The Core of Jazz and Prayer

The Miles Davis Quintet playing All Blues, which we're going to hear this evening to the words of the Friday evening Psalm, "Shiru L'Adonai Shir Chadash."

Dear friends,

On March 2nd, 1959 six musicians converged at a recording studio on 30th Street in Manhattan. The band leader had given the others some sketches of scales and melody lines, no sheet music, little instruction other than to improvise. After briefly going over the music, they began recording what would become what many consider the greatest Jazz album of all time, Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. 

Miles was bringing a new sound based less on chords, the bedrock of Jazz until that time, and more on modality. He was looking for greater freedom, for a living sound, for what he called “spontaneity.”  

Paradoxical though it may seem in a tradition that gives us the same words to say every day at the same time (and lots of them), this is what we are taught to strive toward in prayer. In Mishnah Avot we find: 

אַל תַּעַשׂ תְּפִלָּתְךָ קֶבַע, 

Don’t make your prayer fixed. 

Keva can also be translated as stuck in place or in time, automatic, something lifeless that you do without thinking.  

In music like in prayer, we are after the moment in its bright uniqueness. The rabbis talk about the word Kavanah as integral to prayer. Kavanah is normally translated as intention, but if we think about it in Jazz terms it transforms. A musician takes a solo. We can normally tell if they’re feeling it, if they’re going somewhere internal, if they’re listening and attuned to the other musicians. That’s Kavanah. It’s what you’re trying to hit, and in prayer what we’re trying to hit is this amorphous glob of meaning and time we call in English God, or in Hebrew Adonai, YHVH, being itself. If we are lacking Kavanah, we miss the mark.  

Another way to say it is that kavanah means play. When we are playing, we are present, we are beyond ourselves, we are in company. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott said it this way: 

“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” 

This, to my understanding is what Miles was working on, and what the rabbis in the Talmud were about when they jammed on the purpose of prayer. It’s what the Kabbalists were doing when they riffed their insanity into a book we now call the Zohar. It’s what we do when we come together as Jews to eat, pray or study. 

The Hebrew word for play is Lesachek. It’s practically the same as the word in Hebrew for laughing, letsachek. The bible actually uses both words interchangeably. Like there’s no laughter without spontaneity, there’s also no play without it, or prayer, nor is there great music. We plan to have all of the above this evening at Voodo Fe’s art gallery in Clinton Hill, The Spot, where, immersed in Voodo’s collection of Miles Davis art and fashion we will bring in Shabbat to the spontaneous sounds of Jazz. 

Hope to see you there!

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha