Faith: Feeling the Spirit in the sounds of jazz
I presided over a memorial service in Connecticut — one for my mother-in-law, Page Hedden Wilson. A few weeks earlier my wife Alix and I tuned in virtually to the memorial for Page's best friend, Jean. Participants concluded that service with opened umbrellas as they sashayed behind a brass band, leading the procession around the sanctuary: an homage to Jean's longtime annual engagement in this ritual at the Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans.
Her seven children recounted many Jean stories that morning but one stood out. Jean's daughter described an evening when she and her mother babysat for one of the grandchildren, who had a seizure. The two women struggled to place objects in the girl's mouth to prevent her from swallowing her tongue. Finally Jean managed to shove in two fingers. The child's tiny teeth bit down hard. Nevertheless, those grandmother fingers remained in that mouth for the duration of the ambulance ride once EMS arrived — two fingers that lost all feeling for two solid years. This account inspired two lines in a poem I later wrote for the family:
sacrifice never asks why;
Jean never asked why.
This fall the church where I worship, St. James' Episcopal, will offer its 28th jazz Mass. Each time I participate in this service, my Roman Catholic roots speak up to remind me of the full title for this order of worship: the Sacrifice of the Mass.
In my mind Jazz, with its bluesy roots buried deep in the tormented soil of American slavery, provides fitting accompaniment for this tradition commemorating, not only one man's ultimate sacrifice for his people, but for the sacrifice of those people themselves,. Love compels them to forego "asking why" as they do what needs doing so one or many may survive and thrive. It is this interpretation that led my graduate school professor, the theologian C. S. Song, to write his book: "Christ, the Crucified People."
Can we, however, take this sacrificial aspect of our faith too far?
Some suggest that the first jazz Mass took place in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral in 1965. Vince Guaraldi of "A Charlie Brown Christmas" fame wrote the score. Prior to that, however, in 1964, Mary Lou Williams wrote her "Black Christ of the Andes," a jazz liturgical tribute to Martin de Porres, patron saint of racial harmony. Not till 1975 in Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City did it become a jazz Mass.
The fact that Williams was raised, like me, on the East Side of Pittsburgh, where she's now interred in the same cemetery as my parents, prejudices me. It's not just my "homey" instincts that compel me to conclude that Williams the genius behind the Jazz Mass. Her peculiar relationship with sacrifice, particularly in its capacity to go too far, plays a greater role.
You see Williams took it too far on the fronts of both jazz and faith. From age 6, "the little piano girl of East Liberty" played professionally, and by age 13, she toured with Duke Ellington. In 1954, in a state of near physical and emotional collapse in Paris, she gave up the musical medium that made her a star.
Shortly thereafter, upon her return to the U.S., Williams, along with bebop legend Dizzy Gillespie's wife, Lorraine, converted to Catholicism. Again Williams took it too far when it came to the sacrificial aspect of her newfound faith. She opened her home to help all she came across to enable them to escape desperation and poverty. This included Jazz greats like Charlie Parker, whom she mentored — musicians struggling with addiction as they tried to meet the performance demands that led Williams to call it quits.
Two clergyman friends, seeing Williams once again flirt with mental and emotional collapse, convinced her that a more balanced way to live out her faith existed — one using her God-given musical gifts. She recalled how she as a little girl stopped neighbors from throwing bricks and bottles at their house because they did not want a Black family living there by giving concerts on their front porch. When she broke her arm and could no longer play, the neighbors then knocked on her door to ask why the concerts had stopped. This memory motivated Williams to then celebrate what she called "the healing powers of jazz."
At the behest of Cardinal John Wright, Williams went on to write three more jazz Masses. The Little Piano Girl of East Liberty in time came to be known as the "History of Jazz" because she embodied every iteration of this original American art form in her playing and created what she called the "Tree of Jazz" to honor the medium's origins in slave songs: the outcome of her balancing a sacrificial faith with her deep capacity to swing.
I don't know if Page's BFF knew this peculiar history of the amazing Williams. Still I came to know Jean and, therefore, feel certain that, if Williams squeezed in behind the keyboard, this little blue-eyed, white-haired white woman would not hesitate to pop her bumbershoot and shake her booty in procession to the pianist's groove. I feel equally certain that my mother-in-law would join her friend in the manner she followed another Black woman, her Antioch College classmate, Corretta Scott (later King) as she led Page and her classmates to squeeze their Black and white bodies behind Southern lunch counters. None of these young people asked why because they knew that this how integration must begin.
On Nov. 13 at St. James' Episcopal Church's Jazzy Sacrifice of the Mass, I plan, therefore, to line up, at least in my mind, behind Jean and Mary Lou Williams, Page and Coretta Scott King as they process out of our sanctuary pews to the syncopated strains of "Songs of Our Deliverance," Rector Eileen O'Brien's chosen theme for the Mass concluding this year's Jazz at St. James' fest.
Who knows? I might even bring along my umbrella to open when the Spirit moves. The Mass will remind me that sacrifice on the part of many persists but the jazz will permit me to swing nonetheless. For in this confusing confluence lives the substantive how? I pray that I've at least tempted you to join us.
Terry Dawson is an ordained Presbyterian minister and former adjunct faculty member of San Francisco Theological Seminary. Terry Dawson's book, The After: Poems Only a Planet Could Love" is now available at Book People and at Amazon.com.
The 28th Jazz at St. James'
Headliner: Don Braden, saxophone
John Fremgen, bass; Sean Michael Giddings, piano; Daniel Dufour, drums
7:30 p.m. Nov. 11 and Nov. 12, concert, social hour beginning at 6 p.m. with refreshments and live music; $20-$40
10:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Nov. 13, Jazz Mass, free.
St. James' Episcopal Church, 1941 Webberville Road
Tickets at Eventbrite.com
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Feeling the Spirit in the sounds of jazz
