By Janna Tull Steed

Daring to write about jazz and spirituality strikes me as something like holding one's balance in the middle of a seesaw with two animals of indeterminable shape and constantly changing weight on either end. Better make that two menageries, rather than two animals: There are almost as many different species of jazz as there are of spirituality. But when descriptions elude us and definitions fail, stories may illumine. I have three to tell, with commentary.

It is summer 1998, and I am at Columbia University for a research colloquium run by the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life (obviously named before the word "religion," inevitably preceded by "organized," became unstylish and "spiritual" became in-vogue). I am meeting versatile musician, conductor, and writer Loren Schoenberg at a Korean restaurant on Broadway near 116th Street.

We once performed together in New Haven, and I'm already in his debt for introducing me to "Something to Live For." On the thin credit line of brief rehearsal exchanges and a lively post-concert group discussion at a Chapel Street restaurant, I am asking a favor of him. He knows I am a minister interested in Ellington's sacred music, which he is not particularly fond of. The meeting is not an interview, I explained, but an opportunity for me to discuss ideas with someone who will challenge them.

Loren is digging into the spicy-hot cabbage appetizer with gusto. I am struggling with chopsticks like someone who lives in Iowa, which by now I do. When I dare introduce the name of the Deity, not without some trepidation, Loren responds:

"God? Well, I don't know about God. But I believe in Louis Armstrong."

Later, he elaborated, "All I can say is that Louis Armstrong's music offers me the most immediate and fulfilling spiritual nourishment that I have found to date. There is something in the sound of his trumpet and something in the sound of his voice that reflects an optimism rooted in the tragic/comic essence of life that swings despite all the odds. When you factor in the obstacles that Armstrong overcame in his early life, and where he wound up, it helps to put your own problems in perspective."

For Schoenberg, Louis Armstrong personifies that triumph of art over adversity. For other people, the messiah may be Parker or Coltrane, Mingus or Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Billie Holiday, or Bessie Smith. But the giants of jazz often embody some attributes of the shaman, guru, roshi, priest, prophet. It's not simply their art, but also their very selves which seem transparent to another reality, to Spirit (as some might say), to the numinous, the holy. Thus we accept Charlie Parker's answer to a question about his religious affiliation: "I am a devout musician."

In our secularized culture, the arts and romantic love have displaced religion as a path to transcendence. (Although the ideal of romantic love has been tarnished by the trivialization and exploitation of sexuality in advertising and shallow entertainment, this ideal is still sought as a sacramental experience, a communal source of ecstasy and creative transformation.) Jazz incorporates the dynamics of artistic endeavor (inspiration and improvisation chief among them) and, through both the music and the lyrics of its standard repertory, the intense emotional highs and lows of romantic love and sexual passion.

For many performers and fans, jazz functions as a religion, with its own constellation of saints and martyrs, its performance rituals, its "denominational divisions." But the primary source of its appeal is its evocative power to heal, transform, inspire, and uplift. In his book Jazz, Myth and Religion, Neil Leonard provides a thorough and nuanced analysis of this phenomenon.

Leonard draws on anthropological and sociological categories, saying, for example, that the jazz hero resembles Max Weber's "exemplary prophet," who "makes no binding demands but offers an inspirational model. He is not the instrument of the deity so much as its vessel…."

This perception is not limited to audiences, fans, and other performers seeking to become part of an elite band of disciples. The artists themselves often express a sense of their work as a holy vocation, even if their specific beliefs about God are unconventional. Some describe the music as coming "through them," as if they were a medium possessed by another spirit. Others are more explicit. According to Nat Hentoff in Jazz Life, Ornette Coleman considered a dedicated performance as "just showing that God exists." Mingus said that his music was all about his belief in God, and Dizzy Gillespie drew parallels between religion and jazz: In both God raises up leaders to take humankind up to a certain level of "spiritual development." The "jazz messengers " encompass more than those who played with Art Blakey.

Second story: My own experience leads me to believe that adherents of the historic faiths, especially Christianity, could benefit from sitting at the feet of the jazz prophets and practitioners. During a crucial period of disruption and grief, I found jazz to be a great healer of my soul. This movement into an arena I had long been fascinated by (but fearful of?) seemed to be a faithful response to a divine invitation to dance, to "stomp the blues," and to sing my prayers.

I recall a moment in the fall of 1990, when I found myself the only vocalist in a jazz improvisation class. I think there were two or three young guitarists, two saxophonists (including a John Coltrane wanna-be), a retired trumpet player, a hired rhythm section, and an instructor at least 15 years my junior. I was unemployed, unhealthy, and about to be unmarried. But there I was, shaking my head in disbelief that I am in such company, grinning like someone who has just learned that a family heirloom is priceless, feeling as humble and happy as a notorious sinner being ushered through the gates of heaven with the second line bringing up the rear.

