Jazz can make you a better Christian … Nice.
Posted by Paul | Filed under uncategorised
I’ve listened to two excellent mp3s on Jazz recently.
The first is by William Edgar — Heaven in a Nightclub. He gives an whirlwind tour through the history of Jazz pointing out the influence of Christianity. He also gives live examples which, since he is a very good Jazz pianist, are great.
One thing that stuck out from his talk is the comment that much of today’s praise music expresses happiness not joy, because it doesn’t face up to the dark and despair of life. Because of its history jazz (and other African-American music) is in contrast to this.
The title of this post comes from the second mp3 — Learning to Glorify God through the Enjoyment of Jazz by Kevin Twit (of indelible grace). More into the relationship of Jazz and Christianity — how Jazz can correct our theological shortcomings.
An interesting point from this one is the importance of learning to improvise. White middle-class evangelicalism can be very much into rules and doing things the right way (implicitly if not spoken). This is a lot like the performance of Classical music. On the other hand, Jazz is about exploring the limits via improvisation. One low-level example given is apologetics — there is a tendency to approach apologetics with an implicit script ‘if they say this, then you come back with…’; instead it should be more of a real conversation where we truly listen to the other people and respond from what they are saying, knowing that we are building on and interacting with a whole tradition. More risky, but more exciting…
The idea of improvisation is one that Tom Wright considers on a bigger scale in the famous How Can The Bible Be Authoritative? He puts forward an analogy for the Bible of a play for which the penultimate act is lost — we are called to improvise the act, ensuring that our playing is in the consistent with the existing record.
It’s useful to think about how our approach to life/theology might be affected by our cultural need to have everything spelt out with only a small scope for the player’s interpretation, compared with other views where there is room for improvisation (with of course the restriction that we are true to the underlying tune/play). How much do we miss that we should be doing?
Another interesting point from Kevin Twit’s talk is the difficulty of teaching Jazz. In the end you have to learn by example, listening, following previous great players. Which ties in with a previous post and the ever-important theme of disciple verses book-learning.
Oh, and I can’t leave a post on Jazz without a link to Reflections of a Jazz Theologian.
Tags: apologetics, art, culture, jazz, mp3s, theology
A random walk over culture, art, christianity, etc. with occasional photographs...