One night in the spring of 1967, after a show in New York, James Brown called his musical director, the saxophonist Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, into his dressing room. He had a fragment of music in his head and he wanted Ellis to help him turn it into a song. 'He grunted a bass line of a rhythmic thing," the saxophonist told a writer from Down Beat magazine after Brown's death in 2006. Thoroughly familiar with the singer's informal operating methods, Ellis jotted the idea down in rough, almost graphic form on a piece of paper and went away to see what he could do with it...
The next morning... the bus pulled up outside the record company's offices. The musicians got out and went straight into the studio... by the time we got the groove going, James showed up, added a few touches, changed the guitar part which made it real funky and had the drummer do something different. The band set up in a semicircle in the studio with one microphone. It was recorded live in the studio in one take. It was like a performance - no overdubbing - and it turned out to be "Cold Sweat."
"I was very much influenced by Miles Davis," Ellis continued. " I'd been listening to "So What" six or seven years earlier and that crept into the making of "Cold Sweat." You could call it subliminal, but the horn line is based on "So What." And so it is - not so much subliminal as seen through a voricist's eyes, its forms stretched and distorted... and when Brown shouts, "Maceo... come on, now" Parker obliges with a trenchant, hard-edged solo that sticks to the D major tonality of the song's opening section... so that what began with a hint of inspiration from "So What" was now taking additional inspiration from the extended explorations of John Coltrane.
That Williams roams around with Eno, Talking Heads, John Cale, Lou Reed to say nothing of La Monte Young and Terry Riley is just freakin' brilliant.
A close runner-up is Geoff Dyer's 1996, But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz. This is tender and lyrical as he gives shape and form to the lives of key jazz players like Lester Young, Monk, Mingus, Bud Powell, Duke Ellington and Art Pepper. The final chapter, "Tradition, Influence and Innovation" is an equally compelling essay that shows intellectual depth as well as artistic awareness of the unique nature of jazz. Quoting the late MLK at the Berlin Jazz Festival of 1964, he writes:
Dr. King's presence there served as a reminder of how black people's struggle for civil rights was paralleled by jazz musicians' struggle to have their art recognized as such. In his speech King noted the role played by music in articulating the suffering, hopes and joys of the black experience long before the task was undertaken by writers and poets. Not only was jazz central to the lived experience of Negroes, he went one, but "in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man." (sic) This is a vital connection: once it has been made, jazz becomes a medium representative not only of a people, but implicitly, of a century, a medium that expresses not simply the condition of the black American but a condition of history.
Ralph Heintzman's Rediscovering Reverence - purchased on our late summer swing through the Eastern Townships of Quebec - continues to give voice and meaning to my work blending the arts in public worship. He is philosophically grounded in the quest for authenticity that permeates 21st century Western life as well as the consequences of our collective loss of awe.
In our modern world, the hunger for reverence sometimes expresses itself in surprising ways. Starved for other ways to express itself, reverence re-emerges in new forms that can risk flipping over into a caricature of the real thing. The rock concert, the mosh pit and the rave, for example, are all expressions of a hungry search for connectedness and ritual that are not satisfied in other ways. So are big media events like the Olympics, the World Cup, the funeral of Princess Diana or a natural or human disaster that rivets millions to the TV screens for weeks on end. In all of these forms of activity, isolated citizens of Western countries seek to be gathered into the kind of communal, ritualized experience that our societies, on the whole, no longer afford. Sometimes this unsatisfied hunger goes beyond caricature to express itself in radically evil forms, such as the Nurenberg rallies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
As the American classical scholar, Paul Woodriff, remarks: what modern societies have lost is not reverence itself, but rather the idea of reverence.... This makes it very hard for us consciously to nourish or develop the virtues of reverence, so essential to the kind of society we want to live it. And it also makes it hard to understand the roots of some of the deepest, most persistent and most human forms of expression - such as religious practice.I am more and more convinced, however, that reclaiming awe and the practices of reverence are part of the calling of faith communities in our generation. Now that we are no longer established - and free from the theologies of glory - we can playfully and humbly offer a parched people a bit of refreshment and renewal. But only if we take the time to be clear, simple and compassionate.
In this I have found the writing of both Sr. Joan Chittister and Tom Driver uniquely helpful this season. Chittister's book, The Liturgical Year, is a primer in liturgical spirituality. She is so clear - and poetic - as she describes the intent of the Christian liturgical year that I am surprised more of the emerging world doesn't celebrate her contributions. In my mind, she is much more helpful than Brian MacLaren - who has a profound ministry to recovering Evangelicals - but doesn't have much to say to those of us in the once mainstream churches.
We begin to see... that the spirituality of the liturgical year is not an exercise of private devotion. It is the journey from Nazareth to Jerusalem that takes us, on the way, to Egypt, to Samaria, to Roman soldiers and Jewish high priests, to the poor and to the cross, to total commitment and everlasting resurrection, to the heart of the faith and so to the heart of the world... it is about real life... speaking for the poor, changing the lives of widows and orphans, exalting the status of women, refusing to make war, laying down our lives for the other, the invisible and the enemy. It is about taking everyone in instead of leaving anyone out.
And Tom Driver's text, The Magic of Ritual, from the early 1990s is a clear reminder of some of the reasons why our tradition has contributed to the loss of reverence and awe in our market-obsessed realm.
Three angels up above the street,
Each one playing a horn,
Dressed in green robes with wings that stick out,
They've been there since Christmas morn.
The wildest cat from Montana passes by in a flash,
Then a lady in a bright orange dress,
One U-Haul trailer, a truck with no wheels,
the Tenth Avenue but going west.
The dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around,
A man with a badge skips by,
Three fellas crawlin' on their way back to work,
Nobody stops to ask why.
The bakery truck stops outside of that fence
Where the angels stand high on their poles,
The driver peeks out, trying to find one face
In this concrete world full of souls.
The angels play on their horns all day,
The whole earth in progression seems to pass by.
But does anyone hear the music they play,
Does anyone even try?
(Bob Dylan)
No comments:
Post a Comment