Sacred jazz
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Jazz has always incorporated aspects of African American sacred music including spirituals and hymns, which jazz musicians often performed renditions of as part of their repertoire. Many other jazz artists also borrowed from black gospel music. Before World War II, American churches, black and white, regarded jazz and blues with suspicion or outright hostility as "the devil's music". It was only after World War II that a few jazz musicians began to compose and perform extended works intended for religious settings or expression.
Since the 1950s, sacred and liturgical music has been performed and recorded by many jazz composers and musicians,[4][1] combining black gospel music and jazz to produce "sacred jazz", similar in religious intent, but differing in gospel's lack of extended instrumental passages, instrumental improvisation, hymn-like structure, and concern with social and political issues. Mahalia Jackson and Rosetta Tharpe contributed to gospel and sacred jazz along with pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, known for her Jazz Masses in the 1950s, and Duke Ellington. Ellington included "Come Sunday" and "Twenty-third Psalm" in Black, Brown and Beige, an album he recorded in 1958 with Jackson.
The societal changes of the 1960s included changes in attitudes toward the arts in both the Catholic and Protestant churches, which slowly became more open to the liturgical use of jazz.[1] Mary Lou Williams continued composing sacred jazz, including her "Black Christ of the Andes" (1964) in honor of newly canonized Martin De Porres, and Duke Ellington wrote three Sacred Concerts: 1965 – A Concert of Sacred Music; 1968 – Second Sacred Concert; 1973 – Third Sacred Concert. Other artists including John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Lalo Schifrin and Vince Guaraldi performed and recorded major sacred jazz works. Most works were in the Christian tradition, but some were inspired by Asian and African religious traditions, such as John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," Alice Coltrane's "Universal Consciousness", and Pharoah Sanders' "Karma".
One of the most popular figures in the modern form of the genre is the African-American saxophonist Kirk Whalum, whose fusion of jazz and Black Gospel music has garnered a litany of Grammy Award nominations and produced a number of bestselling albums.[5][6][7][8]
