Here the magnificent cathedrals, there the small and often shabby jazz clubs; here a worldwide, clearly structured hierarchy, there the loose bonds of small groups and “scenes”; here the carefully planned, calm movements of the liturgy, there the spontaneous interaction within a band and with the audience; in short: here incense, there cigarette smoke.
At first glance it seems as though the contrast between the Catholic Church and jazz could hardly be greater, as though there were no points of contact at all. I myself am both a jazz musician and a Catholic Christian, and so I stand in the tension between these two cultural and philosophical currents. At the grass roots, in the parish, combining the two is usually no problem. When I occasionally play at a service, most people are glad to hear something other than the usual music in church for once. The cultural range and tolerance of Catholic parishes is considerably greater than it is often portrayed in public.
More decisive for me, though, is the level of content. And there one finds that, beyond their very different surface effects, there are shared basic attitudes that drive the inner dynamics of both the Catholic Church and jazz.
It is of course not without its problems to compare a style of music with a religious community, since the two have completely different aims, themes and patterns of action, and each responds to its own human needs. On top of this, a satisfactory definition of the terms “jazz” and “Catholic Church” is a practically impossible task. Both have changed over the course of their history, are made up of a multitude of different currents, and are extremely blurred at the edges; that is, they show numerous mixed and transitional forms with other styles of music or other religions.
A thorough comparison guided by scholarly criteria would have to take account of these difficulties and work through them in a way that is not possible within the scope of this piece. Here, in a personal and essayistic context, a few basic remarks will have to suffice:
- Time and again it becomes clear that jazz is more than just a style of music. Musicians and listeners are bound together in a way that in many respects also includes social behaviour, values and convictions about the world. Conversely, Catholic theology has time and again stimulated and given rise to cultural developments and social structures. So there are thematic overlaps within which comparisons are not only permissible but meaningful and fruitful.
- Despite the difficulty of defining “jazz” and “Catholic Church” precisely, neither can be denied an identity of its own that links its historical layers and its different currents. This is due, on the one hand, to the unbroken process through which their many manifestations developed out of one another. And on the other hand it is rooted in the identity-forming principles that fed this development. It is precisely here that the present comparison can offer an unusual and stimulating perspective.
From what has been said so far it follows that this text starts above all from my personal experience. It tries to make clear what my stance as a Catholic jazz musician is founded on, and where I see points of contact between my music and my faith. I find the common ground surprising and inspiring. It has helped me to find forms of improvised music suitable for Catholic services, and it has also shaped my path as a creative jazz musician. For this reason I have left the differences and contrasts aside here.
I have already written something about what jazz has in common with the Jewish-Christian attitude of prayer in general in the text “Jazz and Praying the Psalms”. Here I want to look at elements that belong to the distinctive character of the Catholic Church, particularly as distinct from the other denominations. I would like to present the common ground under five headings:
1. Bodily presence
That jazz is closely bound up with the bodily presence of the musicians and with the sensory experience of musical interaction is immediately obvious. The rhythms and sounds that arise in improvisation are not abstract and one-sidedly rational; they unite body and spirit, mind and feeling. And the artist as a person can never be separated from his artistic message. He has to create it anew in every improvisation and shape it in its material, acoustic reality.
Listening to music made in this way therefore also calls for bodily participation. You can see this, for example, in the spontaneous movements of the listeners, such as snapping their fingers or tapping their feet, through which they tune in to the rhythmic dimension of the music. A community arises between band and audience, sparked by the musicians’ physical feel.
What seems to have been somewhat forgotten, on the other hand, is the fact that the bodily, sensory communication of faith and of the encounter with God also plays a central role in the Catholic Church, especially compared with the Protestant churches. The sacraments, such as the Eucharist (Communion) and baptism, are meant to keep Jesus present in his personal and bodily activity. They are not merely explanatory, interpretive symbols that refer to a spiritual reality; they extend the bodily presence of Jesus into our everyday lives.
In this context the priest is not only the herald of an abstract truth or a special kind of social worker, but the representative of Jesus in his action for people. This presence of Jesus, understood bodily as well, is the foundation of the community of the Church. Catholic Christians are connected with one another in a similar way, embracing both spiritual and bodily aspects, as the members of a jazz band are with one another and with the audience. It is no accident that in the Catholic tradition the Church is called the “mystical body of Christ” and also “the pilgrim people of God”. (If you are interested in learning more about the Catholic teaching on the sacraments, you can find more in the text “Eucharist and Existential Philosophy”.)
