The New Bedford Jazz Ensemble at Jazz as a Unitarian Universalist 4th of July Church Service

Each year for the past quarter of a century, First Unitarian has hosted the Annual Jazz Service on the Sunday closest to July 4.

What's more, the traditional jazz group performance -- in which soloists alternately emerge from the group's collective musical effort to give an individual version of that group effort, and afterward go back into the ensemble -- is a classic American symbolic action for this bandstand called the world, for this grand jam session called life, for these improvisations that are our individual lives. And, as fiction author James Balwin superbly demonstrates at the end of his compelling, lyrical short story, "Sonny's Blues," it is the classic symbolic action for African American life, the historical human experience in which this wonderfully inclusive music is rooted and from which it rose, stemmed, and continues to blossom so beautifully among nearly all of the diverse and varigated peoples of the world....

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Each year for the past quarter of a century, First Unitarian has hosted the Annual Jazz Service on the Sunday closest to July 4.

What's more, the traditional jazz group performance -- in which soloists alternately emerge from the group's collective musical effort to give an individual version of that group effort, and afterward go back into the ensemble -- is a classic American symbolic action for this bandstand called the world, for this grand jam session called life, for these improvisations that are our individual lives. And, as fiction author James Balwin superbly demonstrates at the end of his compelling, lyrical short story, "Sonny's Blues," it is the classic symbolic action for African American life, the historical human experience in which this wonderfully inclusive music is rooted and from which it rose, stemmed, and continues to blossom so beautifully among nearly all of the diverse and varigated peoples of the world.

Indeed, "music is often a connection to and expression of the spirit(ual)." Be it by Bach or Bechet, by Beethoven or Basie, Bartok or Bird, or be it Billie singing "God Bless The Child," or the original works our own church's late member and co-founder of the annual concerts, jazz composer/arranger/saxophone virtuoso, Bobby Greene, or be any one of the famous Sacred Concerts of Duke Ellington.

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