Jazz, the Blues, and Jesus

Kasey Cox

Define the universe and give three examples.

That’s the punch line to a joke I heard in college, when we were cramming for final exams. The “funny” preamble is this: on the day of the final exam in Philosophy, the professor will hand you the dreaded blank blue book, point to the above question written on the blackboard, and say, “You have one hour.”

I have to say, I feel a little like I’m in the same position trying to write a review on Donald Miller’s book, “Blue Like Jazz”. The title is apt, but just as illusive as placing this book in a genre, or defining jazz.

Try to define jazz music. I’m a music lover, and have even done some performing in various choral groups, school bands, and in front of many a campfire. I can converse confidently about many kinds of music and music experiences, but I’m intimidated to flesh out JAZZ. Let the jazz musicians or the music professors tell you, I’ll say. Go to the experts for that one. But when Louis Armstrong was asked, his reply was, “Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never know.”

There are, of course, many experiences in our lives that remain difficult to explain. Take GOD. We as a human race have written millions of books on God. The books we believe were directly inspired by God we call our sacred texts. In addition to these “God-breathed” texts, we’ve written ad infinitum attempting to define, explain, defend, and share our faith in God. “Blue Like Jazz” is one such book. C.S. Lewis wrote several books that fall under the term “apologetics”, the subsection of theology that focuses on academic or logical proof of Christianity as truth.

In many aspects, Don Miller’s books could be on the same shelf with Lewis’s apologetic texts. “Blue Like Jazz” also reads like a memoir, or an anthology of essays about Christian life in the 21st Century. The praise that comes to Miller from the literary community and folks in the Christian church liken him to a male Anne Lamott, whose books “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith” and “Grace (Eventually)” continue to touch people across many denominations.

So what does Don Miller actually say about God, faith, and himself in this book? His tone is conversational, an approach that has garnered Miller both criticism and adoration. I read some reviews that unfavorably compared Miller’s writing to “a glorified blog … meandering in [the] purpose to get to a point that never comes.” For many readers, especially younger Christians or those who have become disillusioned with puffed-up preaching, Miller’s writing is a breath of fresh air.

I had mixed feelings while reading this book, but take that with a grain of salt, because I have mixed feelings about God, faith, and myself. Also, it is important to note that Don Miller wrote “Blue Like Jazz” from the perspective of a man (which I am not), who lives in Seattle (which I don’t), mostly interacting with a college population who look at you as though you’ve sprouted an extra head if you admit that you’re a Christian. That is not the day-to-day experience of most of us who live in Wellsboro and surrounding environs, nor does that sound anything like my growing up years or my time in college. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what Don Miller had to say to ME. Yet I found myself continuing to read, occasionally laughing out loud, often brushing a tear from the corner of my eye.

That’s where JAZZ comes in. Though there are many definitions out there, most people writing on jazz agree on a few basics: jazz starts with a theme, and a strong rhythmic understructure, from which musicians improvise, playing with variations in chord structure, meter, harmonics and more, to express themselves and the mood they wish to convey. The mood can be as complex as the entire range of human emotion, and can change as quickly, as the history of jazz music has, encompassing everything from New Orleans funeral marches to swing to big band. In order to play jazz, a musician need not be classically taught – indeed, most of the earliest and greatest weren’t – but a musician must have a deep understanding of music and of the basic theme he’s building on. This can be said for Don Miller’s writing about being a Christian. At one point, he clearly states that he does not want to defend Christianity; he wants to talk about Jesus. This he does, with improvisatory, virtuosic style.