The Brooklyn Rail

I had a discussion with a friend on personal responses to the mess we’re in politically. She was completely depressed by the news and I responded, “Well, you’ve still got to enjoy your life.” This got me thinking: does engagement with a cause, a strong desire to protect what we value, preclude ordinary paths to happiness? If we can see that the American version of fascism is on the rise, do we still, like the village inhabitants in The Zone of Interest, tend our gardens, inured to the realities taking root around us? 

Yet I still find myself seeking beauty, as a wonder and as a balm, because the search for beauty is also a search for meaning. Our regard for what we love, our coming back to it, is its own kind of pushback against the unharnessed power directives of the state. Creative statements are themselves statements of being, of will, of solidity, and of remaining rooted; as Walt Whitman writes in his monumental ode to the individual among many, “Song of Myself,” “My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite.”

An allied response is a search for spiritual repose in a world of confusion. With the news coming at us full speed daily, fractious and invasive, do we have any sacred space in which to dwell? Two recent recordings, by the ensemble Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness and by pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, engage in musical explorations of this question, newly imagining how traditional forms of worship can merge with ever-evolving musical practices.

Pitch, Rhythm and Consciousness is comprised of a group of affiliated musicians led by saxophonist Tony Jones and violinist Charlie Burnham. Since debuting in 2011, they’ve hosted various collaborators, and for their latest recording, Sextet (Reva Records), they have expanded to include original drummer Kenny Wollesen, as well as newer additions cellist Marika Hughes, bassist Rashaan Carter, and second saxophonist Jessica Jones. The recording makes open-hearted forays into spiritual matters, starting with the opening cut, “I Shall Not Want.” It recasts the frequently memorized and recited Lord’s Prayer, beginning “The Lord is my shepherd.” Burnham engages the lyric with his pleading cry of a voice, transforming it from a ritualized recitation to a passionate cri de coeur. Elsewhere, there are Jewish melodies, Buddhist creation stories, and a free approach to form. The band traffics in the unexpected, whether in its melodic twists or its shifts of energy, with Jones often emerging as a wizened voice in the fray. The band absorbs all manner of influences, but finds a folk-inflected chamber jazz style of its own. 

Their name expresses their range, suggesting the way they employ musical idioms to interpret and embody types of consciousness, making that basic connection—music as a form of inquiry—more explicit. These are statements of multiplicity. Their building up and collapsing of song form through elliptical progressions feels organic, based on trust. There is an extraordinary balancing of the six parts, an innate respect for what it takes to complete the sound of the ensemble. They seem to know instinctively that the way to knowledge is reached by way of the open hand, not the closed fist.

Another type of spiritual journey takes place in the new recording by the pianist Isaiah J. Thompson, The Book of Isaiah: Modern Jazz Ministry (Mack Avenue). A blazing young presence, a 2018 finalist in the prestigious Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz International Piano Competition, he is brilliantly versed in jazz repertoire. Playing with a New Orleans-leaning ensemble—including drummer Herlin Riley (who plays the tambourine on the album) and bassist Marty Jaffe—Thompson digs into a cut in the declaratory style of the religious works of Duke Ellington and Mary Lou Williams, as well as their acolyte Wynton Marsalis.

For Thompson, the turn toward this particular jazz tradition fused with his own spiritual journey. Troubled by physical pain brought on by playing, he began to ask basic questions about his purpose, as a musician and as a person, and turned toward scripture. The inaugural cut of his new recording, “The Prophet,” is set off on a loping, 5/4 clip that exerts a tidal pull. Thompson returns to the spirit of church music, undergirded by jazz. Like the hard bop style this is partly modeled on, it is determined to spin the listener into its swing.

This easy merger of traditions recalls a great Cannonball Adderley live recording, in which he explains the origins of the Bobby Timmons tune, “Dis Here”: “This one is a jazz waltz, although it has all sorts of properties. It’s simultaneously a shout and a chant, depending on whether you know anything about the roots of church music and all that—meaning soul church music, I don’t mean Bach chorales, that’s different.” As the surging, extended Thompson cut nears its end, a vocal chant reminiscent of church-adjacent jazz oratorios emerges, with the repeated lyric, “I am free / got no chains on me.” The music passionately leans into this sentiment, recalling the unifying power of sacred text. Again, the lyric reads as an existential statement of purpose, a demand for true selfhood and the liberation that accompanies it. 

These are perilous times for our country. Besides the astonishing downturn caused by the President’s disastrous economic policies, basic rights of citizens have been badly eroded. As New York Times columnist Ezra Klein noted in a podcast, “The emergency is here. The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It is happening now.” This stark reality took me from the self-determination expressed by Whitman to the defiantly flippant words of another favorite poet, Frank O’Hara. In the title poem of his collection, Meditations in an Emergency, he strays through sense and nonsense, the joy of words for their own sake meshed with simple, spot-on observations. His opening questions define the terms of his argument by dispensing with the notions of rectitude and logic altogether: “Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French?” Yet, just when he seems to be simply in it for a lark, he offers up this needy observation that has always made perfect sense to me: “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”

The narrator winds up with a homegrown escape plan: “I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead.” We may choose fight or flight, engagement or exile, or we may recognize that these choices are not mutually exclusive, that we are all bound to combine them in our own ways. Addressing the political emergency brought on by the betrayal of our country’s ideals is crucial, but so is the spiritual emergency that accompanies it. Musical expression always provides an avenue for addressing our state of being; when it wrestles directly with questions of faith and draws on the centuries of tradition behind those questions, it emerges richer for it. And as listeners and fellow travelers, so do we.