The often rich artistic decoration of Catholic churches, and the cultural expressions of Catholicism in architecture, music and the visual arts in every era, are a consequence of this basic attitude. God is close to people bodily as well; he can be experienced through the senses; he makes himself touchable.
2. Orality and practice
The forms of community and expression described above lead to a further thing the two have in common: a distant relationship with the written word. The essential content of a jazz concert or a liturgical celebration cannot be fixed in writing. It lies in the actions themselves and is bound to those actions. In this context texts or scores can only be instructions and aids to memory; they do not contain the actual message. It is much the same with recipes: however beautifully they are written, only the cooked meal will fill you up.
The comparison with cooking also shows that it is not merely a matter of theoretical knowledge, but above all of skills. These have to be developed through oral transmission and practice. You cannot become a jazz musician through textbooks, through reading and practising alone in your room. Lively exchange, making music together and talking with other musicians, of your own generation and of earlier ones, are irreplaceable.
In just the same way, Catholic Christians gradually grow into the expressive world and the shared celebration of the Catholic liturgy. The community of the parish helps them to practise and understand the rituals, celebrating the service together deepens the emotional experience, and conversation within the parish helps to relate faith and life to one another and to act together. Anyone who knows the Catholic Church only from books or newspaper reports will not understand what is essential. Likewise, books on music theory can certainly help in understanding jazz improvisations. But real access, which is above all emotional, only opens up through listening together.
To close this section, a small side note: just as orality is something jazz and the Catholic denomination have in common, one could say that on this point there is an affinity between classical music and Protestantism. For both, the principle of “sola scriptura” (scripture alone) applies in a certain sense. For the one it is the scores of the great composers, for the other Holy Scripture, the Bible. Both groups are strongly convinced that the content is contained most clearly and most densely in its written form.
3. A sense of history
The important role that bodily presence and orality play in jazz and in the Catholic Church gives rise to a further common feature: a particularly strong sense of history.
For the Catholic Church this seems obvious. Everyone knows that tradition plays a large role here, and that the Church insists very firmly on the unchangeability of certain teachings and structures. On the one hand this seems to stabilise the Church; on the other, it seems to hamper its capacity to develop and its contact with the modern world.
If you look more closely, though, you see that things are not so simple. A quotation from Pope John XXIII, from his opening address to the Second Vatican Council, illustrates this well: “But it is not our task merely to guard this precious treasure (the faith handed down, ed.), as if we were concerned only with what is old; rather, we want now to set about, joyfully and fearlessly, the work that our time demands, and to continue the path that the Church has travelled for twenty centuries.”
So in the Catholic Church tradition means walking a path through history that is open to the future, just as much as it means holding to principles that apply to all generations. Tradition thus positively demands a further development of the status quo, a “joyful and fearless” encounter with new times and new tasks. The phrase “ecclesia semper reformanda”, the Church that is always and in every age in need of reform, points in the same direction. Church history shows how often and how profoundly the Catholic Church has already changed in the course of this development without abandoning its foundations. And it turns out that the very people who set off the most effective changes had a strong relationship with tradition and at the same time a fresh and courageous view of it. In Catholic circles there is a well-known saying that illustrates this connection nicely: “Tradition is the passing on of the fire, not the preserving of the ashes.”
While a sense of history is evidently an important trait of the Catholic Church, the opposite seems to be true of jazz. Jazz is associated with new departures, spontaneity, constant renewal. And with good musicians that is indeed the case. But it is easy to overlook the fact that the forms constantly emerging arise from the older ones in a very similar way to what I sketched above for the Catholic Church. This link between new styles of music and the history of jazz has several aspects:
- First of all, learning improvisation, rhythm and phrasing orally means that each new generation is in close contact with the one before it. Almost all famous jazz musicians played with the best of the older musicians in the early years of their careers and learned in their bands. Beyond that, it goes without saying that young musicians listen to the most important recordings of earlier eras, talk about them, and seek advice from older musicians. And even in lessons at the music school it is striking that young people interested in jazz, at an age when they are distancing themselves from parents and teachers, like to listen and ask questions when instrumental teachers or bandleaders tell them about their experiences and musical adventures.
- A further aspect is the basic principles that underlie jazz of every era. Groove, an individual sound and improvisation are the essential elements of all jazz styles. They are practised by learning older styles, and they also underlie every further development and renewal. It is intuitive and often unconscious faithfulness to these basic principles that makes it possible to integrate ever new ideas and techniques and to develop new styles.
