Author’s latest book looks at jazz and link to religion ....

By CLIFF BELLAMY - Associated Press
Saturday, May 16, 2015
DURHAM, N.C. (AP) - Many listeners of jazz speak of their first encounter with the music in terms of a conversion experience. One hears stories, from listeners and musicians, of a particular recording or performance that drew them into the music, and transformed their way of listening.

Jason C. Bivins writes of that kind of experience in the acknowledgements section of his new book “Spirits Rejoice! Jazz and American Religion” (Oxford University Press, $29.95). He first “started to fall for jazz via those Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk records,” Bivins writes. Later, as a student at Oberlin College, he “plunged into the deep end of the pool” when a friend played him a recording by the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Bivins was “transfixed, smitten, in love with the sound of John McLaughlin’s guitar and with the incredible, impossible lines he played in rhythms I’d never heard.”

That experience, Bivins said in a phone interview, “opened me up to a different way of thinking about art and relating to people. … It was totally a conversion experience.”

Bivins is a guitarist and a professor of religious studies at N.C. State University. His previous books are “Religion of Fear” and “The Fracture of Good Order: Christian Antiliberalism and the Challenge to American Politics.” Bivins said he is a self-taught jazz guitarist who has been lucky to be at schools where there were lots of music students.

As a scholar, he decided to turn from politics and religion to the vital connection between jazz and American religion. “I always thought that someone would scoop me on this book,” Bivins said. There are books on the religious and spiritual connections of composers like Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, as well as books about early 20th century jazz and the African-American church, but Bivins thought there needed to be a comparative study about the music and its relationship to ritual and community, he said. What happens, he asked himself, when we think of music not just as an accompaniment to religious settings, but as something that shapes culture?

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