HANGING
OUT
March 30, 2003
TEXT: Numbers 21:4-9
John 3:14-21
When Teddy Sommer returned to New York from a safari in Africa,
he told Charlie Mingus about his adventure. They were deep in
the African jungle, camped for the night. In the darkness, distant
drums began a relentless throbbing that continued until dawn.
The safari members were disturbed, but the native guide reassured
them: “Drums good. When drums stop, very bad.”
Every night the drumming continued, and every night the guide
reiterated, “Drums good. When drums stop, very bad.”
Then one night the drums suddenly stopped. The guide looked frightened. “When
drums stop, very, very bad,” he said.
“Why is it bad?” asked a member of the safari.
“Because, when drums stop, bass solo begin!”
To appreciate that story you have to realize that Teddy Sommer
was a drummer and Charlie Mingus a bass player. These are the
kinds of stories jazz musicians would like to tell about each
other while hanging out.
Over the years I’ve been able to hang out with jazz artists
at the Berks Jazz Fest. They like this festival because it gives
them an opportunity to see one another and listen to one another
in a relaxed atmosphere, and also to learn from one another.
What impressed me was the great sense of community that jazz
musicians have among themselves. They may be on their separate
tours all over the world, but they know each other’s music
and they speak a common language, and when they come together
in a jam, it is “church”—it is the sharing
of their souls; it is prayer; it is praise; it is theological
expression without words. And that’s the metaphor for today:
the church as a jam session.
Paul F. Berliner in his study of the jazz community has a chapter
entitled “Hangin’ Out and Jammin’: The Jazz
Community as an Educational System.” He describes the process
of learning how to improvise. Young musicians hang out in a jam
session and great learning takes place. Individuals share their
talents by forming casual apprenticeships. Jam sessions bring
together amateurs and professionals to learn from and with one
another. The great masters like Dizzy Gillespie liked to teach
technique and theory to the young guys. Miles Davis told how,
as novices, he and Freddy Davis would challenge one another by
tossing a quarter and telling what note it would come down on.
Hanging out was a growing experience.
This is how the church was formed in the early days. We learn
the faith from one another, from people we respect and who become
our mentors and role-models. I have often told our church school
staff that the curriculum they select, while it is important,
is incidental to how the faith is lived out in the lives of those
who teach it. If you are not the embodiment of the Christ-spirit,
you are not going to communicate the faith. To paraphrase Bird
Parker, if it’s not inside of you, it’s not going
to come out of you.
The jazzmen have developed the art of imitation and improvisation,
by listening to the music of others, appropriating it, modifying
it, taking it to another level, and owning their own style. In
the jazz community there is a constant struggle between leading
and following, interdependence and individual freedom, the search
for that right balance to be able to play freely but within the
group. Freedom has limits and responsibilities.
In the church we call it a covenant relationship, of respecting
the spiritual development of each individual as that person seeks
to discern how God is speaking to him or her, and yet at the
same time being faithful to the gathered community so that collectively
we may discern God’s will in our communal and societal
life. That is especially true in these troubling times when we
need to listen to each other and together discern what God is
saying to us. There are times when we ought to step to the music
which we hear, but there are other times when we need to find
the common beat. Somewhere among the volume of voices that support
the war against and Iraq and those that lift their voices for
peace, we need to listen for the faint whispers that tell us
we are one family and that we need to live together.
Peter Arnett, who recently displayed the poorest judgment, was
a CNN television commentator and reporter in a small town on
the West Bank, when a bomb exploded. Bloodied people were everywhere.
A man came running up to him, holding a little girl in his arms.
He pleaded with Peter to take her to a hospital—as a member
of the press he would be able to get through the security roadblock
So Peter, the man and the girl jumped into his car and rushed
to the hospital. The whole time the man was pleading with him
to hurry, to go faster, heartbroken at the thought the little
girl might die.
Sadly the little girl’s injuries were too great and she
died on the operating table. When the doctor came out to give
them the news, the man collapsed in tears. Arnett was at a loss
for words. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t
imagine what you must be going through. I’ve never lost
a child.”
It was then that the man said, “Oh, that girl was not my
daughter. I’m an Israeli settler. She was a Palestinian.
But there comes a time when each of us must realize that every
child, regardless of that child’s background, is a daughter
or a son. There must come a time when we realize that we are
all family.”
There must come a time when we need to realize that God so loves
the entire world that he gave his only son. There must come a
time when we must realize that there is only one earth, that
we are all children of the same God, and that we are killing
members of our family.
Jazz artists know something about being a voice of protest, about
criticizing the establishment. In fact jazz has always functioned
as a social alternative to mainstream culture. Our German forebears,
when they came to this country, brought with them a love for
high classical music—the music of the court and the church
and later the concert hall—the ponderous Beethoven symphonies
and Bach chorales. They referred to symphonic music as sermons
in tones and disdained the “unlaundered Negro and American
Indian” themes, the plantation songs of the African slaves
which became the basis for jazz.
The music of the newly liberated slaves evolved from spirituals
to early gospel music to ragtime to blues to bop to new jazz
which had no rhythmic formulas but stressed its African origins.
After hearing the Dizzy Gillespie Alumni All-Stars last night,
we talked about “real” jazz or “true” jazz,
and about a return to the authentic jazz and away from this “smooth
jazz.” But I’m not so sure what that means, or how
far back in the evolution of jazz some people want to go. Maybe
somewhere there is an audience for Amish Jazz.
The point is that jazz encourages permutation and change. Nothing
is ever static. So, too, the church must be a prophetic voice
in a constantly changing world. It must continually speak out
for the love of God in new ways and in new forms of expression.
Just as bebop became an alternative to swing, the church must
show the world that there are other alternatives to bringing
peace to our planet.
In hanging out with the musicians this week, the war was hardly
mentioned, although you could feel that things were not the same.
I think that both the artists and the audience were glad to get
a little relief and diversion. That’s healthy and healing.
When the Israelites were bitten by snakes in the desert, Moses
set up a bronze serpent on a pole and told them to focus on that.
By looking at the serpent that was raised up, the people were
able to look beyond it and see an alternative direction and new
life.
We are all one family and we need to focus on that which unites
us, not that which divides. We need to focus on the Scriptures
which say, “For God so loved the world. . . .” and
understand that to mean the entire world, and not just our part
of it.
The church would do well to adopt the jazzmen’s art of
hanging out as a model for hanging out in the world and by jamming
finding that music that binds us together.
-Harry L. Serio |