This week’s QuakerSpeak interviews musician Colton Weatherston. I love the way he relates the communication and collaboration of jazz musicians to Quaker worship:
Especially artists and musicians, we often don’t have the same point of view or even the same background. Each of us will bring a lot of baggage into the meeting of the musicians and we have to build trust with each other and people need to feel free to express their ideas as a soloist without feeling told by the leader how exactly to play — we have to work it out as an ensemble. And I think that’s very true with meetings also.
Those with long memories might remember that I interviewed Chad Stephenson after he made a comparison between new jazz traditionalists and Convergent Friends at the 2009 Ben Lomond conference (I believe he wrote an expanded version for the Spirit Rising Quaker anthology but I can’t find a link).
This is Chad here – it was good to see someone else use this analogy! Here is the link to my article, as I have gone ahead and published it on my blog site as of today (https://bit.ly/2qwokgl), since it seems relevant. You can also find a link to a review of Spirit Rising here, where it is mentioned, by Chuck Fager (https://bit.ly/2HCAyw4). Thanks for remember this – you have a great memory!
That’s great! I’ll share this next!