Posts from April 2013

What is a jam session?  This short video tells the story: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2rNUWAx-O0]     2 great trumpeters; Sean Jones and Marcus Printup caught on video in a trumpet “fight”.  Watch how 2 musicians come together, connect, challenge, enjoy and celebrate each other and the music they so obviously love:   [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfTmB_PLx0I]  

We continue with week 5 of our worship series:  Yes to the Mess: Surprising Lessons from Jazz & Acts.  This series is structured around a book called Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank J. Barrett.  Throughout this worship series we will hold Barrett’s reflections on jazz in creative tension with the development of the earliest church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.    This weeks worship will explore jamming and hanging out.  Worship will be…

“Jazz players look for and notice instability, disorder, novelty, emergence, and self-organization for their innovative potential rather than as something to be avoided, eliminated, or controlled.  Indeed, jazz bands are very much human systems living at the edge of chaos.  To understand their social complexity requires cultivating an aesthetic that values surrender and wonderment over certainty, appreciation over problem solving, listening and attunement over individual isolation.” (From Frank J. Barrett in Yes to the Mess, 68) Look at the photo…

  Frank Barrett (Yes to the Mess, 73-74) outlines three components of minimal structure that allow jazz players to coordinate… Jazz musicians work within clear constraints…they know that they need to orient their choices within a certain range of notes that fit within the chord or the scale, but they don’t have to stop and negotiate or debate which constraints are worth attending to. They simply trust that all the players will adjust to the patterns. In effect, they employ…

“I wish there were some way we could understand how important dietary law has been to the people of Israel. Most of us have eaten bacon all our lives,  and we do not think twice about combining milk and meat, but if we were first  century Jews, the very thought would make us break out in a cold sweat.  It would be like coming to church one morning to find pork chops and whiskey on the altar instead of bread and wine.”  Acts 11:1-18…

“A different type of fusion, represented by a mixing of jazz and classical music, also emerged as an important movement during the 1970’s….No artist better exemplified this powerful synthesis of disparate styles than pianist Keith Jarrett. The influence of classical music is, at times, as pronounced as the jazz ingredients of his playing…The calling card of (Keith) Jarrett’s achievement is…his ability to blend these various sources of inspiration into a coherent, persuasive whole.  Nowhere is this clearer than on his…

We continue with week 4 of our worship series:  Yes to the Mess: Surprising Lessons from Jazz & Acts.  This series is structured around a book called Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank J. Barrett.  Throughout this worship series we will hold Barrett’s reflections on jazz in creative tension with the development of the earliest church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.   This week worship at The Table will explore the balancing of freedom…

“Jazz improvisation assumes that there is affirmative potential waiting to be discovered from virtually any utterance, any chord, any note.”  from Yes to the Mess by Frank J. Barrett, p. 44. What are some affirmative potentials waiting to be discovered from practicing your faith?  How might you act on one of those potentials this day?

This week our worship will be rooted in Acts 9.36-43.  “Peter knelt down and prayed – Tabitha opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. (9.40)  I have known many folks who have died.  Some of them my close friends.  One of them my father.  I prayed next to the lifeless body of my father.  He didn’t come back to life.  I believe my prayers went unanswered.  With his death part of me died too.  The part of me…

Classically trained pianist, Friedrich Gulda, said that Jazz offers, “the rhythmic drive, the risk, the absolute contrast to the pale, academic approach I had been taught.” (from NYT)  Watch Gulda improvise with the brilliant Herbie Hancock.  Watch for the interaction between the two men.  What do you observe? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toZdvTBMvOk]

We continue with week 3 of our worship series:  Yes to the Mess: Surprising Lessons from Jazz & Acts.  This series is structured around a book called Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank J. Barrett.  Throughout this worship series we will hold Barrett’s reflections on jazz in creative tension with the development of the earliest church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.    Outline for Yes to the Mess April 7    Jazz: Mastering the…

“Evangelical friends of mine are always trying to trim the corners and smooth the rough edges of what they call My Witness in order to shove it into a tidy, born-again conversion narrative.  They want an exact date, even an hour, and I never know what to tell them.  The dateable conversion story has a venerable history.  Paul, the most famous Jew to embrace Jesus, established the prototype of the dramatic, datable rebirth.  He was walking on the road to…