Saturday, September 1, 2018

It's Not the Same Old Song


Luke10:25-37
Jazz Communion 2018
September 2, 2018
William G. Carter

The story is told of a couple that went on a date one night to hear Miles Davis, the late, great trumpeter and bandleader. Both of them enjoyed his recordings and discovered they had that in common, so they went to hear him play. They found the club, paid the cover charge, took their seats, and ordered drinks. The lights went down and the musicians went on stage. Miles kicked off one of his songs and they recognized the tune.

Ten minutes later, the song was over. It had all these extra notes in it, nothing like the recording. She leaned over to him and said, "That's not the way I thought that song would go."

She should have known. This is what jazz musicians do. Not only do they swing with infectious rhythm or curl our tongues with a judicious use of dissonance, they take a perfectly acceptable melody and mess with it. 

The practice began quite early. Louis Armstrong would pick up a melody by ear, replicate it on his trumpet, and begin to spin it anew in his own musical dialect. As the art form of jazz developed, the explorations became more adventurous. The melody became the launch pad for explorations that take us into outer space. 

If you want to hear the same old song in the same old way, jazz is not the art form for you. 

The scene changed after Thomas Edison created the recording business.  Before there were records (then tapes, CDs, and download files), music existed in the air. Composers notated the melodies and rhythms on paper, but the notation was in service to putting those melodies back into the air. It's only been in the last hundred years that we've heard the music played the same way every time.

I recall back in the dark ages, about the time that I met Al Hamme, I spent weekend evenings in a blue ruffled shirt with a Fender Rhodes piano. The band was comprised of school teachers and me, and we performed for banquets, private parties, and wedding receptions. Especially wedding receptions. That was my first experience with bridal opinions.

The band leader met with the bride and groom to fill out a checklist. There would be quiet bossa novas during the cocktail hour, a trumpet fanfare when the bridal party arrived, the father and the bride would swoon to "Daddy's Little Girl," and at the center of it, the all-too-important bridal dance. The bandleader inquired, "Is there a song that you would like for your first dance in public?" The groom rarely had an opinion, but the bride always did. The song was usually something we knew, or something we could learn.  

These were professional musicians, with three horns and a wonderful singer. We enjoyed making people happy, yet when it came to the bridal dance, that didn't always happen. We might play the piece, the couple would swoon, Grandma would wipe away a tear. Not long after we finished, the bride might stomp up and declare, "That's not the way that song sounds on the radio."

Someone would try to explain the recording she heard on the radio had a $70,000 studio budget. We didn't have the London Philharmonic on hand to play that sixteen measures of the string part. Nor did we have a trio of female Gospel singers to back up our vocalist. One time, the bandleader got so frustrated, he exclaimed, "If you want the music to sound like the radio, maybe you should hire the radio." Within a year or two of that comment, that's exactly what the next generation of brides would do.

A new species of entrepreneurs would emerge - the disc jockey - at first any otherwise unemployed kid with a big stereo. He would charge the same amount, or a little more, as a live six-piece band, and he would deliver exactly what the people wanted to hear. Plus, he had a light show! So much for live music. At least it sounded just like the radio, just like the homogenized, house-broken, consumer-driven music on the radio.

But here’s the question that jazz raises: what if the music is not merely played but interpreted, adding to it the inspiration of the moment? What if the musicians push the music forward and not merely replicate the past? What if they want the music to be alive, and not merely resuscitated? 

These are questions for all kinds of music, particularly the music of scripture. There is great comfort in hearing something we have heard before. We hear it, we nod in affirmation, we look sideways at one another and say, "I knew that. Didn't you know that? I knew that!"

When Igor Stravinsky presented his ballet, "The Rite of Spring," for the first time, there was a riot on the streets of Paris. It was new. Nobody had heard music like that before. It was bracing, confusing, revolutionary.  The composer complained of the Parisians, "They are very naive and stupid people."[1] The listeners, for their part, dismissed the music as too new, too radical, and therefore unnecessary.

Stravinsky might have picked up a lesson from the prophets of Scripture. The prophetic power is not in giving them something new, something they've never heard before. The power is in giving the people something they already know and bringing it forward to here and now. The power is nudging the listeners to lean forward and work through the true implications of what we have heard.

Isn't that what Jesus is doing? The expert in God's Law asks him an old question: "What must I do to inherit the life of eternity?" The expert knows the Bible. He already knows the answer. 

