rw08.jpg (19539 bytes)JIM CULLUM JAZZ BAND JAZZ MASS

Jim Cullum says:

"I was inspired to put together music for a jazz liturgy after attending the funeral of a musician friend, the well-respected jazz trumpeter Don Albert, at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in San Antonio. Herb Hall, a very sensitive clarinetist, played with organ accompaniment, and I was moved by the soulful qualities of his playing.

"I'd grown up in the Methodist Church but I really knew very little about liturgy. In fact, I had left the Church when I was about 18 years old. At the time of Don Albert's funeral, I was getting close to 40, and it had been a lot of time since I'd regularly attended church. But gradually, as these jazz services continued, I began to learn about the role of liturgical music. To this end, my friend and partner John Sheridan contributed greatly with a number of beautifully crafted arrangements.

"So, in 1980 we began. Our first presentation was held at the Chapel at Trinity University here in San Antonio. Since then, we've offered our music at over 200 services, and I'm often surprised to hear later from people who have been deeply moved.

"My own personal life has been dramatically affected by the experience of preparing and presenting this music. As I went along, I found myself drawn back little by little into the Church toward the celebration of the Holy Eucharist which has now become an important and central part of my religious life.

school show 3.jpg (202593 bytes)Right: Jim Cullum

"My special interest is in the spirit that's in the music and the spirit that's in the Eucharist. There are many parallels here. The breaking of the bread that, for me, contains a powerful symbol of the miracle of life, combines with a spirit of thanksgiving. I think this has much in common with the melancholy, but at the same time joyous, spirit of the early jazz music I love.

"These hymns and spirituals say all this. They express pain and anguish akin to the blues--and still they are joyous. I hope that you also find this spirit in the music."

The Jazz Mass has been offered in Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian churches in San Antonio, Little Rock, Dallas, Austin, the Rio Grande Valley, New Jersey, Houston, Denver, St. Louis, and San Francisco.

Most of the music from the Jazz Mass was produced for the Riverwalk Public Radio series and is included in a Riverwalk Jazz CD, Deep River, available from our online vendor. Here is the song list from this CD:

The Grace Cathedral Virtual TourThe Jim Cullum Jazz Band performed its 200th Jazz Mass at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco on Sunday, July 30, 2000.

The Mass musical program featured a special presentation of Duke Ellington music and other traditional hymns, psalms, and spirituals performed by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band with special guest William Warfield.

In 1965, Grace Cathedral, San Francisco’s Episcopal landmark, commissioned Duke Ellington to write a new liturgical work to be performed there as part of the building’s year-long consecration celebration. When the piece was premiered on September 16, 1965, it made newspapers across the country. His Concert of Sacred Music was largely a compilation of earlier ideas from Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and My People (1963), and included the 1943 piano feature New World A-Comin’. The newly written, fifteen-minute opening section, In the Beginning, God, inspired by the first four words of the Bible, and musically a progression of climaxes, won a Grammy Award in 1966 as the best original jazz composition.

William WarfieldLeft: William Warfield 

Frequent Riverwalk guest William Warfield performed In the Beginning, God and Come Sunday with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band. Warfield is most familiar to the public for his role of Joe the Dock Hand in the 1951 film of Show Boat, singing Ol' Man River. He also played the title role in a renowned 1952 production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. Riverwalk listeners often hear Warfield narrating historical texts, such as the letters King Oliver wrote to his sister, or the story lines of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess.

On May 6, 2001, Jim and the Band performed its 204th Jazz Mass at the Oak Lawn United Methodist Church in Dallas, TX. The OLUMC has a special significance for Jim Cullum. Its founding pastor, Marcus Hiram Cullum, was Jim's great-grandfather. The church stands on the original site established in 1874. Many of Jim's close relatives are still church members.

Reverend Janna Tull SteedLeft: The Reverend Janna Tull Steed

Of particular interest at that Mass was the sermon delivered by The Reverend Janna Tull Steed. Reverend Steed is the author of Duke Ellington: A Spiritual Biography (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999).   She also sang Duke Ellington's Come Sunday with the Band.

