Tag: art

Art, Worship and All That Jazz: Inspirations from a Jazz Legend

Cleve Eaton, Alabama Treasure and Count Basie's bassist

I’ve met two people in the past ten years who made me believe the bass was the most wonderful instrument in the world.  Got to know Dave Pomeroy when he played here a several years back with the put together acoustic jazz group with Rob Ickes (of Blue Highway) on dobro and Andy Leftwich, fiddle and mandolin player from Kentucky Thunder (Ricky Skaggs).

The other man is a legend I met a few months ago when a member took us to a little jazz dinner theater here.  A group was playing called the Sonny Harris Trio—drums, piano and bass.  The pianist was terrific, a young man from Cuba named Pedro Mayor, and the bass player was Cleveland Eaton.  Cleve is one of Alabama’s treasures—in the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, gigs with Ramsey Lewis Trio, Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Ike Cole, and more people than can be remembered in the legends of jazz.  But mostly he was renowned as Count Basie’s bass player, “The Count’s Bassist.”  Here’s a clip from 25 or so years ago.  at Carnegie Hall with Basie playing “Booty’s Blues.”

Elvis and Sam at Sun Studios

We had them come and play for a lunch at the church this week, and Mr. Eaton spoke to my class.  I’ve been teaching a bible study called, “The Year of Alabama Music,” an observance going on this year honoring musical greats of Alabama (Louvin Brothers, Vern Gosdin, Sam Phillips, Hank Williams, Emmy Lou Harris, W. C. Handy,  and on and on)    I’ve been talking about music found in scripture, about spiritual and theological issues that arise out of the stories in

both scripture and these artists’ lives, and so on.  It’s been pretty interesting—how many artists in the blues, country, bluegrass, rock and jazz got their start in the church.

It’s also interesting how many of them harbored and pursued spiritual longings in their music—Hank Williams’ maudlin talking songs under the penname “Luke the Drifter,” Sam Phillips seeing his calling as a spiritual one, to bring the soulful music of African-Americans to white America, and the oddity that he recorded and released “That’s Alright, Mama” the same year of Brown vs. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Era began in earnest.  It’s astounding how much the Bible has to say about secular art and how many spiritual pursuits dwell at the center of supposedly secular art.

The Great Count Basie

In Jazz, of course, we have a totally different creature altogether.  Perhaps the most truly American and original art form of all—pure innovation, in which artistic creations might be recorded and played again and again, but never performed live the same way ever.  Cleve told me this week that Basie once hit an incredible riff on the piano and a guy said, “Hey, man, play that again, what you just did.”  Basie said, “Aw, man, that’s gone and it ain’t never coming back.”

Makes you think that there is something deeply spiritual, letting our music be creature, born,  living and full of delight, and then dying to rise again some other way, some other time.  Cleave said he practices all day every day.   That’s why he’s never nervous.  A lot to teach us, I think.  Watching he and Basie in this clip I thought, “That’s holier than many a song with Jesus words in it—you can feel the Creator smiling.”

Frankly, for a long time, much contemporary Christian music left me hollow not because it was rock and roll or “indie” or whatever, but because it was musically second-rate, lyrically hollow and generally uninteresting.  It was too much like the old Billy Graham movies churches would turn out to support as the supposed answer to Hollywood.  Movies like The Restless Ones may have been productive evangelism, but they were, truthfully, awful movies.  You could see the ending coming a mile away, and it all got tied up too neatly at the end.  It failed to be true to life, to Creation, to story.

Ah, the prerequisite "praise team." They seem to be enjoying themselves while we spectators watch.

Great art IS spiritual.  Our efforts (mostly among evangelicals, who often have an advertiser’s lack of confidence in their “product” to appeal on its own) undermine the creative process.  Artists, write great songs.  They WILL speak.  Superficial, artistically inferior music is nearly always the result of subordinating excellence to some other motive, even if it is a good one.

10 Qualities of a pERFECTionits

deadline coming...

1.  Perfectionists cannot stand it when something is not completed.  For example, when a person…

2.  There is a rigidity about things always having to be a certain way or else they become very upset.  Things cannot be out of order, altered from their usual place, etc.

