Let’s celebrate sacred jazz this Easter

Mary Lou Williams is a unique figure in the history of jazz, and there are two definitive sources on her life and music. The first is Tammy Kernodle’s Soul on Soul and the second is Linda Dahl’s Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams. Both books outline the story of Williams’ life and career showing her failures and disappointments as well as achievements and successes. Due to William’s musical flexibility and willingness to embrace newer genres, she never quite gained the fame that her peers attained. Her musical achievements allowed her some level of success, yet there was no single style of music that Williams’ playing would fit cleanly into. However, this seemingly negative attribute ultimately led to her “act[ing] as friend, mentor, and teacher to Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Kenny “Klook” Clarke, Bud Powell, and Dizzy Gillespie.” Her musical influence most likely encouraged the forward momentum of the jazz movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless, Williams declining popularity prompted a move to Europe, her eventual acceptance of faith, and inspired the Sacred Jazz performances, compositions, and recordings that marked her subsequent career

NPR Music deserves critique for failing to include Williams in its list of “The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women,” Jenny Gathright argued in “Shocking Omissions: Mary Lou Williams’ Choral Masterpiece.”

In 1962, the Catholic Church canonized a new saint: A Peruvian brother of the Dominican Order named Martin de Porres, the son of a freed slave named Ana Velazquez and a Spanish gentleman who refused to recognize him because he was born with his mother’s dark features. St. Martin de Porres was a gifted healer who was dedicated to the poor — today, he is the patron saint of those who seek racial harmony.

His canonization was inspiring to Williams, and so Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes, a devotional work composed in his honor, was born. The composition is rooted in both Catholicism and the black American music tradition — and it undoubtedly found critics among those who adhered exclusively to one of those schools or the other. Williams performed the full piece for the first time at Saint Francis Xavier Church in New York in November of 1962, and she recorded it in October 1963.

The opening hymn, “St. Martin de Porres,” begins with a choir singing a cappella. The chords — dense and full of satisfying tensions — showcase Williams’ previously underutilized aptitude for vocal arrangement. As they sing the saint’s name, the choir slows down, masterfully swelling on the vowels as if to prove their devotion. When Williams finally enters on the keys, she does so with an Afro-Latin groove, perhaps a nod to the heritage of the hymn’s subject.

It is the perfect, haunting invitation to the world of this recording, which feels unexpected and refreshing at every turn. “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary,” Duke Ellington once said. “She is like soul on soul.” Black Christ of the Andes feels like soul on soul, perhaps in ways beyond what Ellington intended by the phrase. The entire composition is concerned with salvation, the wellbeing of our souls. And the sound, which draws upon blues, gospel and jazz, can certainly be described with the word “soulful,” that adjective we so often use to talk about the music that comes from enslaved black people and their descendants.

My dad was an atheist communist and my mom was Presbyterian. But although I wasn’t raised Catholic, I had a long-term relationship with “Blessed Martin,” who wasn’t a saint when I “adopted” him. When I was a kid of about 5 or 6, my oldest cousin, who was a very devout Catholic, told me that I was going to burn in hell when I died because I didn’t have a “saint’s name.” 

Hers was Theresa, and she had a statue of St. Therese Little Flower in her bedroom. I demanded that she take me to the religious supply store next to her church, where I could pick out a saint. She did, and I looked at all those white statues, feeling nothing. Then at the back of the shelf I spotted one who was a kind-looking Black man. That’s who I chose, though she tried to talk me out of it and get me to pick a female saint. I threw a tantrum and to shut me up, she bought Martin for me, telling me I had better pray hard because he was only “blessed” and not yet a saint. I prayed each night when I went to sleep and when he was canonized by Pope John XXIII on May 6, 1962, I felt that all of my prayers had helped bring that to fruition.

Here’s Williams’ tribute to St. Martin de Porres:

David Brent Johnson wrote “God Is In The House: Five Sacred-Jazz Recordings” for NPR Music.

When jazz emerged in the early decades of the 20th century as music of liberation, entertainment and modernism, it provoked a backlash among cultural and religious-establishment figures, many of whom went so far as to suggest that it was “the music of the devil.” By the middle years of the 20th century, however, jazz had found its way into the church, sometimes employed in the ritualistic proceedings of liturgies and other traditional ceremonies, or presented in other thematic ways that paid homage to a deity (usually Christian). How did the devil’s music get religion?

The religion, in some respects, was there all along. Many African-American musicians grew up attending and performing in church services, and the imprint of that experience can be found in albums ranging from New Orleans clarinetist George Lewis’ 1954 album Jazz At Vespers to saxophonist John Coltrane’s landmark 1965 LP A Love Supreme, which Coltrane offered as a sort of musical prayer to God. Even Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue was inspired in part, in the words of its leader, by “some other kind of sound I remembered from being back in Arkansas, when we were walking home from church and playing these bad gospels.”

Johnson’s story features Ed Summerlin’s “Te Deum” from the album “Liturgical Jazz,” Mary Lou Williams “Anima Christi” from “Mary Lou Williams Presents Black Christ of the Andes [Bonus Tracks,” Duke Ellington’s “Heaven” from “Second Sacred Concert,” the Dave Brubeck Trio & Gerry Mulligan’s “Blessed Are the Poor (The Sermon on the Mount)” from “Live at the Berlin Philharmonie,” and lastly, Wynton Marsalis’ “Uptempo Posthude” from “In This House, On This Morning.” 

Here’s what Johnson wrote about Marsalis:

Unlike many of his colleagues, trumpeter and composer Wynton Marsalis did not grow up performing in a church. But his awareness of such experience and its influence helped inspire him to write a sacred-jazz epic, 1993’s In This House, On This Morning. “Listening to all of [his fellow players] made me want to put that feeling in a long piece and reassert out here the power that underlies jazz by constructing a composition based on the communal complexity of its spiritual sources,” he said. Reverend Jeremiah Wright (he of 2008 presidential campaign fame) gave Marsalis a blueprint in the form of a 12-part African-American church service. In his structurally complex and blues-suffused emulation, Marsalis hits a variety of musical signposts along the way, illustrating calls to prayer, hymns, scripture readings and sermons. “Uptempo Postlude” limns the breezy lift that follows the conclusion of services, the congregants lingering to converse as they return to the world beyond the church’s doors, spirits set anew in the noontime Sunday light and air.

Give Marsalis’ “Uptempo Posthude” a listen:

In a more experimental vein, Argentinian composer and arranger Lalo Schifrin teamed up with flautist Paul Horn to record “Jazz Suite On The Mass Texts” in 1965:

I’ll close with the late, great John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” which is known to just about everyone who appreciates sacred jazz. Mark Richardson wrote about the work for for Pitchfork:

A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane’s musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It’s the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones’ opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner’s piano clusters to Coltrane’s stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison’s iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—”a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME”—that carries out the opening movement, “Acknowledgement”. By the time the record gets to the closing “Psalm”, which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he’d written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane’s initial vision. It’s as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz.

Please join me in the comments section below, where I’m posting more spiritual music; I hope you will post your favorites too. In case you missed it the first time around, check out “Black Music Sunday: Let’s celebrate Easter (and a big anniversary) with Ellington’s Sacred Concerts.”

Enjoy your Sunday.

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