Arts & Culture
FROM THE 1920s until her death in 1981, Black jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams injected energy and innovation into the genre and, via three jazz Masses composed after her conversion to Catholicism in the 1950s, into the church. Still, her music is sometimes overlooked, while the popularity of male jazz musicians’ work—including her mentees Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker—persists.
In this century, Deanna Witkowski is amplifying Williams’ works of music and faith. Witkowski is a jazz pianist herself, inspired by Williams, and a doctoral student in the jazz studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. She is restoring and recording general and liturgical compositions by Williams, some of which haven’t been recorded since 1944. And she has written a biography of the pioneer, Mary Lou Williams: Music for the Soul (Liturgical Press). Witkowski spoke with Sojourners associate editor Da’Shawn Mosley about the book and its namesake.
Da’Shawn Mosley: How did you become interested enough in Mary Lou Williams to write a biography of her?
Deanna Witkowski: In 2000, Dr. Billy Taylor, a jazz musician himself and the judge from a jazz piano competition I had played the year before, contacted me and said, “Come bring your quintet to play at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in the spring.” And so of course I said, “Yes, I would love to do this.” And then thought, “I really don’t know Mary Lou Williams’ music.” That’s a very common thing, even among jazz musicians or aficionados. She has this reputation [as] this great pianist and composer who wrote big-band music for Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman and mentored all these famous jazz musicians—so we know Thelonious Monk. But her compositions aren’t very well known.
The actor and activist talks with Sojourners about faith, service, and his new film ‘12 Mighty Orphans.’
The God presentented in the new children’s book What Is God Like? is a shapeshifter. Matthew Paul Turner and the late Rachel Held Evans, with the help of Ying Hui Tan’s vibrant illustrations, depict God as a woman, a shepherd, a gardener, and even as a blanket fort.
I read a lot of news this week, and Baldwin had something to say about all of it.
Allow us to steal a few minutes of your attention for stories that will steal your heart.
More than usual this past week, I've needed small reminders about the possibility of justice. Why? Well, this week is the week of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I am no stranger to the ways that sports is often derided in faith and justice circles. But I contend that sports and competition offer valuable insights into what it means to be human.
Despite all the outsized power and privilege white evangelical communities hold, there is a dearth of spaces where people can process what it means to have grown up in the belly of it. Fortunately, there’s a whole slew of new films and documentaries that focus on white evangelical youth culture, offering some of us the chance to reflect on our upbringings as we figure out what it means to have white evangelical roots in a post-Trump world.
We wander round searching for demons
and making them of each other
when we find none. Out of feigned necessity,
the slightest difference becomes a reason
to tame—to vanquish—to stamp out until
we look up and catch sight of ourselves:
Shannon Dingle is a disabled activist, sex trafficking survivor, and author of recently released Living Brave. Her family’s grief over the sudden death of her husband, Lee, in July 2019 resonated with many worldwide. She discussed Living Brave with Liuan Huska, author of Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness.
LIUAN HUSKA: IT’S been almost two years since a rogue wave killed your husband, Lee, on a family beach vacation. You wrote about his death soon after it happened.
Shannon Dingle: Looking back on some of my writing, I’m so damn proud of my ability to capture where I was then. It is a record for me and my kids as much as for anyone else. I wanted to tell the story and protect how it was told.
Did the sexual abuse you experienced as a child influence how you wanted to tell your grief story? My brutal and raw honesty definitely comes from a place where I had horrific things happening that I couldn’t tell. I know how freeing it can be to put words to things. I write from a place where I know I’m the authority on what my life has been and what happened.
WE ARE LIVING in shouty times. The pandemic has raised the decibels of public debate, as we bellow and bark at each other across social media. And while we initially may have imagined that the coronavirus would bring us together—and in some ways it has—in many ways our civic life has only become more fractured and fragile. The murder of George Floyd last year unleashed a well of public grief and a wave of protests that revealed a widening political divide in the U.S., as did the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. And now vitriol over vaccines from an anti-science contingent threatens the hope of achieving herd immunity.
Perhaps, amid all this noise and tumult, the quiet biblical Book of Ruth has something powerful and profound to say, some reassuring balm and redemptive truth to offer our polarized world. Indeed, in the skilled hands of gifted poet Pádraig Ó Tuama and the late theologian Glenn Jordan, it is made new for our times. In Borders and Belonging, these two Irish men orbit the ancient narrative of a Moabite woman and her Jewish family, asking how “this apparently simple book situates itself at the very places where the tectonic plates of conflicted communities threaten to crack and split apart whole nations and societies.” With an eye to how Brexit-related tensions in Ireland threaten to reignite old conflicts and destroy a delicate peace, and as white nationalism gives rise to horrors in the U.S., Ó Tuama and Jordan explore the Book of Ruth’s extraordinary capacity to move us toward a different way of being in relation to one another, suggesting that “it offers us a way towards the healing of our fractures and the building of new and healthy relationships in the aftermath of trauma.”