4.  If you’re going to do your best, you can’t always worry about pleasing everyone else (“You know you shouldn’t be writing this blog.  I told you to major in something else in college.  You’re an idiot.  Nobody cares what you think.)  Pay no attention to that voice in my head…

3.  Practice makes prefect.  Practifect makes perfice.  Aw, you know what I mean.

5.  If you are a Christian, be happy all the time and when you are mad, talk more piously.

6.  Almost perfect is never good enough.  Perfection is so hard to reach, you often don’t try.  This is so frustrating that I’m not going to list the last four.  It’s too overwhelming.

I forgot the other four.

In an article by Elizabeth Scott at About.com, I came across this statement.

High achievers tend to be pulled toward their goals by a desire to achieve them, and are happy with any steps made in the right direction. Perfectionists, on the other hand, tend to be pushed toward their goals by a fear of not reaching them, and see anything less than a perfectly met goal as a failure.

That rings true.  Sometimes our goals are so lofty with a song, recording, preparing a presentation, aspiring to a project, or writing, that we are immobilized.   My friend, the late John Claypool, used to say that there’s a difference between wanting to do something and wanting to BE somebody.  The first group accomplishes a lot.  The second group tends to make themselves and everyone around them miserable.  It’s all about “how you look.”  Faggetaboutit!

In this culture so shaped by the visual dimension of life, are we so oriented to expectations that come from without us that we cannot find the “push” from within?

So, here is my advice to perfectionists.  Lose yourself in the task once in a while.  Don’t worry too much about how to sign your autographs just yet.  Just write good songs.  Sing your best.  All that obsession with fame, stuff, adoration and making a million is too much about being PUSHED.  Let yourself be pulled by something that offers so much joy you just HAVE to find it!

note to self

Accept the process and enjoy the ride.  The journey of healing will not be automatic and instant.  Taking something in, getting somewhere, growing, all involve time, faith, hope and love.

Strive for reality, not perfection. A friend of mine was struggling with some people whose behavior disappointed him in his church.  He expressed his disappointment and I replied, “You have to learn to lower your expectations.”  He asked, “How do you do it?”  I answered, “From reading the Bible.”    Have you ever noticed what a sorry lot of people are in the Bible–Jesus being the exception, of course?  If you want to feel good, read a Bible story.  But it ought to encourage you.  God works with the available material.

Try on a new self-assessment based on reality, not what you have experienced, come to mistakenly believe, or adapted to as a reaction to life.  Work on those voices inside your head.  Turn off the editor when you want to be creative.  Let it flow.  You’ll be surprised what comes forth when you aren’t worried about what someone will say about it.

Finally, lie down and sleep when you run out of ideas.  You’d be amazed what the acceptance of our limits can do to unleash creative power.  Turn the world back over to God every night.  It’s liable to still be there when you open your eyes in the morning.

Stewards on a Sinking Ship?

I have committed, as a writer, to undertake the serious discipline of writing during the month of July each year.  This is a little confusing, because I write all the time in my work, as a songwriter, just about everyday as a facebook citizen (won’t find me with those loathsome mundanities like how much mustard was on my sandwich or my farmville situation.  I try to write something short and worthwhile, except when i don’t, of course.  Which is why I like “like.”  Cuts to the chase, and you can “unlike.”).  I mean, though, that I have committed to myself to use my gift, whether anyone reads it or not.  Writing, the very act of committing words to sequence, has a power.

Anyway, I have dozens of book ideas, but most of them are still in my computer.  I’m one of those people Dorothy Sayers talked about in The Mind of the Maker when she said that  all artistic failures correspond to defects in trinitarian theology.  All artistic work begins as idea, “becomes flesh” in the act of writing (or painting, or making music) and then achieves fulness in becoming an experienced reality by those who read it, watch it or listen to it.  A work of art is not complete without this fullness of being–it’s fine that you have an idea, and many people, she said, say “My book is finished.  I have only to write it down.”  But until you write it, it is not complete. So, if you are a writer, you don’t wait for a contract or just think about ideas.  You write.

I have pondered about three projects I have in various stages of completion (whatever I do with them), but the one I have strong feelings about is “stewardship.”  It’s an odd phrase, usually associated in churches with fundraising and subscribing the budget, but it has an interesting history as a word.  According to the website “word origins” (http://www.word-origins.com/definition/steward.html), in Old English, where this word originated in about the 15th century, a steward was literally “in charge of a sty.”  This was either connected with the word “stigweard,” a compound from “stig” (hall or house) and “weard,” meaning a guardian  or keeper, thus, “keeper of the hall.”  It may have been from the word “sty,”, the place where the pigs were kept.  I will admit that in the current political moment someone who takes care of something dirty and unglamorous without credit is indeed, “Weard.”