The text of the sermon is reproduced below (with permission):

Sermon "Twentieth Century Messengers"
By The Reverend Janna Tull Steed
Oak Lawn United Methodist Church
Dallas, Texas
May 6, 2001

Text John 20:19-30

0824523512.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg (5027 bytes)In 1973, the year before he died, Duke Ellington published his autobiography, which was more like a collection of anecdotes and reflections than a narrative of his life. In one essay titled "On Seeing God," Ellington wrote these words:

"There have been times when I thought I had a glimpse of God. Sometimes, even when my eyes were closed, I saw. Then when I tried to set my eyes--closed or open--back to the same focus, I had no success, of course. The unprovable fact is that I believe I have had a glimpse of God many times. I believe because believing is believable, and no one can prove it unbelievable...."

He continues, "There was a man who was blessed with the vision to see God. But even this man did not and does not have the power or whatever it takes to show God to a believer, much less an unbeliever." (Music Is My Mistress, 1973, p. 260)

Jesus came to show us the face of God. We just heard how he appeared to his defeated, guilty disciples to show them and tell them once more who he was and also who they were. His first words were words of peace, not judgment. He showed them the marks of his physical suffering, his hands and his side--no longer bleeding, but healed scars. Again he said that word of peace, and then he sent them out into the world as he had been in the world, with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the authority to forgive and retain sins.

But Thomas, who was not there, could not believe what the others told him. So Jesus appeared to them all once more, eight days later. And in case hearing and seeing were not enough, Thomas was invited to touch Jesus, to place his hands in the very scars that proved both his suffering and death and also his healing and resurrection. For Jesus was God come to us in the flesh, in human flesh, so that we might see and believe.

"There was a man who was blessed with the vision to see God," Edward Kennedy Ellington wrote. Like Paul in II Corinthians 12, Ellington seems to be referring to himself in the third person. If so, I have to disagree with his disclaimer that he did not have the power to open the eyes of others to that vision. During the last decade of his life, The Duke Ellington Orchestra gave more than 100 performances of his sacred concerts. Long before that, in his life's work as a composer and leader of a jazz orchestra, he had touched the hearts of millions with his music. I believe that his music and his testimony of faith, which was given in the sacred concerts, have opened the eyes of believers and nonbelievers to the incarnate God.

A few years go I was involved in a performance of the sacred music at Yale University, a performance that affected two people so powerfully that they wrote to me afterwards. The first note came from a woman who had been in a period of darkness, without a sense of guidance or the presence of God. She heard Ellington's retelling of the creation story: "Day, good...night, good. Light, good...darkness, good." It was a revelation to her: Even this time of darkness was blessed by God. Another woman had been persuaded to sing in the choir even though she didn't consider herself a singer. She came to rehearsals and sang Ellington's choral pieces in a timid alto. My friend is married, the mother of four grown children, a Roman Catholic steeped in her own faith tradition. She called this event one of the most significant experiences of her life. She closed with these words: "Ellington introduced me to the universal God."

Both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament tell us of a God who raises up witnesses and prophets--and finally the suffering servant Messiah--to reveal the true identity of all peoples and all nations. Their unity is found in the God who created them out of nothing for love's sake alone.

We, like Thomas, may find it hard to receive and believe this word. So God raises up in each generation those who open our eyes anew to the wonder of who we are and who God is. Those of you who have been coming to this Jazz Mass during its 20-year history may not need convincing that jazz musicians are among the messengers which God uses for this witness. And people who watched the Ken Burns documentary series Jazz may have a better idea now that this music is a 20th century American art form through which many practitioners have expressed their spirituality.

Most artists acknowledge that their creativity is a gift, even a gift of God, and Ellington was one of these. The process of artistic expression also seems to be a dialogue, a conversation if you will, with sources both within and outside the artist. Those of us who are privileged to hear or see a work of art find the experience seems to lift us to another plane. In this sense, all genuine art is religious.

Jazz and the blues have their origins in the music of the black church. Like the spirituals, jazz and blues were forged out of the experience of slavery and degradation endured by African-Americans. Jazz and the blues became Saturday-night music that in its rhythms and lyrics often celebrated carnal love. As such, jazz was thought to be uncivilized and unsuitable for the church setting, yet it has always retained traces of its origins.

