My paid Sunday position with the Presbyterians, though it involves a wide variety of music, is at least nominally rooted in the classics. I didn’t blink an eye when we sang “My Lord, What a Mornin’”, was a tad scornful when we made our way through Rutter, and was slightly bewildered with some Contemporary Christian a cappella.
And now for Shrove Tuesday, we’re singing vocal jazz. I’m not necessarily agin’ it, given that the harmonies are really cool (my jazz theory is non-existent), but it is a bit of a stretch. It’s going to be a “Saints and Sinners” concert, and we’re going t be making our way through “Straighten Up and Fly Right”, a close harmony arrangement of Lennon/McCartney’s “Michelle” and, most unusual of all, the first two movements of Bob Chilcott’s A Little Jazz Mass.
First of all, let me say that I applaud Mr. Chilcott for attempting this. As a former King’s Singer, he obviously has the chops to put this together, and its clear that he loves the musical wellspring from which this flows. It’s also interesting to note that, he being English, he doesn’t have the racial cultural baggage that many composers in this country would have in dealing with jazz (it was the same with Mick/Keef and the blues). So, he just jumps right in.
Second, let me say that he doesn’t go for the jugular in this piece: this isn’t Missa Thelonious Monk. It reminds me of nothing so much as The Four Freshmen. There’s no improvisation written into the piece. Indeed, the Oxford University Press font in which it is typeset makes it appear like it’s another in the Tudor Anthem series. There’s no direction to “swing” the eighth notes either, which, being American, we automatically did.
I will keep you in suspense no longer:
[There seem to be a plethora of Asian choirs performing the piece on the Tube of You. I don't know whether because they all had to do it for a competition, or that Chilcott is inordinately popular in Japan and South Korea.]
I play the video not to make a joke (well, maybe not only to make a joke), but to say this. After we had gone through it a few times, the director asked, in a serious tone, whether this piece made anyone in the choir uncomfortable.
*****
For my Sunday morning choir’s upcoming Cabaret performance, we’re going to sing two pieces, a choral arrangement of “Masquerade” from Phantom of the Opera, and a vocal jazz arrangement of “All that Jazz” from Chicago. After learning major portions of the latter, our director asked if everyone was comfortable singing it.
Now, some of it, I think was because we were a church choir singing for a church event (though not a religious service by any means). However most of the lyrics had been toned down because this repertoire is primarily sung by high schoolers: “the gin is cold” was changed to “the ice is cold.” So, it wasn’t that we were singing nasty words.
But I do think that it had something to do with the style. Though we are a church that has no problem singing the South African anti-apartheid “Siyahamba” and the breadth of spirirtuals, we still are unsure about the jazz idiom. It’s not that the music is simplistic (most of these arrangements are in a pretty extended diatonic idiom) or unfamiliar (to most people.) We still haven’t reconciled jazz music with the sacred, except on a one-off, “cute”, “stunt” basis. The jazz mass above is much deeper harmonically than anything John Rutter puts out for public consumption, so it’s not wanting in that area. It’s as difficult to learn as anything we sing by Kenneth Leighton.
It’s just weird that two very musical people would put out the same question on the same Sunday with two different pieces of music in the same style.
