Pub Date : 2020-07-21DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0005
Vaughn A. Booker
This chapter discusses the popular methods of African American scriptural interpretation that formed the early religious context that Duke Ellington represented through his jazz artistry. In these biblical interpretations, African American Protestants in the twentieth century’s early decades read the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in concert with constructing their own history as descendants of the African continent. Ellington brought into his musical profession a relationship to the Bible as a sacred African document that portrayed African and black people as the great founders of ancient civilizations and as contributors to the foundation of modern civilization. By publishing and promoting books on history and biblical interpretation, writing editorials, answering reader questions in regular black press columns, staging pageants, and even through long- and short-form jazz compositions, middle-class black Protestants, along with black academics who studied ancient North Africa, the Near East, and East Africa, invested their intellectual and artistic energy into racializing sacred Hebrew figures and sacralizing non-Hebrew peoples as venerable contributors to the development of religion. These Afro-Protestant racializations of sacred texts and ancient religions, alongside their sacralizations of African identity, involved their embrace of both monotheisms and polytheisms.
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Pub Date : 2020-07-21DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0008
Vaughn A. Booker
This chapter charts Mary Lou Williams’s decision to become a Roman Catholic. As she made this religious journey, she engaged in several critical conversations with God, with close friends, with two jazz-loving white Catholic priests, and with several other jazz musicians. Williams also engaged in conversations with various publics: a black public, through African American print publications; and the professional jazz public, whose musicians she claimed had lost their creativity in the modern musical era. This first group of conversation partners compelled her return to performing and composing music. Aiding them were her new Catholic clergy friends, who urged her to reconsider the jazz profession as remaining worthy of her divine musical talents. Williams expressed the hope that her conversations with the professional jazz world would prompt meaningful conversions for them. She argued that the fruits of this labor would be the revival of black musical creativity. To safeguard what Williams defined as God’s gifts of creative African American music and musicians, she called for practices of care and accountability within the jazz community.
{"title":"Jazz Communion","authors":"Vaughn A. Booker","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter charts Mary Lou Williams’s decision to become a Roman Catholic. As she made this religious journey, she engaged in several critical conversations with God, with close friends, with two jazz-loving white Catholic priests, and with several other jazz musicians. Williams also engaged in conversations with various publics: a black public, through African American print publications; and the professional jazz public, whose musicians she claimed had lost their creativity in the modern musical era. This first group of conversation partners compelled her return to performing and composing music. Aiding them were her new Catholic clergy friends, who urged her to reconsider the jazz profession as remaining worthy of her divine musical talents. Williams expressed the hope that her conversations with the professional jazz world would prompt meaningful conversions for them. She argued that the fruits of this labor would be the revival of black musical creativity. To safeguard what Williams defined as God’s gifts of creative African American music and musicians, she called for practices of care and accountability within the jazz community.","PeriodicalId":237381,"journal":{"name":"Lift Every Voice and Swing","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130288245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-21DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0002
Vaughn A. Booker
This chapter discusses the Afro-Protestant mainline in the era when jazz emerged as a distinct profession. In the 1920s and 1930s, religious race professionals provided editorial commentary on African American entertainment and social gatherings through their denominational newspapers and the black press. Jazz competed with middle-class African American religious leaders for the minds, time, and even finances of African American youth. At the same time, these churches and clergy were already facing the criticisms of African American intellectuals who questioned the aims of their ministries as well as the moral and intellectual fitness of their ministers. As they faced various challenges to their authority as race representatives, religious race professionals articulated and constructed their Protestant ministries as credible professions for a modern era. Middle-class black Protestants operated as religious race professionals: cultural critics whose pursuit of modern religious identities resulted in their debates to determine the appropriateness of recreation, entertainment, and theatricality in both the daily lives and religious aesthetics of black Protestants. Though middle-class black ministers and intellectuals offered strong criticisms of jazz, the music ultimately emerged as an alternative arena for the practice of interracial community, beyond the interracial ecumenism and fellowships that middle-class black ministers were working to forge.
{"title":"“Jazzing Religion”","authors":"Vaughn A. Booker","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter discusses the Afro-Protestant mainline in the era when jazz emerged as a distinct profession. In the 1920s and 1930s, religious race professionals provided editorial commentary on African American entertainment and social gatherings through their denominational newspapers and the black press. Jazz competed with middle-class African American religious leaders for the minds, time, and even finances of African American youth. At the same time, these churches and clergy were already facing the criticisms of African American intellectuals who questioned the aims of their ministries as well as the moral and intellectual fitness of their ministers. As they faced various challenges to their authority as race representatives, religious race professionals articulated and constructed their Protestant ministries as credible professions for a modern era. Middle-class black Protestants operated as religious race professionals: cultural critics whose pursuit of modern religious identities resulted in their debates to determine the appropriateness of recreation, entertainment, and theatricality in both the daily lives and religious aesthetics of black Protestants. Though middle-class black ministers and intellectuals offered strong criticisms of jazz, the music ultimately emerged as an alternative arena for the practice of interracial community, beyond the interracial ecumenism and fellowships that middle-class black ministers were working to forge.","PeriodicalId":237381,"journal":{"name":"Lift Every Voice and Swing","volume":"245 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114831882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-07-21DOI: 10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0010
Vaughn A. Booker
This chapter examines the reverence for departed jazz musicians and the practices of fellow musicians, creative artists, institutions, and the public to celebrate their memory. By heralding its prominent members who are now its ancestors, the jazz community proclaims the importance of memorializing these musicians, of continuing to perform their music, and of inheriting the improvisational spirit to interpret their works according to the religious and spiritual locations of the reverential performers themselves. African American religious practices of celebrating Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams chart the new lives—or afterlives—that these deceased musicians gain from those left to interpret their legacies anew. And among African American celebrants, the creative works of many African American women produce a significant record of religious and spiritual interpretations of jazz virtuosity.
{"title":"Virtuoso Ancestors","authors":"Vaughn A. Booker","doi":"10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479892327.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the reverence for departed jazz musicians and the practices of fellow musicians, creative artists, institutions, and the public to celebrate their memory. By heralding its prominent members who are now its ancestors, the jazz community proclaims the importance of memorializing these musicians, of continuing to perform their music, and of inheriting the improvisational spirit to interpret their works according to the religious and spiritual locations of the reverential performers themselves. African American religious practices of celebrating Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams chart the new lives—or afterlives—that these deceased musicians gain from those left to interpret their legacies anew. And among African American celebrants, the creative works of many African American women produce a significant record of religious and spiritual interpretations of jazz virtuosity.","PeriodicalId":237381,"journal":{"name":"Lift Every Voice and Swing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128942403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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