Was a steward originally the guy who took care of the hogs?  Interesting thought.  Stewardship has a lowly dimension to it.  “Taking care” of things is not glamorous, appreciated, or always understood by much of our throwaway culture.  Our children may be changed by the recession we seem to be still in the midst of, but we are yet to see if it makes our children more fearful about wasting things or more attentive to taking care of what they have.

Where stewardship matters is its sense of one being responsible for many things and, presumably many other people.  If the steward doesn’t do his or her job, the hogs get out, money is lost, the house runs down, and chaos results.

Stewardship has relevance to all aspects of life.  It is the most powerful image I can think of for where we are in our current global situation.  We sit on a fragile planet with abundant resources, but finite ones.  How we treat that planet will not affect its survival in the universe, but it may have a lot to say about whether we’ll be on it for a long time.  Politics, relationships, economic life, culture, food and water, all are affected by our sense of (or lack thereof) of a sense of “stewardship.”

We watch the global economy halted by our politicians’ endless manipulations, who can never seem to answer each direct question with a simple “Yes” or “No”, posturing, accusing, projecting, blaming, offering excuses, and generally carrying on what sometimes feels like the old “bull sessions” in the dorm late at night in college.  Except their bull sessions affect people’s lives.  And in it all, the sense of stewardship can be lost amid the tantalizing seductions of power, fame and money, the Unholy Trinity of our particular moment win out.

It is a very dangerous time, a time that more than ever asks for servants but always gives in to seducers, wasters, magicians and promisers of fantasy.  Yet if they did tell the truth, give us the bad news, admit the pain that it would take to fix it, would we accept it?  It costs to be a steward.  No fame, no vast fortune, just this unrelenting sense of taking care of something that someone entrusted to us, because that responsibility is more important than all the pleasures to be immediately had by turning from it.

My prayer is for the rebirth of stewardship in the world–parents, families, stockbrokers, bankers, neighbors, policemen, company presidents and CEOs, workers, teachers, artists, politicians.  Without that sense that something is always asked of me for the sake of the other, that something that says, “It can never be only about you,” this ship will sink.  Every good ship has an officer called a “steward.”  The steward is not the captain.  No ship can sail with all captains.  The ship steward looks after the passengers’ comfort and wellbeing, and sees after the supplies and food.

Long live the stewards.  May their tribe increase.  But if we merely delegate this to certain poor souls who are left to tend the hogs while we all watch cable, we will sink.  As a steward of writing gifts, however small they might be, I must reject my own excuses and write as though the world depended on me.  Mothering, fathering, taking care of someone else’s money, churches, schools, neighborhoods, aging parents, the poor among us–we are all called to some great and unavoidable stewardships.  And if we evade them, not only might the ship run out of food or sink, we will never once before we die manage to be who we came here to become.  And that is a loss of incalculable measure.

Helping “The Help”

In the theater on Saturday to see “Tree of Life,” we watched the obligatory previews and saw with interest that a film version of “The Help” is coming in August.  Allison Janney was one of the actresses I recognized, and heard enough to know this would be another butchered movie attempt to capture Southern accents.  Anyone NOT from the South cannot hear the hundred subtleties in Southernspeak.  We do not all sound like Foghorn Leghorn (“Ah, SAY-uh, ah sey-uh Miss Priss-ay”).

In the case of Mississippi, parts of Alabama and south Georgia you would be pretty close, but a little off is worse than way off, the linguistic equivalent of losing a baseball game on a balk in the ninth.  You think, “they don’t know us, don’t know anything about where we live, who we are.  What’s the deal?  Most of ‘em still think we’re unchanged from the barking dogs and fire hoses and Atticus Finch.  It’s as though the South is invisible.

According to Wikipedia: the movie “The Help” is about Aibileen, an African-American maid living in Mississippi in the early 1960s who cleans houses and cares for the young children of various white families.”   There is a storyline about a campaign to get the white residents of Jackson to build separate bathrooms in their garage or carport for the use of the “colored” help.   Characters with odd Southern names like Hilly and Skeeter are here, as well as Aibileen, another maid who has been through 19 jobs because she speaks out too much.  A lot more develops, but pick up the book or see the film.

