Seeking things above

A great night of telly tonight with two music documentary programmes of thought provoking quality.

The first was a 90th birthday tribute to Dave Brubeck, American master Jazz pianist and composer, hosted by Clint Eastwood, with Jamie Cullum and Sting among the guests. It was a truly inspirational  watch.

Thanks to my sister June (always awake to contemporary culture) , and my local Scoutmaster Penry Jones,(not long back from National Service), by the time adolescence hit me in my home town of Ystrad Mynach I was listening to, and engaged by contemporary Jazz. Aged fifteen, I knew every note of Brubeck's 'Take Five' (the biggest selling Jazz single of all time) by heart, and many more tracks of his first few albums.

I must admit, I have not followed Brubeck's career in the fifty years since then, and have only recently become aware of the way he is honoured as a Grand Master in the world of American music. He still does Jazz inspiringly, but also choral and orchestral works and chamber music of great quality. He has been married to his wife Iola for as long as I have been alive. Of their six children, four are musicians of standing in their own right, and they still perform with him. In these unstable times, this is a testimony to the value of family life to be celebrated in its own right.

Tonight I learned that Brubeck became a Catholic when he was sixty, after working on a musical setting of the Propers of the Mass (Kyries, Santus & Agnus Dei) for Pope John Paul II's visit to California. From what he said about this in the interview, his engagement with the text he was setting to music was what led him to make his commitment to the church.  Yet another instance of the old missionary maxim  'the eucharist converts'. It's an idea I can trace back to John Wesley, who was convinced that the celebration of the sacrament had the power to move people to faith commitment.

It's true in my experience too. I have seen the mystery of the sacrament at work in others, though never in any straightforward way. For some, reflecting on the set texts and working on them (like Brubeck did), touches the heart. For others it's visual symbols and ritual which spark the awakening, while for yet others, it's the experience of being with individuals of so many differences, united in the act of prayer, singing or listening, that communicates the life giving importance of belonging to the church - not as a social institution of power and significance, but as a companionship of souls awakened to the meaning and purpose that the Gospel conveys.

It was most encouraging to learn about Brubeck's fertile creative life, and his un-institutionalised witness to faith in a prime time Friday TV programme.

Immediately following this was a documentary entitled 'Krautrock', the somewhat pejorative designation given to the German contemporary music scene 1970-1990. German pop music in the sixties was as bland and ineffective as anything from the Hitler years, and young people growing up post-war, were conscious that 'estabishment' elders of their time were for the most part those who had run their society under Nazi control. Coming to terms with this was painful, and making a fresh start even harder. On the music scene some innovators strived for a radical break with the anodyne music of the present (don't mention the war), but found no value in emulating the pop music of America or the rest of Europe. 

So, innovators looked 'above and beyond', to 'celestial' abstract sounds, uncontaminated by political reference - aided by the new technology of music synthesisers and sound samplers. Some musicians set their ears to listen afresh to the sounds of their everyday environment, and then to emulate these sounds and incorporate them into their new music. Xanakis, Stockhausen and Cage are famed as composers of 'serious'  electronic music in this era, but there were also groups of musicians working collectively in performing live or on records new forms of music that gave birth to today's popular electronic dance music scene. 

As one brought up on Jazz, and music with accessible melodic, harmonic and rhythmic content, I've found abstract electronic music fascinating but elusive to engage with. I often like the sounds, but find it hard to make sense of what it all conveys. This music documentary gave me a fresh insight into what inspired and drove those seminally creative artists of the seventies. 

For Brubeck and for the 'Krautrockers' how to take the given, yet go beyond it to some place new, rather than just please the established audience was the perpetual challenge. Would that the preaching of the Gospel was better understood in these terms.