NEW YORK (AP) - Wynton Marsalis will be turning the House That Jazz Built at the Time Warner Center into the House of the Lord when he premieres his first jazz Mass, which blends the gospel and jazz traditions in a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, New York State's oldest African-American congregation.
-
(Photo: AP Images / Diane Bondareff)Wynton Marsalis, center, rehearses for 'Abyssinian 200: A Celebration,' Tuesday, April 8, 2008, in New York. The Abyssinian Baptist Church is celebrating its bicentennial with music written by Wynton Marsalis to be performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center.
The 100-plus Abyssinian Baptist Church Bicentennial Choir will lift their voices in song as they make their way through the Rose Theater in the traditional Processional to join forces with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to perform Marsalis' "Abyssinian 200: A Celebration," a 19-part piece based on the liturgy found in many African-American Baptist churches.
"When we get in there, it's just a big musical auditorium, but when we do the Invocation, it becomes a sanctified place because God's presence enters into it," said Abyssinian's pastor, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, who will deliver a sermon on "the uniting power of prayer."
"I see this jazz Mass as an opportunity of not only bringing together the jazz and gospel traditions, but as a way of talking about the unique and important contributions of the African-American religious experience to life in America and around the world," he said.
The Mass, with "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" actor Avery Brooks serving as the stage director, will be presented Thursday through Saturday nights at JALC's main hall, with the last performance recorded for later broadcast on XM satellite radio. The following Saturday there will be two performances at the Harlem church.
Marsalis says that though the piece was commissioned by JALC to celebrate the Harlem church's bicentennial, the music has a deeper, personal spiritual meaning for him. The trumpeter says he wrote the piece for his grandmother and great-aunt, both born around the turn of the 20th century.
"Both of them were domestic workers and very religious and quiet spiritual people," said Marsalis. "I love those people because of the feeling they had and the religion gave them a large part of that feeling. It was a feeling of warmth and of a soulfulness and an engagement with the world ... not by escaping things but through confronting them with the power of love."
Before composing the music, Marsalis spent hours talking with Butts about the significance of each part of the prayer service. He further drew upon his diverse influences: his music professor father's lessons about traditional spirituals, hymns and gospel music; his own experience as a classical trumpeter playing the religious works of Bach, Handel and Palestrina; and his encyclopedic knowledge of all styles of jazz dating back to its roots in his native New Orleans.
Marsalis also highlighted the common links between jazz and the African-American religious rite by including call-and-response patterns and leaving room for improvisation.
Both Marsalis and Butts acknowledge that such a collaboration would have been unlikely a century ago when many black preachers denounced jazz as the "devil's music." Continue >>
Comments