I started thinking about real life versions of “The Help” many times.  As a minister you go and sit in people’s homes a lot, especially when things are going badly.  Death, divorce, children run amuck, that sort of thing.  You go as a holy man or woman and sit there, listening, trying to lend some presence to some terrifying absence.  It can be anywhere:  in nursing homes, assisted living or elegant suburban homes.  The help, especially down south, some long-time worker for the family, inevitably comes in and brings me a glass of tea or says hello or dusts around us.

When my wife worked in welfare reform she got to know a lot of women who worked as domestics—cooks, maids, caretakers for the elderly, sitters and raisers of babies.  Often they worked for more than one family to put food on the table.  And if you wanted to know what was REALLY going on, talk to these women.  It helps explain reality television, I think.  Often I think, “Why on earth would you say that with cameras rolling?  How can you be sincere and still know your being taped?”  I suppose you just forget after a while and then, out it comes.

My wife Vickie used to say, “People forget and talk in front of their maids like they’re not there, and don’t realize that everything in their house is known.”  Another way to put it is that these people become invisible.  We stop seeing them, being aware of them, taking account of their presence.

I wondered recently as I thought about a really BAD immigration law passed by the Alabama legislature:  “WHAT were they thinking?”  At first I focused on the legal, financial and constitutional issues—how will we enforce it, who will pay for it, and so on.  My question was, “Am I my brother’s Big Brother?”  Absurdities occurred—will we build a wall like the Israelis to keep the Floridians and Mississippians out?  But there were also somber thoughts—a lot of law enforcement may ignore it, but some might abuse it on people too scared and vulnerable to speak up.  And also frustration that the federal government, whose real job it is, has failed to do their job.  This is not a state issue.  But let’s not go there.

Mainly I have been thinking about the help.  The help are people who clean toilets and wash dishes and dig gardens and mow lawns and help build houses.  They mop hospital halls and work long hours without complaining.  And when they work their fingers to the bone for subsistence wages, we’re only too glad to let them do it.  Then, when the bottom drops out of the Dow and we’re scared, we started passing laws that have a nice, authoritative sound to them.  “Let’s stand up and do something.”

I called the governor’s office before this became law and told his staff I strongly opposed this law—unaffordable, unconstitutional, unenforceable.  But mostly, if truth be told, I was thinking about the Old Testament and Jesus and all those passages in the Bible about the way we treat strangers and foreigners in our midst.  There isn’t one passage in the Bible that says, “When they’re down and out, draw the line and shove ‘em out.”  Find it if you can.  No, it says, “You were strangers in Egypt.  Don’t forget it.  Don’t oppress widows and foreigners and orphans.”  In other words, “Don’t tread harshly on people who can’t fight back.”

I am embarrassed by this law.  We can do better.  Nothing in it about the people already here or treating them with respect and hospitality or how to go from where we are to where we could be or even a mere way to authorize those already here to stay as guest workers.  We didn’t even offer them a ride home.  Just jails, fines, and, worse, the rest of us being tattlers to pull it off.  It’s not that hard, it seems to me, to figure out.  But that didn’t seem to get in this law.

A lot of our newcomers pretty soon become business owners and contractors themselves.  They work hard and pull themselves up.  I’ve met people who were doctors or dentists in their former country but work in menial jobs here because they are not “qualified” and they don’t complain.  It’s a familiar story—like the 24 million immigrants who came into this country between 1860 and the 1920s—some of whose descendants sit in nice homes griping about immigrants.

Most of all, I feel like we got in the living room and made a decision affecting our maids and yard workers and day laborers and restaurant workers and lots of women and children.  Many of them are legal and sometimes their families are not.  It’s a mess, I admit.  But we got in the living room and came up with a half-baked solution that, like those bathrooms in the garages in The Help will look absurd a few years down the line.

We committed the two great sins for Southern Christians.  We were rude to strangers  and we talked about things that affected the help’s lives as though they weren’t even there.  And now our teachers and law enforcement folks and business owners are asked to fix it by becoming an enforcement bureau, ratting out first graders who don’t know anything about why they are here.

I’m for homeland security—career criminals don’t belong here, terrorists need to be stopped.  I hate the ocean of drugs pouring over our borders as much as Mexico hates the avalanche of guns pouring over theirs.  But maybe if we stopped talking about our help like they aren’t even there we could make distinctions between people who make us better and those who don’t.

We had the wrong kind of discussion and we ended up with a Rube Goldberg law.  We can do better.  We should do better.  I pray we will.