
John Coltrane said it very well:
My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being… When you being to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hangups… I want to speak to their souls.
“I want to speak to the souls”—and so should we. As we come to the table we are fed for that. It is Jesus Jazz that we are seeking. It is Jesus Jazz at the table that we are seeking to be fed for. The good news, brothers and sisters, is we have it as a promise from God. God says: Open up, I will give you what you need. If you want to improvise, I’ll give you the Spirit. If you want to play off the script, follow me. It’s good news and it’s so much fun. It begins now and ends never.