- Finally, the history of jazz is itself a rich source of inspiration, one that the great innovators of jazz in particular have drawn on extensively. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and many others are distinguished by the sovereign ease with which they drew on different layers of time and different styles, shaped a personal sound from them, and so arrived at entirely new results, which in turn became part of jazz history.
To sum up: outwardly, the Catholic Church emphasises what is unchangeable in its teaching, while jazz puts what is new and spontaneous in music in the foreground. In reality, though, both cultivate an equally respectful and flexible relationship with tradition, based on a living knowledge of earlier eras. This kind of sense of history enables them to respond to new challenges in a nuanced way and to renew themselves again and again.
4. Universality
The kind of sense of history described in the previous section creates a community across the generations. Forming a group that spans eras in this way makes it necessary to reassure oneself of one’s own identity again and again. This could give rise to a narrow and exclusive attitude towards other kinds of culture and faith, a sort of self-imposed obligation to preserve the achievements of the past unchanged. And this narrowness is indeed found at times, both in the Church and in jazz. Examples from recent years are the Catholic traditionalist Society of St Pius X, or the circle of musicians around the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and the critic Stanley Crouch. So the tendency exists, but on the whole it is balanced out and overcome by the universality that marks the claims of both jazz and the Catholic Church.
Universality means being able to speak to people and convince them across cultures. A universal idea is understandable, plausible and attractive to people who otherwise have little in common and come from different cultural and social backgrounds. It can be applied in many ways and integrated into personal life and feeling. Universality also includes movement in the opposite direction: new and unfamiliar influences can act on the original idea and change it without its losing its basic identity. Both are true of jazz as well as of the Catholic Church.
Jazz had this universality in its cradle, so to speak, from the very beginning. It arose from the encounter of African and European forms of music; it took elements from both traditions and brought them together into a new and coherent whole. Only a few years after it emerged, jazz was arousing interest and enthusiasm worldwide, across all cultures and classes. Jazz bands played in New York, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro and Berlin, and their listeners came from working-class districts, middle-class homes and now and then even princely palaces.
Jazz has preserved this universal openness. It has inspired numerous forms of popular music and has in turn let itself be influenced by them. In many bands and artistic projects since the 1950s there have been encounters and dialogues with practically all the musical cultures of the world, from European classical music through South American, African and Indian music to Arabic music, which has played a recurring role in the concepts of European jazz musicians since the late 1990s.
In all this, jazz and jazz musicians almost always managed to preserve the basic identity of the music and their natural connection with one another. This has to do, on the one hand, with the link to the jazz tradition described above: even a jazz musician who improvises together with techno DJs or Arab musicians is, as a matter of course, able to play a piece by Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker in the proper style. On the other hand, it comes from faithfulness to the unspoken principles of jazz rooted in improvisation: even when a jazz musician plays in an electronic or world-music context, what matters to him will always be the spontaneous shaping of sounds and rhythms.
Although jazz has long been music for relatively few committed listeners, it is still able to build bridges into many other areas and to speak to and inspire people from other cultures. Still, or perhaps more than ever, jazz is a universal music.
The origins of Christianity and the development of the Catholic Church show a whole series of analogies with the history of jazz. The Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Paul in the New Testament already bear witness to the encounter of Jewish and Greek culture. The basic Christian doctrines were formulated in dialogue with ancient philosophy. Categories of Roman legal and political thought also shaped the development of the Church. And the forms of Catholic popular piety absorbed a wide variety of cultural and religious traditions.
I do not want to deny or gloss over the negative sides of this process. They exist in two directions: both the cases of violence in missionary work and the fact that, through cultural mixing, problematic aspects of other cultures overlaid the message of the Gospel cast a clear shadow over the history of the Church. Here there is an important difference from jazz, which, as a purely cultural expression, makes no claim to truth and has no political power to shape things, and so is less affected by violent conflict.
It remains true, however, that the Catholic Church was able to genuinely convince many people in all parts of the world of its faith, and that the encounter with other cultures enriched the life of the Church and made its further development fruitful. In the process, for all the diversity, it managed to preserve the core of its message. For many centuries the unifying elements were the Latin language and scholastic theology, which ensured a worldwide community at the level of bishops and theologians. At the beginning of the 1960s, finally, the Second Vatican Council opened the Catholic liturgy to the many languages of the world and allowed the cultural traditions of the peoples of Africa and Asia to be brought more fully into Catholic theology. This further strengthened awareness of the Church’s worldwide dimension. Many German parishes, for example, have close ties with parishes on other continents, with both partners learning from each other. African or Indian priests in Europe are no longer anything unusual.
