I have been active as a jazz musician for many years, and my cultural roots are in this music. At the same time I am a Catholic Christian, and in church I mostly encounter quite different forms of music. Again and again I have tried to make this tension a theme of my artistic work, for example in the projects “Psalmen und Lobgesänge für Chor und Jazz-Ensemble” (Psalms and Songs of Praise for Choir and Jazz Ensemble) and “Franziskusinventionen” (Francis Inventions). In the process I have also had to ask myself whether such an approach is legitimate. Jazz in church: is that possible at all? Or, to put it another way: what enables jazz to be the expression and vehicle of a Christian relationship with God – indeed, in the end, a musical form of prayer? I would like to try to answer this question by starting from the spirit of the Psalms and the attitude of prayer they express.
The Psalms are prayers of the Old Testament which, according to tradition, were written by King David; some of them do in fact date from his time, while others were written later. They give voice to every feeling a believer can have towards God: praise, thanksgiving and rejoicing; but also grief, lament, accusation and anger, even despair. To this day the Psalms play a central part in Jewish worship, and in the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, too, they belong to the Liturgy of the Hours, the regular times of prayer of religious and priests. Because of their great importance in worship, there are settings of the Psalms from every period and in every musical style.
O Lord, God of my salvation, I cry out to you by day and by night.
Let my prayer come before you, incline your ear to my supplication!
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to the realm of the dead.
I am counted among those who go down to the grave; I am like a man who has no strength left.
I am swept away among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave,
whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand.
Psalm 88:2-6
This lament over one’s own helplessness, this cry to God for salvation and help, is a fundamental statement of many Psalms. The calm solemnity of the Gregorian melodies to which the Psalms are so often sung sometimes makes us forget what an elemental drama is played out in these texts. There are no polite or pious phrases here, no worries about good taste or artistic decorum. All that counts is existential experience of life and its immediate expression.
In this the Psalms meet one of the fundamental forms of jazz: the blues. In the blues, too, the musician’s suffering and lament are voiced with raw force. The sound of the voice and the instruments does not follow any standardised ideal of beauty. The expressiveness and brokenness of the sound mirror the personality of the musician in all its unmistakable individuality. The emotional closeness of the black people abducted and enslaved in the USA to the biblical people of Israel, who also had to suffer expulsion and exile again and again, can also be seen in the black church music related to jazz, the gospel songs and spirituals, in which Israel’s experience of slavery in Egypt or of the Babylonian captivity plays a large part (for example “Go Down, Moses”).
I will extol you, O Lord, for you have drawn me up from the depths
and have not let my foes triumph over me.
O Lord my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me.
O Lord, you have brought me up from the realm of the dead,
called me back to life from among those doomed to die.
To you, O Lord, I cried for help; to my Lord I pleaded for mercy.
Then you turned my mourning into dancing,
you took off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.
So my heart sings to you and will not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you for ever.
Psalm 30:2-4; 9; 12-13
But the Psalms do not stop at lament. It is precisely the admission of one’s own weakness, and the courage to stand before God with one’s whole personality, with all its fractures and fears, that make God’s saving intervention possible. Even when the psalmist feels beset by the storms of life, he still knows that his life is in God’s hands.
This direct relationship with God and this trust in his help are of course not contained as such in a mainly instrumental music like jazz. But in jazz too, and even more in the blues, a new energy arises out of the lament – a rhythmic and sonic energy that gives people the courage to live and leads them back to a vitality that overcomes everyday problems. This basic trust in God is expressed quite explicitly in the lyrics of gospel music, which is stylistically closely related to jazz. In this respect the lament of the Psalms and of the blues differs fundamentally from, say, the “Weltschmerz” of German Romanticism, whose underlying mood is always one of resignation and which shrinks back from the world as it actually is.
The openness to the future, the trust in life that underlies jazz, also shows in the fact that this music is never perfect or finished. In improvisation the musician openly shows himself even with what does not quite come off. He trusts that the ideas will come, that he does not have to control and master the music, but that the music flows through him.
Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth; rejoice, exult and sing!
Make music to the Lord with the harp, with the harp and the sound of song!
With trumpets and the sound of the horn, shout for joy before the Lord, the King!
Let the sea roar and all that fills it, the world and those who dwell in it.
Let the rivers clap their hands, let the mountains sing for joy together.
Psalm 98:4-8
This experience of liberation, of being carried, cannot of course find expression only in quiet tones, either in the Psalms or in jazz. It calls for powerful expression, for rhythm, movement and loud sounds. Yes, volume belongs to it too – provided it springs from the musician’s own energy and is not produced electrically through an amplification system.
Nor does this experience of liberation remain a merely private matter: it embraces the whole of creation, the sea, the earth, the mountains and the rivers. Everything is drawn into the thanksgiving to the Creator and into the joy in life and in rescue from danger.
And there is a further step that the Psalms take together with jazz: after the lament and its transformation into dance and new energy for life, after the rejoicing and its widening out to the whole universe, the gaze returns from the vastness of the cosmos to everyday reality, and there it leads to political consequences.
Give the king your justice, O God,
and your righteousness to the king’s son.
May he govern your people with righteousness and your poor with just judgement.
Then the mountains will bear peace for the people, and the hills righteousness.
He will defend the cause of the afflicted among the people, bring help to the children of the poor,
and crush the oppressor.
May he live as long as the sun endures, and the moon, to the farthest generations.
May he come down like rain upon the fields, like showers that water the earth.
In his days may righteousness flourish, and great peace, till the moon is no more.
Psalm 72:1-7
Just as the psalmist asks God for the coming of the messianic kingdom of peace, jazz musicians have again and again stood up for freedom, peace and justice: from the black civil rights movement in the USA, through the quiet protest of unconventional dissidents in the Eastern Bloc, to the critique of consumerism and the media that jazz embodies simply by existing in our society. When, for example, the jazz bassist Charles Mingus sang with great fervour in the sixties: “Oh Lord, don´t let them drop that atomic bomb on me!”, this is not just the eccentric and somewhat odd utterance of an outsider; it ties in, perhaps unconsciously but nonetheless clearly, with the biblical experience of God.
All this shows that jazz contains within itself the essential elements of Judaeo-Christian spirituality. For me personally, both Christianity and jazz, each in its own way, are among the roots that sustain my life, and I have never felt any contradiction between the two. Like many jazz musicians before me, I can express what moves me in my relationship with God seamlessly through the musical means of jazz. As the saxophonist Roland Kirk once put it: “God loves black sound!”