What might have been just a brief midlife madness led to a redefined identity and vocation – even though I seem to have become a writer who sings rather than a singer who writes, both for the greater glory of God, I hope. Along the way, I met Duke Ellington, so to speak, and became fascinated with his sacred concerts. Through them, I was led to look at his other work more closely, and eventually this task became a passion that found fruition in a book. He was not only my subject, but also my mentor and my model.

Third Story: At a Franciscan retreat center near Colorado Springs in the fall of 1999, I am to give a presentation on Duke Ellington in a program that includes actor Roger Nelson doing one-man shows on John Wesley and St. Patrick.

The participants are Christian writers and visual artists, all of them white, most of them from the more evangelical branches of the Christian church. Only one person there, the oldest I judge, was familiar with jazz or with Duke – except through my work. My introductory lecture focused on Ellington's life story and evidence for his identity as an artist, rather than an entertainer. The second included videotape excerpts of a very early film short and, toward the end of his career, a Sacred Concert performance.

There were predictable questions about the contradictions between Ellington's professed faith and some of his deeds. That was no surprise. The surprise came in an overwhelmingly positive response to hearing the music and to observing Ellington in relation to his orchestra. No one there had read Neil Leonard's description of Ellington's leadership style, but they recognized it as inspiring communal and individual creative effort. One person even compared Duke's activity to that of the hovering Spirit at the dawn of creation.

But the response which made the deepest impression on me came from a white-haired and bearded bear of a man who looked as if he might have played football or done a stint in the Marines. He had been the senior pastor of an independent (non-denominational) church for many years. His speech resonated authenticity and authority, was totally lacking in equivocation, sentimentality, or cant. He asked the toughest questions. But the film material moved him to tears. When he first told me about his reaction, he said, "I don't understand it." Only later did he realize what had touched him. "Freedom," he said, tears welling up again. "It was the freedom."

The New Testament includes many promises that freedom is one of the fruits of faith. Yet the sedate and somber character of much Christian worship does little to encourage that sense of freedom. In jazz performance one cannot escape it. Improvisation, for example, requires both faith and the exercise of freedom. One cannot improvise well without having learned the rules of the game and the necessary musical skills, but these alone will not make a jazz musician.

The Rev. William G. Carter leads both a congregation and the Bill Carter jazz quartet. He points out that the best jazz musicians offer us more than an example of freedom of expression. They also lead us down a road that "takes us into the presence of God, which is first and foremost a beautiful presence, where there is light, levity, refreshment, and new life." In a 1997 address to Princeton Theological Seminary's Annual Institute on Theology, Carter said that jazz has become for him a "metaphor for faith." In jazz he hears the old songs always becoming new, which is a common biblical theme. The language of jazz and the blues are as encompassing of human emotion and experience as are the biblical psalms and songs.

Jazz and the blues can express lamentation, longing, desperate need, even rage, in ecstatic tongues, yet the expression itself seems to touch what Paul Tillich called the "ground of being," beyond which we cannot fall. At the other end of the spectrum, the music breaks into what can be described as wild and exuberantly joyful praise. And there is a good dollop of humor, which also pervades biblical stories and parables, if only they were ever delivered in the pattering style of a stand-up comic.

G. K. Chesterton once said that the reason angels can fly is that they take themselves lightly. There is nothing more profound than a joke in which we recognize ourselves and laugh until we cry. This brings me back to where I started, with my friend Loren Schoenberg, who aptly identified this characteristic of the spirituality of jazz: the mixture of humor and pathos, of play and profundity. Here's what he perceived in Louis Armstrong:

"Simply put, Louis's infectious sense of humor, the sheer playfulness of his stage demeanor, and his determination to spread joy at all costs made the more reflective and serious moments in his music all the more profound. He is one of those artists, like Shakespeare (the Yorick speech in Hamlet), like Chaplin (the end of City Lights), who make you realize how thin the line is between laughter and tears, and can navigate from one to the other in the blink of an eye."

There is an integral relationship between jazz and spirituality. This relationship is bound up with the risks and rewards of improvisation, a common mythology of legends and anecdotes, rites of initiation and passage for performers, the prophetic mantle worn by jazz heroes and heroines, and the music's power to contain paradox (humor/pathos, love/hate, sacred/profane, human/divine, lamentation/praise).

Jazz is now appreciated and enjoyed in spheres far removed from its beginnings, but its power derives from its original sources in the African-American experience and in its most impassioned and innovative performers. This music is a triumph of art, faith, and humanity over injustice and suffering which are, in the final analysis, part of our common experience.

Copyright © 2000 by Janna Tull Steed. All rights reserved.