Old is New is Now

Old is New is Now
Matthew 13:52
Jazz Communion
September 6, 2020

And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”

 

My friend Al Hamme tells about the night when John Coltrane brought his quartet to town. The venue was a pub called “Gentleman Joe’s.” It was in a rough section of Binghamton, New York. Al and a buddy got there early enough to claim seats next to the stage. As a saxophonist in his early twenties, Al was curious about Coltrane, who had played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk, and was now making an international name for himself.

The quartet took the stage, and Al’s companion nodded toward the pianist. Bobby Timmons was playing that night, filling in for the regular pianist for the group. Timmons had been friends with Coltrane from Philadelphia days. They had never recorded together, but Bobby was an outstanding pianist in his own right. Smartly dressed, he flashed a broad smile at Al as he slid onto the piano bench.

Coltrane counted off the first tune, a medium tempo blues, and Timmons held his own. After the saxophone played the melody, Bobby leaned in to play a hard-swinging piano solo. The patrons in the club nodded in rhythm. They clapped loudly when his solo came to an end.

Pretty soon, however, the music began to change. In recent months Coltrane’s band had begun to experiment with harmony, leaving behind chords and experimenting with modal scales. The drumming of Elvin Jones was ferocious, thundering in circular rhythms and swirls of cymbals. Reggie Workman’s basslines were single notes, accented heavily in repetitive pulses while Coltrane fired a fusillade of notes on his soprano sax.

The sounds swelled, the rhythms intensified, and suddenly Bobby Timmons stopped playing. His hands sat motionless on the keyboard. His jaw dropped open. With an astonished look, he turned to my friend Al and said, “What are they doing?” Indeed. What are they doing?

That is a worthy question if you listen to jazz. The music swirls around the room, alive and free, never static or fixed. It is a common experience for a jazz fan to hear a recording by a favorite musician, enjoy it, and lay down good money to hear that favorite musician play somewhere – and if the band plays that familiar song, it doesn’t sound anything like the recording. What are they doing?

The short answer is they are creating the music as it moves along. Or to quote Homer Simpson, “those jazz guys are just making things up.” Well, true; but not really. It’s more than that. They are creating something new out of something old.

Now, this is risky, especially in the presence of those who appreciate the “something old.” Today we hear one of the shortest parables Jesus ever told. He refers to the scribes of Biblical times. These were in the days before laser printers, before dot matrix printers, before Xerox machines, long before the printing press. The scribe of his day copied everything by hand. There was a high priority on accuracy. No room for mistakes. With one scroll open over here, and a blank papyrus over here, the old was transferred as is. No variation. No suggested improvements. The scribes stuck to the literal text. They checked one another’s work. The most accurate work was kept.

To over-extend an analogy, think of the scribes as classical musicians, sticking to the jots and tittles on the page. The manuscript says, "play an Ab.” Don’t make it an A natural. If there is any interpretation, it’s largely in the pacing or the personality of the conductor. For the most part, the music sounds the same every time.

 About a week ago, we were settling down one night. I called out, “Alexa, play Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings.” Almost immediately, the robot in the box began to play that quiet, ascending melody in Bb minor. The tune climbs slowly for eight minutes, never in a hurry, resonating with my soul and drawing me in. It had been a long, draining day. Barber’s “Adagio” was consolation for my soul. I knew what to expect.

Contrast that with last Saturday night. It was August 29, the 100^th birthday of Charlie Parker, the great jazz saxophonist. “Alexa, play Charlie Parker.” I didn’t know what was going to come out next.

In jazz, there is a continuum between interpretation and improvisation. Louis Armstrong played the popular songs of his day, adding his own special touch. That's interpretation. Yet on a studio date in 1926, they turned on the recording machine and Pops bumped the music stand, causing the song lyrics to fall to the floor. So he made something up and ended up with a hit record. The public liked the new thing better than the old.

The new and the old. The old and the new. The scribe of the Jerusalem Temple or the scribe of the Kingdom of Heaven.

One of the comments about Jesus is that, whenever he preached, it was as fresh as his bread. He spoke of the same, old God – but he held the interest of the crowd. He spoke of forgiveness, mercy, justice, and compassion, all of them old words – but the audience heard something new. In one of the critiques that we find in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus “taught them as one having authority, and not as their scribes (7:29).”

The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t like the scribes. In this Gospel, Jesus declares them stodgy and inflexible. He calls them out as hypocrites. He names them as “white-washed tombs.” He accuses them of being pedantic and small-minded, focusing on the commas of the Torah and never truly hearing the message.

I’m reminded of what Frederick Buechner once said about righteousness. He compared it to an exasperated piano teacher who says to one of the students, “You haven’t got it right!” Buechner says,

 

Junior is holding his hands the way he’s been told. His fingering is unexceptionable. He has memorized the piece perfectly. He has hit all the proper notes with deadly accuracy. But his heart’s not in it, only his fingers. What he’s playing is a sort of music but nothing that will start voices singing or feet tapping. He has succeeded in boring everybody to death including himself.

In other words, in terms from the Gospel of Matthew, the kid is merely a scribe. A lifeless scribe. Chained to the page and missing the point, especially the point of what music has the power to perform within us and among us.

There must be new with the old, and old with the new. If something is completely new, it will be dismissed as a curiosity. If it is completely old, it might be pronounced dead. Jesus says, “Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” Ahh – it’s both new and old, not either-or. Best of all, it’s his treasure.

According to the parables of Jesus, the treasure is where you put your heart. The treasure is where you sink your soul. The treasure is the gift to which you will commit your life. The wise person will give away everything to gain that treasure – for the wise person knows it is the one thing that will give back your life.

Talking like this, Jesus doesn’t identify or specify what the treasure might be. He simply affirms there is Something that demands your soul, your life, your all. And when you find it – or when it finds you – it employs your muscles and your mind, your breath and your heartbeat, your concentration and your freedom, your imagination, and your joy. You lose yourself in gaining the treasure. The kingdom of heaven is like that.

Today the music is both old and new. These tunes are so old they were written by somebody named Anonymous. Arising out of suffering and slavery, they name the pain and point beyond it. In five-note melodies and minor cadences, they resonate with our souls and offer a hidden treasure called consolation.

We played the “old” version of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” About the time that our friend Al was wondering what Coltrane was doing, Coltrane lifted that song from his grandfather’s hymnal, recorded it at a night club called the Village Vanguard, and re-titled it “Spiritual.” Something old, something new. Something borrowed, something really blue.

These are the “Sorrow Songs,” writes W.E.B. DuBois. This is music “of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”[1] The music provides an appropriate soundtrack for this pandemic, to say nothing of our long national nightmare of racism and oppression.

So we play these tunes with reverence, imagination, and disciplined freedom. And we play in the service of moving all of us from “I’ve Been in the Storm So Long” to “We Shall Overcome.” This is the journey of our hope. It points to what DuBois called “a truer world,” what Jesus calls “the kingdom of heaven.”

So what are those jazzers doing? Retrieving something old, making something new, sharing hidden treasure, offering deep consolation, and pointing to our redemption.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved. 

[1]W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Bantam Classic, 1903) pp. 116-117.