FREDDIE FREELOADS IN CHURCH...........
On December 1st, Mark Edwards, Geoff Simkins and I took part with a band of singers in a jazz eucharist at St.Luke's church Prestonville. The musical setting was based on the tunes from Miles Davis's legendary album Kind of Blue. "Blue in Green" for the Kyrie, "So what" for the Gloria, "Freddie Freeloader" for the Sanctus and "All Blues" for the Agnus Dei. It's such a fascinating idea that I contacted TIM WATSON, the arranger who now lives in Australia and asked him to tell us the story behind it all……………………….
Tim writes:
My first exposure to the idea of jazz in church liturgy was in 1990: my brother was a member of Durham Cathedral Choir when they collaborated with Stan Tracey and an all-star band to re-enact Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concert during the Sunday Eucharist, as part of the cathedral’s 900th anniversary celebrations – this included veteran Harlem hoofer Will Gaines tap-dancing down the nave at the end of the service, followed by the choir in full robes!
Fast forward to the mid-1990s, and I’m sitting in the chapel of Hautecombe Abbey in France, which is packed with young people attending an international festival similar to those held at Taizé, singing the psalms unaccompanied as part of the office of Vespers. The simple French chants were modal and as several hundred young people from 40 different countries, encouraged by the generous acoustics of the abbey chapel, started to improvise harmonies to a psalm chant in D Dorian, I was reminded irresistibly of the clusters in Bill Evans’ piano solo on the opening track of Kind of Blue.
During my years in France, I was also lucky enough to meet the remarkable Guy de Fatto, author of Aux rythmes de Dieu, who had been a star bass player (and also something of a down-and-out) in the Quartier Latin in the 1950s, working with the likes of Kenny Clarke and Sidney Bechet, before a spiritual crisis led him to a new vocation as a Catholic priest. As chaplain to the “artistes de spectacle” in Paris in the 1960s, Abbé de Fatto pioneered the use of jazz and gospel in the post-Vatican II French church.
A further piece of the puzzle was my discovery, some years later, of the vocal style of Kurt Elling, both through original compositions such as his setting of Walt Whitman’s “The Waking”, which I first heard on Later ... with Jools Holland, and through his extraordinary “vocalese” interpretations of improvised solos such as John Coltrane’s “Resolution” from A Love Supreme. I was fascinated to discover, not just that Elling’s father had been a Lutheran Kapellmeister, but that he himself had been a ministry student in Chicago before quitting to pursue a higher calling. (And also that there is actually a church of Saint John Coltrane in – where else? – San Francisco ...) What if, I wondered, Elling had managed to combine his two vocations in one?
Fast forward again to 2012, and I’m in Liverpool, newly ordained as an Anglican priest, and sitting in the Capstone Theatre on my 41st birthday with my wife who has bought me tickets to hear Terry Seabrook’s band Milestones perform a tribute to Kind of Blue ... and I’m googling the band members, as you do, only to discover that the drummer – a certain Spike Wells – is, like myself, in holy orders. And so with the words of the Anglican liturgy fresh in my mind, I start singing along under my breath to the opening number: “Glory be to God on high (Glo-ry!) ... Peace on earth to all the people (Glo-ry!) ...”
So that’s how the Kind of Blue-Charist – otherwise known as the Missa Succaerulea – came into being: with a first trial performance at Spike’s church of the Annunciation in Brighton in 2016, followed by an official world première at St Patrick’s Hove during the Brighton Fringe Festival in 2017, featuring an all-star band including Spike on drums (he also preached!), Mark Edwards on keys, the Revd Dr Tim Boniface (another extraordinarily gifted jazz priest-musician) on sax, soprano Red Grey swinging a vocalese “Gloria” to the tune of Miles’s first great solo from the opening album track, a Eucharistic preface based on Elling’s “The Waking” sung by yours truly ... and closing with a rousing chorus of “When the saints go marching in”.
The whole thing came off pretty well, I thought – but the feedback I cherish the most came from Tim Boniface: “For most of my life I’ve been playing for church services, and for most of my life I’ve been a jazz musician, and this is the first time that I’ve done the two together and it has actually worked – because for once, the jazz didn’t feel like some kind of awkward add-on, but was actually woven through the liturgy”. Well: hallelujah!
Let’s put an end to this cultural apartheid: if the God we Christians worship is truly the source of everything good, true, and beautiful, then shouldn’t our worship naturally incorporate the fullest possible range of truth, beauty and goodness? – including, of course, jazz.
I leave the last word to Spike, who in his sermon at the first Kind of Blue-Charist quoted an old Anglican offertory known familiarly as the “kitchen sink” prayer, for reasons which should become obvious: “Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine: All things come of thee, O LORD, and of thine own have we given thee.” Amen to that.
Tim Watson is a member of the Chemin Neuf Community and an Anglican priest, currently serving as rector of Holy Cross Hackett in Canberra, Australia. He is also a former principal percussionist of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, a jazz drummer, and a singer who has performed and recorded with the choir of Christ Church Cathedral Oxford and Tonus Peregrinus.