God loves black sound

Under the heading “God loves black sound” I have brought together four essays that look at the subject of jazz and Christianity from different angles. They are the following texts:

• “You have turned my mourning into dancing” – Jazz and Praying the Psalms
• Jazz and the Catholic Tradition of Faith
• Jazz and Franciscan Spirituality
• Jazz as Church Music

From the introduction:

“God loves black sound”: this saying of the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk makes clear that jazz and religion share a long history. Jazz musicians have always understood improvisation and groove as a spiritual experience. And African American religiosity has always taken shape in its encounter with jazz and related music. Blues and spirituals, gospel music and traditional jazz: these are the pairs of siblings that stand at the beginning of jazz history.

This spiritual side of jazz has again and again given rise to impressive works of art. Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concerts”, John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and Mary Lou Williams’s “Black Christ of the Andes” may be mentioned here on behalf of many other musicians and recordings. The form of religiosity at work in jazz is undogmatic and open to influences from all religions. So the turn of many African Americans to Islam in the 1940s and 1950s, and the interest in Asian religions in the 1960s and 1970s, have also left their traces in jazz.

There is extensive research on this aspect of jazz history, perhaps most comprehensively in the book “Spirits Rejoice” by Jason C. Bivins. In Germany, the Protestant Church initiated a research project on jazz in the liturgy in 2015–2018, which resulted in the publications “Jazz und Kirche” and “Blue Church”.

In this collection of essays I am concerned with the connections, in the philosophy of culture and in theology, that come to light when jazz and Christian religious practice meet. My starting point is directly my personal situation as a jazz musician on the one hand, and as a Catholic Christian with a Franciscan outlook on the other. I have circled this particular standpoint from three different directions. The first essay deals with the Jewish-Christian attitude of prayer in general and its relationship to jazz. The second is about essential traits of the Catholic way of being a Christian, and the third, finally, about basic Franciscan attitudes. It closes with a short text of general reflections on jazz as church music.

The PDF with these four essays can be downloaded here: