Our Sound Is Our Wound by Winkett Lucy;

Author:Winkett, Lucy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Music, unlike any other art or discipline, requires the ability to express oneself with absolute commitment and passion while listening carefully and sensitively to another voice which may even contradict one’s own statement. The same two young people who might encounter each other at a checkpoint in the roles of border guard and citizen under occupation sit next to one another in this orchestra, playing the same music, equally striving for perfection of musical expression, and equally responsible for the result.15

The very act of making music together is a protest against the inequalities and divisions that human beings create and re-create in every century. It is not diversionary activity from the ‘real’ world of politics or economics, but is in itself a political act when such beauty is created by young people like these and many others in music therapy projects and housing estate choirs and instrumental groups all over the world.

In recording the story of the movement from silence to sound, from restriction to liberation, there is no better collection of sounds through which to do this than jazz.

The relationship between Christian faith and jazz music has not been straightforward, since jazz grew out of its nineteenth-century gospel roots to become a new way of making music in the early twentieth century in America. Although the music sounds melodic, it was highly controversial in its own day – not so much for the genre but for the fact that the same person would sing about faith in God and their experience of the world. For conservative churchgoers, Sister Wynona Carr (1924–76) and other artists such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Marie King were crossing an unacceptable line by singing gospel music and also jazz or blues. Wynona Carr (the ‘Sister’ was reportedly added by her producer to make her more appealing to the gospel audience) recorded some revolutionary versions of classics in the 1940s, although the studios didn’t release them as they were considered to be too controversial. She recorded a heavily jazz-influenced version of a gospel hit, ‘Our Father’, although the one that was released to the public was much more conservative.16 She didn’t receive the recognition she deserved in her lifetime, although later stars such as Aretha Franklin acknowledged their debt to her. She was truly a musical pioneer, a composer who felt free, not unlike Hildegard, to write lyrics and improvise music that was ahead of her day both in the Church and in the music world. The swinging of her song ‘In a Little While’ has a driving rhythm that makes you want to get up out of your seat and move to it. It’s not music to listen to or sing alone – its energy gives it the feeling of a revival meeting. It’s not long until the trials of life will be over, and we will be free: and it’s not just an individual dream, it’s hope for all God’s people.

From these gospel singers crossing over into the secular music world, jazz became

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