April 25, 2008
Basie
Count Basie’s band is coming to town tonight, and today’s the Feast of St Mark. Coincidence. But maybe the two have a lot in common — minimalism and dynamics, to say the least.
Mark tells the same story as his synoptic colleagues, just notes the facts, builds anticipation, spares a lot of detail. Basie’s band has always followed the Count’s lead as a pianist — spare, appropriate, complete, special attention to what’s between the notes. Elijah’s “sound of gentle stillness” comes to mind (1 Kgs 19.12b, AV).
A music critic once likened the Basie band to the finer symphony orchestras with their equal attention not only to a uniform attack of a note, but as well, to its uniform release. Such ensemble playing — so utterly foreign to those who nowadays play amplifiers rather than music — leaves one with the sensation that a razorblade could be slipped between the notes.
Scott Peck often held up jazz bands and basketball teams as models of what he believed to be true community — people who knew one another’s skills and limits as well as how to incorporate them into an impressive whole often greater than the sum of its parts. In an age when some suspect pianissimo may be a variety of pizza at Papa John’s, any illustration of how churchers with a little imagination might be together is altogether welcome.
Let’s hear it for the One O’Clock Jump. Mark would surely have understood.
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