When You Are a Black Church Musician, but You Love Heavy-Duty Jazz (and That's an Old Taboo)

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This is a random, hilarious moment of me getting ready for a church concert, with a lot of history attached ...

African music in North America is a long story of triumph over great oppression ... beginning with my enslaved ancestors taking the music they brought with them and keeping it although blending it with new ideas from English-language hymns and folk songs. This is the origin of the Negro Spiritual, the sweetest music out of the greatest human oppression of the modern age. Chattel slavery sought to destroy the humanity of the enslaved down to the soul. The Negro Spiritual is the first evidence of the failure, the deepest body of music produced in the Americas, and one of the parents of jazz, blues, and gospel music.

But the other parent, the work song, is very much neglected, and although the Negro Spiritual and its more elevated themes and souns made it to the concert hall and the admiration of Europeans and their idea of a Christianity that allowed for a Sunday to be holy and peaceful and calm and devoid of any reminder of the suffering their choice of enacting colonialism and slavery , the work song and its closer connection to the African chant and drums was not embraced as readily ... and thus, as Black people embraced Christianity and at last began to hope to be accepted into Eurocentric Christian circles, Black Christians began to be afraid of both jazz and blues ... as if Africa itself and all its contributions that could not be pigeonholed as chattel were unholy.

It is 2025. I am 44 years old, and still having conversations with frustrated people who get scared when younger musicians use jazz chords and blues scales in church ... churchiness does not include five-note chords and flat fifths and progressions of that sort ... although both Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk played for church groups, and if you really listen, the only major difference between traditional gospel and traditional blues is really the lyrics...

I am free of the old prejudices because I am studied enough as a musician and a Christian to know that God loves every sound in music that Africans in America brought here, and that all of it can be used for His glory ... so I tickle myself sometimes doing traditional gospel progressions and listening to the great jazz musicians I have studied coming right on out in a harmonious blend. This was such a moment!

"Trouble In My Way" is a big-time traditional gospel song, and as an arranger I have been looking at the chant section in it on the phrase "Jesus, He Will Fix It" ... as both arranger and composer i look at repetitive phrases from the bass side for variety ... I always start out traditional but things can get interesting in a hurry when one has Jelly Roll Morton and Thelonious Monk under one's hands too... and because I am not afraid of my full musical heritage, what happens is what happens!

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