What is the significance of music in worship? Why play jazz rather than other types of music?
These are the two questions which I would like to discuss in relation to my own work on early Christian theology. Contemporary worship and liturgical jazz may seem rather far removed from the early Church but it, too, was preoccupied with similar questions: what role does music have – and most especially, what role does spontaneous, extemporary, musical expression have – in worship?
I don’t want to get waylaid by definitions, although almost every key word I have used so far begs for further elucidation: what do I mean by ‘music’, by ‘worship’, by ‘liturgy’, indeed, by ‘jazz’? I hope that by the end of this paper what is meant by these terms will become clearer from the contexts in which they are used.
