Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion

Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion. By Jason C. Bivins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 369pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Bibliography, Index. ISBN 9780-19-023091-3. $29.95 Spirits Rejoice!: Jazz and American Religion is the book Jason Bivins was born to write. A professor of religious studies and a jazz musician, Bivins combines his estimable knowledge of both subjects into one ambitious volume that aims to recalibrate popular considerations of jazz and American religion. Deliberately "complicating" the reader's understanding of both topics by stripping the common conceptions away Bivins builds a complex but, ultimately far steadier and more insightful view of jazz and religion as fellow travelers on the road to spiritual freedom. With a few exceptions, Spirits Rejoice! focuses on the postwar jazz scene, when some of the most innovative experimentation occurred. Bivins begins his exploration with the most obvious connections between jazz and religion, and then proceeds chapter by chapter to the most esoteric. Of the former, he illustrates how the music of specific religious traditions, such as Baptist and Pentecostal, influenced the compositional work of those who grew up in them or, as with Chick Corea and Dizzy Gillespie, adopted them later in life (Scientology and the Baha'i faith, respectively). Of the latter, he shows how certain jazz performance subcultures were functioning as unconventional forms of religion, how jazz historiographies used music to comment critically on the relationship between American religion and race, the ways in which performance ritual served as a "medium of the gods," and how meditation and mysticism in jazz performance was a means for performer and listener to communicate with the divine. He concludes with the most esoteric: the metaphysical work of artists such as Ornette Coleman, Anthony Braxton, and Wadada Leo Smith, who sought to embrace the cosmos by forming all new musical languages and adapting new spiritual sensibilities--"art without limits," Bivins writes. Bivins also tackles the associations between religion, jazz, and race, most notably how African American jazzmen and jazzwomen were, and continue to be, subject to what he calls "the reality of the sweating brow." This describes the "racialized expectations audiences have when engaging 'jazz,' often understood to be music played by sweating, cathartic, emotionally exuberant black performers." Such characterization, writes Bivins, obfuscates the true meaning and value of jazz. To Bivins, religion and jazz are forms of "human cultural communication" constantly in search of enlightenment. It is artistic expression in a quest for God, as much a medium to the spiritual as any religious denomination or sacred practice. This restless search for the spiritual is at the book's core. The most fascinating aspects of Spirits Rejoice! are the analyses of familiar works by more universally known artists, such as Sun Ra and his ever-evolving space jazz, Ellington and the Sacred Concerts, Mary Lou Williams' Mass, and John Carter's epic five-part Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music. They enable the average jazz aficionado to test Bivins' hypothesis by listening to these pieces in a new way. Two stories in particular make for especially engrossing reading. The first is the establishment of the One Mind Temple Evolutionary Transitional Body of Christ, which used saxophonist John Coltrane's song catalog for its principal worship music. The other is the community building activities of the Underground Musicians Association (UGMAA), a story so relevant to today's racial tension that it deserves a book-length revisiting. Both examples demonstrate how race, jazz, and religion can combine to offer a better world here on earth. But alas, the most unconventional and purely enlightened practices, whether musical or metaphysical, tend to put the general public on edge and are either marginalized or swept off the street corner. …