Naturally there are recurring conflicts and disputes between the central authority in Rome and the differing needs of the local churches in the various regions of the world. Even so, the Catholic Church succeeds in uniting people of all cultures and classes into a real unity. A visit to St Peter’s Square in Rome shows the whole colourful variety, and indeed the universality, of the Church in an impressive way.
5. Order and freedom
Even more than with the other points, the roles here seem clear-cut: the Catholic Church stands for order, jazz for freedom.
The Catholic Church holds a view of the world set down in unchangeable dogmas, and for papal decisions on fundamental questions of faith it claims the assistance of the Holy Spirit, which is called, catchily but not quite accurately, “infallibility”. In ethics, it attempts to apply the ethics of the Gospel to every situation in human life through a precisely formulated system of commandments and rules, in order to offer binding guidance.
In jazz, by contrast, there are no dogmas; every musician is free in what he creates. The boundaries between jazz and other kinds of music are fluid, and jazz musicians in particular often dispute that stylistic boundaries make any sense (which, however, does not change the fact that musicians from other genres identify jazz musicians very clearly as such). There is a kind of “ethics of improvisation”, but it is limited to the demand to preserve the spontaneity of improvisation, to develop a style of one’s own, and never to stop searching for new forms of improvised music. If you transfer this ethics of improvisation to life, you arrive at the idea of striving for an original, self-shaped life that resists outside constraints.
On closer inspection, however, you soon notice that this division does not correspond to reality, and that it rests rather on labels attached from outside, or perhaps even on a kind of self-stylisation.
For jazz it quickly becomes clear that the freedom it proclaims is only possible when it is supported by a strong counterweight of order and self-discipline. That begins with learning the instrument. To be able to improvise truly freely, you need a craftsman’s mastery of the instrument, which can only be achieved through thousands of hours of concentrated practice. Hours of practising alone, day after day, is an almost ascetic achievement, requiring an extraordinary degree of patience, perseverance and self-criticism. A jazz improviser also needs a thorough knowledge of the harmonic foundations of music, that is, of music’s ordering functions. Anyone who wants to improvise over particular chord progressions both spontaneously and meaningfully must be completely at home with how the chords are built and with the inner logic of their sequence, so as to apply them within fractions of a second.
Added to this is the bond with the jazz tradition described in point three. For jazz musicians it goes without saying that they master the most important styles of earlier decades (the so-called “mainstream”), so that on this basis they can play with other musicians at any time. Only from this foundation do young musicians develop new concepts and styles. And the postmodern and deconstructivist tendencies of the last twenty years demand of musicians the ability to play many different forms of jazz, or music related to jazz, faithfully in their own style.
So an ethics of jazz includes not only personal freedom but also consideration for the stylistic context. This naturally carries over into the group structure of a band. In a music that makes improvisation its central feature, mutual consideration and empathy are indispensable if a concert is to succeed. Good music can only come about if everyone in the band takes responsibility for it.
The conclusion, then, is this: creative freedom in jazz really does exist. But it presupposes great self-discipline in learning the instrument and a willingness to engage actively with the ordering structures of music theory. This freedom is, moreover, embedded in the social demands of a group, without which it cannot unfold. In jazz, then, the principles of freedom and order, individuality and responsibility, are brought into a balance that keeps this music from losing its tension and dynamism.
In the same way, the Catholic Church’s outward orientation towards laws and dogmas is balanced by a strong element of individual freedom. This applies both to the realm of worldview and theology, in which dogmas, that is, unchangeable doctrinal statements, play a large role, and to Catholic ethics with its precisely formulated rules and laws.
At first one would assume that dogmatic formulations, by being unchangeable, are an obstacle to free thought. But if you look at how dogmas have actually worked in the history of the Church, you find the opposite. Dogmas have inspired reflection and piety in very different directions. At the same time they have created a common basis for all these directions, which has made community possible.
