Jazz as a way of life

For a little more than ten years, Duke Chapel has held a Jazz Vespers worship service once a semester. This service — a collaboration between Duke Chapel and the Duke Jazz Program — combines the ancient form of evening vespers with the musical improvisation of jazz. Periodically, we have special guest musicians. In February, we had saxophonist Branford Marsalis and pianist Joey Calderazzo. They did not disappoint as the elegant sounds of “The Bard Lachrymose,” “La Valse Kendall” and “Eternal” echoed off the walls and into our hearts. The service also included poetry by our very own Duke poets Tsitsi Ella Jaji and Crystal Simone Smith, as well as scripture readings and prayers.

There are so many moments that were moving that evening, but one stands out to me that says something about the nature of jazz. Before the service started, I was touching base with Branford Marsalis about the anticipated flow of things, and I noted that the lyrics and music of the final hymn, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” were printed in the bulletin. When I showed it to him, he affirmed that they were going to play it, but as he looked at the notes on the page, he added, “But not like that.” 

I chuckled and knew what he meant. Marsalis was signaling that the notes on the page were not the music. The written notes and bars presented a visual structure, and perhaps even a compass of sorts, but the music was going to be made off the page through the sound of the saxophone and piano. He was indicating that they would play off of the given structure. There might have been some constraints, but they were free. And that is a key component of jazz — improvisation. 

When we came to that final hymn in the service, we sang the first two verses with the accompaniment of the musicians and then paused to thank the guest musicians and poets for their presence and gifts. And then, instead of singing the third and final verse, the gathered community sang the hymn’s refrain a cappella one last time as some people swayed and clapped with eyes wide open or closed. We all improvised that evening.

In January, my colleague Professor Patrick Smith, associate research professor of theological ethics and bioethics at Duke Divinity School, gave the Trent Humanities in Medicine Lecture at Duke on the topic of “Jazz and Medical Ethics: Reflections from an Imperfect Art.” In that lecture, he described how jazz includes syncopation, polyphony, call-and-response, dissonance, and improvisation. He went on in his address to apply these principles to the practice of medicine.

Jazz can also be applied to the practice of life. This is what I mean. As a musical genre, jazz is a bricolage of sorts, consisting of various elements, influences, styles, sounds, rhythms, cultures and more. Jazz is not just one pure thing; instead, it is made up of numerous things, whatever one has at hand in the moment to make music. Isn’t this like our human existence? In any given moment, we live in a bricolage of consonance, dissonance, syncopation, harmony, legato and staccato, adagio and allegro time. We live in joy and sorrow, love and animosity, truth and lies. And through these experiences, we construct a life. We make music. We play jazz existentially. 

French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said that the artist "shapes the beautiful and useful out of the dump heap of human life." Life can pile on heaps of cow manure, and so we improvise because we have to. When someone dies in a tragic car accident or a rock-climbing accident—or your parents get a divorce or you end a friendship or you have to shift directions as an institution, like Duke, due to a strategic realignment and cost reduction process — it is necessary to learn how to improvise. 

Every day the sun rises and sets. This is an elemental structure of our day. It gives a frame with some constraints for our time, yet within that frame, there is freedom to make the necessary music required in any given moment — to perform a jazz riff. In life, you will experience consonance, dissonance, syncopation, crescendos and decrescendos, and more, but how will you respond creatively in the moment? How will you play jazz?