Jazz as Church Music

Jazz in church? Isn’t that a topic long since shelved, from the 1960s? From a time when the Church was still looking out for new shores, jazz was in full bloom, and most of those debating it were not really clear about the difference between jazz and Schlager (German popular song)? Certainly, at present the field of Catholic church music seems to be divided between traditional church music, the Neues Geistliches Lied (new sacred song) and a very few experiments in the area of “New Music”. For a form of music like jazz, which is both artistically demanding and, at first, unsettling, there seems to be neither room nor need. Add to this that jazz no longer holds the place in public awareness that it had 40 or 50 years ago, and that over the past 20 years it has developed and diversified stylistically once more, so that one can hardly speak of “jazz” as a single, self-contained musical style any more. Nevertheless I believe that the basic elements of jazz contain creative principles that can give Catholic church music important impulses for its cultural and spiritual development.

An essential mark of the Catholic Church has always been its openness to different cultural traditions, beginning with the encounter of Jewish and Greek thought in the New Testament and reaching to the many forms that today’s world Church has developed in the different cultures. Here a central element of the Christian faith shows itself: the Church is sent to all peoples; it is to take into itself the best of every culture and to sanctify and transform it through the presence of Christ. Pentecost already shows that Christianity has no single culture; the language of Christianity is the language of all peoples. This is precisely where an important bridge to jazz lies. Jazz, too, is a music of cultural openness. Born from the encounter of European and African musical traditions, it has, in the course of its history, entered into musical dialogue with all the major musical cultures of the world. Especially in the last 20 years, the stylistic development of jazz has once again set clear accents here. Jazz in a German church: that includes the possibility of opening up not only to the theology but also to the musical cultures of the “young churches” in Africa and South America. It is a clear statement for the vitality of the Catholic Church, which is not merely the guardian of the “Christian West” but is setting out on a new and exciting path into the third millennium of its existence.

As a second point, I would name the connection with the spirituality of the Old Testament. In the Christian tradition there has often been an opposition between body and spirit, in which the body was devalued and a purely spiritual Christianity was striven for. This also shaped church music, in which the physical, rhythmic element was often regarded with suspicion. The rediscovery of the Old Testament by Christian theology, and the Jewish-Christian dialogue, have led to a reassessment here: the human being is a unity of body and spirit, and stands before God in this wholeness. Whenever the Old Testament, above all the Psalms, speaks of music, this comes out clearly. There is talk of loud rejoicing, people are called on to clap their hands, the trumpets sound, cymbals ring, and the strings of the harp are struck with full force. What comes to mind is far more the picture of a jazz band than of a schola singing plainchant. The ability of jazz to connect the physical and the spiritual level in the human being through improvisation and rhythm can be seen as directly taking up this holistic form of piety.

These two points alone make it clear that it is worth bringing jazz back into the church; after all, that is partly where it came from, by way of the spirituals. Many jazz musicians certainly do have an interest in religious themes. So church musicians who enjoy experimenting will have no difficulty finding musical partners on the jazz scene.