Congratulations to our plenary performer Helen Sung, who won the 2022 Charlie Parker Jazz Competition Prize! We are so excited about her performance with Dana Gioia following the opening banquet of the Catholic Imagination Conference. In a performance of his poem “Pity the Beautiful,” you will hear a bit of Sung at the opening. Her album “Sung With Words” features several of Gioia’s lyrics.
Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes….
Jazz seems to be abounding in Christian arts circles right now. There’s an opportunity with the Trinity Forum to hear a discussion about Jazz, Hope and the Gospel next week (Aug 5).
One of our panels will also feature Toni Morrison who wrote a novel titled Jazz. If you have not read Morrison or if you’re looking for ways to understand her Catholic faith, I’d recommend Nadra Nittle’s book Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision. As part of my course on Catholic American Writers at the University of St. Thomas, Houston; I’ll be teaching Morrison’s most Catholic novel, Paradise.
Morrison writes of social injustice and race from a Catholic perspective. In his conversation about new collection of poetry (Slant 2022), Paul Mariani explains why he, as a Catholic artist, engaged social injustice:
“I admire those poets who have raged against the dark, but for me, it’s better to point to myself as one who stumbles along, painfully aware he didn’t do more, and trying to get some of it right.”
Morrison both rages against the dark in her work and moves forward in an inspiring way. Doesn’t that sound like a description of jazz?
I have to thank Gloria Purvis, one of our keynote speakers, for pointing me towards the jazz Mass written by Mary Lou William’s. Maybe we’ll have space at the fifth iteration of the Catholic Imagination Conference to see this performed.
We’ll have more information on that fifth iteration of the conference, if you attend this year’s event. Register here and share the information with friends.