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Happy Friday, everyone! This is the first proper post for my Friday recommendations / reviews-lite series, "Tuning In," where I'm sharing podcasts, videos, music, and media that's worth a listen or look this weekend. I make no pretense to originality, but hopefully this can serve as a reminder of your favourites or an introduction to someone else's!
Today I'm highlighting an album of music that sits firmly in the Christian tradition, but in weeks ahead I intend to range far and wide. And if something isn't necessarily at home for you, do at least dip your toes in -- you may be pleasantly surprised to find the water's warm.
Mike Janzen's The Psalms Project was one of my most-anticipated musical releases of 2020. I've heard Mike in concert a couple times, and he brings terrific good humour and virtuosity to jazz, folk, and funk pieces on solo piano or with upright bass and drums (the Mike Janzen Trio). This album is different, though. Mike tells the story of how shortly after a friend invited him to compose some music based on the Psalms, a serious concussion brought his busy schedule to a halt and plunged him into a period of pain and discouragement that the cries and laments of the Psalms really spoke to.
One might expect startling, unusual reinterpretations of the Psalms from a virtuous jazz pianist, but while the musicianship on these albums (Volumes I & II released, Vol. III TBA) is excellent, it tends not to fight for the listener's attention. Many of the melodies are written in a folk ballad style, and the rhythmic drive often comes from staccato strings or deep, acoustic rolling drums. The vocal harmonies and tasteful ornamentation fill out the soundscape with warmth and joy that make for inviting, contagious music.
These are very human songs that reach out through the long years of the Psalms to touch the divine. The project's website captures the ethos of the album in its offer to listeners: "Play the music, share the music, and sit with the music letting these prayers sing over you." Like the ancient Psalms they're re-expressing, Janzen's songs are meditations, musically personable tracks that gather musicians and listeners together in community around the beauty and pain found in the original Hebrew poetry. Despite what some philosophical traditions have argued, pain in itself is meaningless (Keller, Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering); when it can be named, shared, and given to God, though, perhaps it can be borne. Introducing the album, Mike writes:
The words of these ancient prayers were full of cries to God in times of great distress. They lifted my spirits even though my own circumstances weren't changing.
I don't know that The Psalms Project will impress you, but it may lift your spirits. It's the right album for today.
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