Jazz Psalms

So the Art & Spirit festival was amazing. Many wonderful things happened -- I urge everyone to go next year if they can. I've been to many festivals and several conferences -- this was something special.

And I think something special got started.

In my reading I mentioned -- off hand -- that some of my devotional stuff (notably the Book of Wisdom, etc) seemed to me liberto without opera, psalms without the music; that they didn't seem complete. And that I thought they'd go with jazz. (I'm becoming interested in scored space in these poems, which seems to me a sister to the use of silence in jazz.)

It turns out a jazz musican/composer who played earlier in the festival is working on instrumental "psalms." So he perked right up, and soon swooped down. So we're going to see what happens when we put these two things together. Having heard his group play, I'm thrilled with the idea. He gave me a demo of something called "Psalm 88," and it did seem to want a voice, somehow, though it was hard to put a finger the shape of that wanting.

And then we meet the commissioning editor of Novalis Press who started talking about the spoken word/music/"para-liturgical" line he wants to start, and how would we like to be involved ....

So I'm awfully amazingly wonderfully enthused about all this.

Wow.