A FEW WEEKS ago, a friend invited me to New York with them to see some art. After taking the commuter train down from New Haven, Conn., we made our way through Grand Central Station, onto the subway, then up a steep escalator, eventually arriving at the gallery’s entrance.
Visiting Manhattan during a pandemic is a fascinating study in strangeness. The Times Square subway station is so quiet you can hear your own footsteps. Sweaty players duel on a basketball court, and I am shocked by seeing unmasked faces in public. Even the experience of gallery hopping, one that used to be extremely familiar to me, feels askew. A few of the places we visit require a signed liability waiver before entering. Each desk is punctuated by a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. This imposing combination does not stop me from enjoying the work I see, however. There are many juxtapositions of color and line that sparkle in my brain. An image of a fabric store, itself made out of fabric, proves especially delightful. I see some art books that I think I might like to have in my home. I am glad to have gone.
‘I Finally See’
Prerelease tracks “Church Girl” and “Safe Passage” pave the way for British singer-songwriter Laura Mvula’s forthcoming album Pink Noise. The former gospel choir member brings introspection and the ’80s sounds of her youth to her third record, perfect for dancing. Atlantic Records.
A Common Thread
Muslim American Writers at Home: Stories, Essays and Poems of Identity, Diversity and Belonging gathers a range of Muslim identity and experience in the U.S. and Canada. Authors in the anthology share dreams and memories, shatter stereotypes, and speak to one another. Freedom Voices.
IN 2016, RAOUL PECK'S documentary I Am Not Your Negro used the life and work of James Baldwin to explore the underlying truths of racism in U.S. society. Peck said that after making that film, “Baldwin had firebombed every known field of bigotry I knew and annihilated any attempt at deniability of the racist monster that lurks in corners of our societies.”
Processing that experience led Peck to his new, ambitious HBO documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. In it, Peck expands on the themes of ignorance and resistance in our modern-day understanding of racism and on how our flawed historical understanding feeds those attitudes. Exterminate All the Brutes is also an essay film, with Peck, a Haitian immigrant, reflecting on his identity as a Black man who has lived in a variety of cultures and how that’s influenced his own art.
The series weaves voiceover and scripted dramatic scenes with information from groundbreaking works on European colonialism, Indigenous peoples, and racism—including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past, and Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes.
ON HIS DEBUT record, Palisade, released in 2012, Americana wunderkind Parker Millsap ends the title track singing with blues-soaked vocals, “Writing on a blank white page keeps my demons one more day away.” For Millsap, an Oklahoma native who now calls Nashville home, those lyrics weren’t just a young artist trying to sound profound; they spoke truth to his experience with music and faith.
“When I’m playing [music] with other people and for other people, there is something about it that will always feel spiritual to me,” says Millsap. “After all, that spiritual feeling, that’s the context I first received music in.”
Millsap grew up in a Pentecostal church in a small Oklahoma town, and says if people were going to speak in tongues or run around the sanctuary, it was almost always during the music. “I always resonated with using music to reach ecstatic states,” he says. “As soon as I could play enough chords to keep up, they put me down in front at church.”
OFTEN, WITH MEDITATION, I’m reminded of many people’s reaction to poetry. “I don’t get it,” they say, a little embarrassed to be admitting this to a writer and a former English teacher.
The first thing I think is: You must have had a really lousy teacher who taught you that poetry is something you “get”—a message you extract for a good grade. Poetry-phobes might feel a bit more relaxed when I tell them that’s not how poetry works. Often, with my favorite poems, I never fully get them. All I know is that reading and rereading them, the mystery stirs inside me again. In her lovely poem “Self-Portrait with Religion and Poetry,” Kate Daniels describes what happens to her when she deeply connects with a work of art:
... I lie down in the silence
of my mind and touch the world all over.
Clouds fly through me. Trees break the sky
above a frozen lake, and a footprint
startles its crust of snow.
Then I can type another page, or nurse
my hungry infant. I can take from the cupboard
the bread and the wine, the eggplant and garlic
my hands will transform into sustenance.
Historically, people love to opine on power. Whether it’s John Dalberg-Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” or Kanye West’s “No one man should have all that power,” the concept of concentrated power is taught as something to fear.
We work hard for diplomas and degrees, and yet as Jes Kast reminds college graduates, no title is more important — or utterly unearned — than being beloved.
Director Anthony Mandler's movie Monster, focuses in on a myriad of social issues — race, class, mass incarceration, crime, and the U.S. penal system — but it also is a monster movie of sorts.
The stories I read this week on the internet reminded me of the Ten Commandments, so please indulge this loose paraphrase of Exodus 20.