Sacred Swing: The Sacralizaiton of Jazz in American Bahá'í Community

By E. Taylor Atkins

Before I became a Bahá'í, I was convinced that the only people I knew who seemed to understand God as I understood Him were jazz musicians.

—Marvin "Doc" Holladay

[M]usic and musicians must help to set things right.
—Dizzy Gillespie

Once condemned as "the devil's music," jazz music has assumed a sacred aura. Since the mid-twentieth century, many prominent jazz artists have infused their music with an overt spirituality, and have been met by listeners turning to jazz for a sacred experience. The release of John Coltrane's majestic A Love Supreme (1965), which paid unabashed tribute to God, "to whom all Praise is due," was but the culmination of a broader trend. Compositions by Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, Mary Lou Williams, and Jimmy Smith paid musical homage to the African American church, while other musicians, such as Art Blakey (Abdullah Ibn Buhaina), Idrees Sulieman, Sahib Shihab, Yusef Lateef, and Kenny Clarke (Liaqat Alí Salaam)—converted to Islam. Pharoah Sanders, Tony Scott, and Alice Coltrane explicitly evoked Asian mysticism and spiritual practice in their music. Inspired to (re)situate mystical experience and spiritual transcendence within the theory and practice of improvised music, consciously rejecting secular commercialism and modernist aestheticism, these artists created jazz-informed Buddhist or Hindu meditation aids in addition to renditions of African American spirituals and gospel, Jewish klezmer, and Afro-Caribbean santería ritual music. A recent National Public Radio commentary defined jazz as "the sound of God laughing." "The devil's music" has clearly changed hands.