This can be illustrated, for example, by the Christological dogma according to which Jesus Christ is “true man and true God at the same time”. Taken on its own, this statement is at first an empty formula. For it to have any meaning, it has to be filled with content. That happens through the believers’ living relationship with Jesus Christ. Some feel more drawn to his divine nature; they experience him as the “Logos”, the spiritual ground law of the world, as the guarantor of the resurrection and the Lord of the Last Judgement. Others feel closer to Jesus in his human nature, as a friend and brother who was exposed to temptation and suffering, as someone who resisted inhuman laws and traditions and promised justice to the poor.
The crucial point is that both experiences of faith are grounded in the dogma, but not to the point where either can deny the other its right to exist. The dogma guarantees the freedom to find one’s own personal way to Jesus.
It is similar with most other dogmas: they do not restrict freedom but form a foundation from which many interpretations are possible, all of which are nonetheless linked to one another through their grounding in the dogma. The dogmas also reach into different areas of life. They inspire both rational thought, that is, theology, and the emotional side of faith. They offer points of connection for integrating other cultures, and they find varied and individual expression in the popular piety of every era and continent. If it were otherwise, the dogmas would have disappeared long ago, like so many doctrines of earlier times.
In the field of ethics, the Catholic Church has produced a system of rules and laws meant to apply the message of Jesus to as many situations in life as possible. If you actually apply these laws to every conceivable individual case, situations arise in which they seem inhuman or even absurd. And quite apart from that, the impression arises that a suspicious supervisory authority wants to suppress all independent and self-responsible action.
So it is important to keep clearly in mind that this legal system is only one part of Catholic ethics, and that its importance is limited by two far more important components.
The first is the awareness of the fundamental weakness of human beings. Combined with the belief that God loves people precisely in this weakness, this awareness leads to a great liberation: no one can keep all the laws, no one can make himself righteous before God through his own faultless conduct. All these laws are profoundly relative. They offer an ideal to orient oneself by, by which one can shape one’s life and the growth of one’s personality. But how one applies them to one’s own life is entrusted to the judgement and effort of each individual. This becomes visible in the ritual of confession. It is not about presenting oneself as a perfect person or promising future perfection, but about seeing oneself as a whole person, faults and all, and entrusting this whole person to the love of God. If you remind yourself for a moment how relentlessly perfect functioning is demanded in today’s working world, you can see what a liberating element lies in this acknowledgement of human imperfection.
The second is that the laws are relativised by the importance of conscience for the individual. It is one of the foundations of Catholic ethics that conscience always and in every situation takes precedence over the observance of the laws. Even in cases where conscience reaches a different conclusion from the Church’s teaching (that is, where from the Church’s point of view it “errs”), one may, and should, follow it.
These two serious limitations on an ethics of law make the following clear: what matters is not blindly obeying a more or less sensible system of rules, but developing a personality oriented towards ethical principles, for whom freedom and personal responsibility are the central values, and for whom the laws serve as signposts.
To bring the argument back round to jazz, you could compare the laws of the Church with the rules of harmony: they make sense and are in a certain way correct, but they need to be interpreted for the concrete situation. Just as in the end it is the musician’s ear that decides whether a note fits or not, and just as improvisation is not about “faultlessness” but about individual creativity, so for the Catholic Christian conscience and trust in God’s love are the basis of their own actions. As the Church Father Augustine already put it in the 5th century: “Love, and then do what you will.”
Conclusion and assessment
I have described common ground between jazz and the Catholic Church in five different areas. These shared features are, to begin with, neutral in value. They do not make jazz or the Church better or worse than they are; they establish neither a claim to truth nor a moral superiority. Nor do they lead to the conclusion that jazz is really the ideal form of Catholic church music; they do, however, indicate that there is no reason in substance to reject jazz in church.
If, finally, you look once more at the consequences of these shared basic principles of bodily presence, orality, a particular sense of history, universality and the tension between freedom and order, one thing stands out above all: what unites the two is a continuity of creativity.
Even if you don’t like jazz, you will have to admit that the variety of styles and forms of expression, of playing techniques and of formative musical personalities within barely a century is without parallel in the whole history of music. And quite independently of whether you consider the Church’s teaching true or not, and of how you judge its role in society, the wealth of different schools of thought, paths of faith and cultural forms of expression that it has inspired is impressive. Countless individuals, active and contemplative, progressive and conservative, stern and cheerful, women and men, priests and lay people, have contributed to it. They have devoted their lives to it and in doing so have realised those lives creatively.
It is this unceasing stream of creative expressions of life that gives both jazz and the Catholic Church an important role in meeting the cultural challenges of our time and in developing new visions and ways of living. They should be reckoned with.