In the creative process that occurs when the music is written and when it is played, there is a meditative approach to the exterior and interior worlds of players, singers, and listeners. Jazz musicians themselves often express a sense of their work as a holy vocation, even if their specific beliefs about God are unconventional. Ornette Coleman considered a dedicated performance as "just showing that God exists." Charles 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." When Charlie Parker was asked about his religious affiliation, he responded, "I am a devout musician."

Jazz is an incarnational music that begins with the human, fleshly experience, yet reaches out beyond the human, seeking meaning in that very human existence and particular human experience. In the blues, we have the cry of human anguish, the inarticulate moan, the pleas in protest against life's tragedies and difficulties. Like the psalms, jazz and the blues encompass the whole range of human emotion. They give a voice to suffering, and in doing so they also bring healing and resurrection joy. After his mother's death in 1935, Ellington was so despondent that he was unable to compose. Finally, he wrote Reminiscing in Tempo as an expression of his memories and his sense of loss. But the music carried him finally to a state of acceptance.

The offertory this morning is Precious Lord, Take My Hand, by Thomas A. Dorsey. Dorsey was a piano-playing bluesman who wrote this gospel hymn after the death of his wife in childbirth and the subsequent loss of their baby as well. Initially his music was resisted in the old-line black churches because it was based on the blues and evoked such an emotional response. But eventually, around the 1930s, the music was accepted, and Dorsey became the father of black gospel music as we know it.

My own experience leads me to believe that adherents of 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. I recall a moment in the fall of 1990, when I found myself the only vocalist in a jazz improvisation class. 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 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 mid-life madness led to a redefined identity and vocation. Along the way, I met Duke Ellington, so to speak, and eventually wrote a book in which I try to trace the thread of spiritual depth that pervades so much of his music, even before he began writing for and performing his sacred concerts.

A classical music critic, writing in 1932, described listening again and again to an early Ellington recording of Black and Tan Fantasy until he was finally struck by its spiritual power. R.D. Danell used the words of Proust when he named Ellington as one of the great artists who "do us the service...of showing us what richness, what variety lies hidden and unknown to us. In that great black impenetrable night of our soul which we have been content to regard as valueless and waste and void." (The Duke Ellington Reader, edited by Mark Tucker.)

Barry Ulanov, who in 1946 wrote the first biography of Ellington, once said, "...he gave us, I believe, a testimony to what jazz offers, itself, as an incarnation of the spirit. 1 can't think of a music that's more insistently human and reaching out beyond the human…."

I recall a meeting with a versatile musician, conductor, and writer who was not particularly fond of the sacred music. The meeting was not an interview, but an opportunity for me to discuss ideas with someone who would challenge them.

Not knowing Loren Schoenberg well, I introduced the name of the Deity; not without some trepidation, Loren responded:

"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 my friend Loren Schoenberg, Louis Armstrong personifies that triumph of art over adversity, but many other 20th century messengers playing the blues and jazz have given us glimpses of God. And, like Jesus, they did this "in the flesh," revealing the wounds and scars they themselves had suffered.

Sometimes we have been unable or unwilling to see this, because of where the music was played, or because it was identified in derogatory terms as "black" music, or because it was a revelation given in the present moment, unconfirmed by centuries of tradition and endorsement by the church.

The lives of these messengers were often unstable, marginal, and hard. Most of them were not adequately recognized for their artistry, a source of bitterness and self-exile. The temptations of nightlife were great, and many musicians were wasted by drugs or other addictions. In spite of all that, they were often transparent to the Light and vessels of the Holy Spirit as, even like Jesus, they showed us their scars in the process of being healed and brought peace and joy into our lives.

They gave witness to a God who redeems suffering, who blesses human love, who takes what is old and, with new harmonies and melodic improvisations, makes it fresh as the dawn of creation. To this God the darkness and light are both alike. This God keeps playing the same love song in endless variation, until our scars are touched and healed, until our ears and eyes are opened and our mouths proclaim, "My Lord and my God."