A point of entry into Spirits Rejoice! can be found in the two epigraphs to its closing chapter (255). One is from Emerson's 1844 essay “The Poet,” where Emerson laments the failure to write “those primal warblings” of “that region where the air is music.” Emerson's interest in music was aesthetic rather than auditory.Footnote ¹ It is not a surprise that he was irritated by the young man next door who practiced every night on his drum kit; and yet he also admitted to a cloth ear for much less boisterous music. On the other hand, Emerson was an inspired and inspiring perpetrator of linguistic action as an attempt to reach for (in William James's phrase) “the keynote of the universe.”Footnote ² Emerson's ecstatically musical language frequently appears in his journals, sometimes in essays such as “The Poet,” and most often in his lecture performances. According to James Russell Lowell, even Emerson's most chaotic lecture made him see stars and hear trumpets. John Jay Chapman wrote that Emerson's gift was to open “the shutters of the spirit.”Footnote ³ This is a good description of the aim of Spirits Rejoice!, and Emerson may be regarded as its godfather. As Richard Poirier remarked in “The Deed of Writing” (the Prologue to his 1987 The Renewal of Literature), “we need to keep messing up the idiom,” and Emerson stands at the head of a line of pragmatist messers.Footnote ⁴ Michael Magee, in Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing (2004), has identified a genealogy through William James to Ralph Ellison to Frank O'Hara, and thence to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and (later) Ornette Coleman at the Five Spot Café. It is a pity that Spirits Rejoice! makes no reference to Emancipating Pragmatism.

The other epigraph of the final chapter, “Beyond ‘Religion’,” is the author's rejected alternative title after he discovered that Spirits Rejoice! had already been used as the title of a German monograph on the tenor saxophonist Albert Ayler (255, 329). It would have been a more prosaic title, but it is nevertheless apt, for Jason Bivins consistently rejects a religious taxonomy, requiring the reader instead to “build your own system” (121). Drawing on his own experience as a guitarist, and as the author of two earlier books on the sociopolitics of American religion, Bivins argues that it is impossible fully to understand either jazz or American religion without grasping the integral relation between the two. He is less interested in jazz as an institutional transmitter, and more in looking beyond “parameters” to “a dizzy surplus of themes, practices, and creations in traditions jazz and religious: new bodily practices, music as a vehicle for new experiences of intersubjectivity, and the flowering of religious imagination through sonic eclecticism and combination” (29). This is a venturesome restatement of the “pragmatic” view demonstrated in James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), which refuses a precise definition and ignores “the institutional branch” of religion completely in favour of “the personal branch.” Bivins also invokes Ralph Ellison, who suggests that the “Negro American style” provides a monitor of “the sudden turns, shocks and swift changes of pace (all jazz-shaped) that serve to remind us that the world is ever unexplored.”Footnote ⁵

Spirits Rejoice! is an exploration of the personal beliefs of jazz musicians, using interviews and recordings, from Yusef Lateef's album Prayer to the East (1957) onwards. The reader will not find here an ethnography of the New Orleans funeral, or the importance of the Mount Zion Baptist Church choir to the career of Sarah Vaughan. Instead, the text is constructed in two groups, each of four meditations divided by a brief interval: “Pause. / And Begin Again.” The book could therefore be modelled on Duke Ellington's Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue, less the 1956 Newport performance with Paul Gonsalves's “wailing” interval than the 1937 recording, where a pause was enforced by the need to turn the record over. The book's two sections present variations on the “religiosities” (16) of Bivins's chosen musicians, and as a result reflect the quality of those musicians. Some of the communicants are obvious candidates for the elect: as well as Ayler and Ellington, there are valuable appearances by Alice and John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Sun Ra, and Mary Lou Williams. The nature of worship is as various as Scientology and shamanism, Taoism and theosophy. Sometimes, as in the case of Anthony Braxton's Tri-Axium system, the integration of metaphysics and music is highly complex. Sometimes it is obtuse. Ornette Coleman notes that the word “‘God’ … spells ‘Dog’ backwards. So that puts us in the dark” (quoted at 226). This is a childish joke, displaying an ignorance of etymology, and best kept in the dark. But that is the nature of risk that is one of the qualities of jazz.