December 20, Fourth Sunday of Advent
I once read Luke 1 on a park bench during a jazz festival in Burlington, Vermont. I was practicing what homiletics scholar Chuck Campbell calls “dislocated exegesis”: the art of reading scripture in an unusual physical location, to see what this allows the reader to discover in a familiar text. As a woman sang in French on a nearby stage, I thought about Mary. We know that Mary is virginal, and she prays a lot, and she talks to angels. But I had the thought that maybe she’s also a jazz singer. Maybe Mary is in heaven right now, sipping martinis with Ella Fitzgerald and teaching the angels how to scat.
Jazz has never been my favorite kind of music, and I don’t know much about it. When I got home from Burlington, I read up on it. I learned that jazz resists definition. It involves syncopation and saxophones and the occasional trombone. Jazz is sometimes high-stepping, cakewalking ragtime and sometimes jazz has a frantic Dixieland beat and sometimes there is bebop.
One thing that you can almost always find in jazz, even if there is no bebop and no saxophone, is improvisation. A musician takes what she knows of scales and modes and the melodic theme and creates something new—in response to what the other members of the band are doing, or even in response to some random ambient noise. (In 2001, back when cell phones were still sort of new, Wynton Marsalis took a ringtone that had interrupted his performance and magically improvised around it until it resolved into the song he’d been playing, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.”)