So Jesus questions the questioner, "What do you read in the Bible?" The interrogator says, "You shall love the Lord your God with heart, soul, strength, and mind; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Jesus says, "That's the right answer." They both agree. They've heard that song before.

But the expert can't let that sit. He has to push it, and asks, "And who is my neighbor?" By pushing it, by asking “what does this really mean,” the question goes off the page, and Jesus says, "Let me tell you a story." He spins a tale about the man who is beaten by thugs, left to die, stepped around by religious leaders, and saved by a stranger he's never met.

Now, you and I have heard that one, too, haven't we? We have heard that old song many, many times. Maybe we've heard it so many times that it has gotten a little dull.

We might not realize that Jesus has tossed a lit stick of dynamite toward the Bible scholar. He pushes his interrogator to answer a big question, "Which one acted like a loving neighbor to the man in the ditch?" The man doesn’t say, "The Samaritan is his neighbor," because Jews and Samaritans didn't have much to do with one another. All he can murmur out is, "the one who showed him mercy," and he knows who that is.

It is a disturbing moment, because Jesus reaches back to that old, old melody about loving your neighbor and brings it forward, here and now. The man must wrestle through the implications of loving the stranger, loving the outsider, loving the enemy -- all of whom are "the neighbor."

This is how first-century Jewish theology, not through conclusive, final answers, but through questions that push deeper questions. If we take God and neighbor seriously, and truly love them, we can’t play it safe. We may have long established habits and well-traveled ways, but a living faith pushes us forward, to re-engage the old song that we thought we knew.

This is evidence of God’s prophetic power, a Holy Spirit power, a jazz power, because the same old song is never the same old song. The musicians may be different, the situation may be different, the audience may be different, the moment of inspiration may be different. The better question is this: is this music real? Does it connect to the human heart? Does it come from the creative pulse of the Spirit? Is it alive? Does it exist merely to be consumed (what the guys and I refer to as "music to chew by") or does the music consume us? The way we answer will tell us if we ourselves are alive.

Among recent jazz legends, there is a story about the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. It comes from a season in his career when he had dropped out of sight for a while. David Hajdu, the journalist, had dropped by a club to listen to some music. Standing in the shadows, the trumpeter for the band looked like Wynton. He wore an expensive Italian suit, as Marsalis would have, but was pudgier than Hajdu remembered, now middle-aged, without as much hair. His eyes had lost their glimmer.

The next tune was his featured solo, and so he stepped up to play the ballad, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” It was a sad song, which he played without accompaniment. The performance was breathtaking. The inflections had traces of melancholy as he spoke through his horn. As he reached the climax, he played the final phrase in deliberate tone. “I don’t stand … a ghost … of … a … chance…” The room was completely still.

Just then, somebody’s cell phone went off with some dorky ringtone, a melody with electronic bleeps. The audience giggled. People reached for their drinks. The spell was broken… but not for Marsalis. He paused, motionless, his eyebrows peaked, as the journalist scribbled a note, “MAGIC, RUINED.” Then Marsalis, still at the microphone, replayed the stupid cell phone melody note for note, and repeated it, and started to improvise variations on the tune. The audience put down their drinks and leaned forward.

He changed the key, played the variation, turned the variation upside down, changed the key again. With a flurry of notes, he settled back down to a slow tempo, ending up exactly where he had let off: “with … you...” The room exploded with applause. People stood up and cheered.[2] Any thoughts that the old song had been ruined were turned upside down – because Wynton had taken that old song somewhere new.

And for us, what about that old story of the Good Samaritan? It’s a new riff on the older lesson to love God and neighbor. Maybe if we loved God, we would love our neighbors, even if they are different from ourselves. Maybe if we loved our neighbors, we wouldn't miscount the number of Puerto Ricans who died in last year's hurricane or dismiss those who believe or vote differently from ourselves. A true faith never lets us off the hook from loving the people that God loves. That’s one of the ways that we love God.

This is what it means to have a living faith, a faith that might be shaped and informed by how jazz musicians create their art. This is what we try to do around here every week, Sunday after Sunday, week after week: we listen for the song God sings, and we try to live it forward in fresh and life-giving ways. 

We have plenty of songs, the same old songs. But what we care about is whether anybody is dancing.


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

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