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Biography
[Transcribed from tape and edited for clarity.] |
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Conversation with Ozzie E. Smith, Jr. Ozzie Smith: Thanks for having me. Daniel Pawlus: We want to spend time talking about this interesting connection between your music and your ministry. You talked about it a little bit in the previous segment but help us understand when that calling happened for you. You were, I believe, a professional musician at the time, doing some other things. And then something moved in you and you said, I’ve got to do more than this. Ozzie Smith: I taught school in the day, played the clubs at night. At Olivet Baptist Church in Memphis, that I married into where my wife was Minister of Music, that’s where it happened because the pastor there, the late Kenneth T. Whalum, hired me as the church saxophonist and so I played in the services. I could not stand gospel music! This is the other thing. I couldn’t stand gospel music and I married a gospel musician, who was a banker by profession. So in playing, I found out that how I played in another arena, in another venue, in the jazz clubs and R&B and that kind of stuff, another kind of audience, but it took another kind of player to play in church. I remember the first time I played “Peace, Be Still” by the late James Cleveland in church, at my wife’s church. An old lady came up after I finished playing and she said, “Son, I heard a lot of learning in that playing. But I didn’t hear any burning in that playing!” I said, Oh?” I immediately understood what she was saying. The learning is one thing. That’s the way you learn the techniques, the etudes, the scales and all of that, but that does not touch the soul. And that’s what she was talking about, the burning, because the burning reaches beyond the instrument. It takes the technique and allows the technique to do other things. So it speaks from your heart. I was taken back by her comment but then it was my goal to get that. My wife had it, when she would sing when we were eating breakfast and bring me to tears. So that was the difference. Lillian Daniel: Did you feel that before being a church musician, when you played in the clubs and jazz, that you had the burning there and you were afraid to bring it into the church? Ozzie Smith: I always had church in my life. I’ve been going to church since I was in diapers. But that’s the thing, I was going to church. When I met me wife, she got me in church. There’s a difference. I noticed something about her. We were dating, and we do all this in life, and I noticed something about her. She had that burning that old lady was talking about: the way she spoke, the way she sang, the way she did it. I said, I don’t have it, and I found out you can’t fake it. You either have it or you don’t. So I said, I want that. I want that. Daniel Pawlus: What about the improvisational nature of jazz, in and of itself? I know our friend, who I saw speaking about this, Otis Moss III, recently, who loves jazz and I know you know him well, I’m sure. Talk a little bit about the connection of the improvisational nature of the music that you do and how you connect that to ministry, because I imagine as UCC pastors you’ve got to prepare a sermon, it’s got to be organized somehow. Ozzie Smith: Oh, yes. Daniel Pawlus: It might be an interesting process we could hear about. Ozzie Smith: The improvisational part of it is exactly what that lady was talking about. The hymn is a launching pad. In playing “Where He Leads Me I Will Follow,” I was just modulating upwards because that’s God leading you and God continuing to lead you. After a while you leave the melody and you improvise on what the spirit has caused to happen in you. The late John Coltrane, of course, when he recorded “Love Supreme,” his major work was when he crossed over and talked about God in the liner notes, making a few jazz musicians a little angry. But if you would hear the first number he plays on the acknowledgement, now it’s rather abstract when you listen to it because it’s atonal and you don’t know what he’s doing, but that was his step into the realm of God and of faith. Improvisational totally, but atonally. So the improv piece happens as the Spirit gives utterance to what I’m playing. Lillian Daniel: So a lot of people, I think, when they see a preacher get up there without notes and they think, oh, that person is improvising. Or they see a musician and they make it look easy. But what a musician will tell you is improvisation takes an enormous amount of practice and preparation to be able to do that. Ozzie Smith: You’ve got to know the melody. The melody is written down. The jazz musician calls it the lead sheet. So that establishes the chord progressions and everything like that. Everything that you do afterwards, the improvisation, is based on the melody. Lillian Smith: So as a preacher, what’s the melody? Ozzie Smith: The melody is that thing in the text, that the late Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Jeremiah Wright always told me, that will leap out and say “preach me” when you’re reading the text. The lectionary gives you the text, of course. I preach the lectionary, but there is something in that text that says preach me. So that becomes the melody and everything thereafter—because I’m a manuscript preacher—so all of the points, all of the issues, and also keeping in mind where the congregation is. After I exegete a text, I need to have exegeted the congregation. A pastor that does not exegete his or her congregation does not know who he or she is preaching to. I think Fred Craddock said it best: “You’re hurling words at strangers when you don’t know who you’re talking to.” Daniel Pawlus: Ozzie, you gave me an opening before when you said jazz musicians were upset about God being mentioned in liner notes. I want to ask you, as a professional musician who probably knows a lot of other professional musicians, what’s that spiritual faith walk like? Okay, I come from an entertainment background and I found in my experience that many people just didn’t have that as a priority in their life. They weren’t bad people, they just weren’t interested in organized religion, per se, didn’t find the value in it. I’m sure you could give us some interesting insights. Ozzie Smith: Well, the thing is, the church and the club were seen as two different places. That is secular. This is sacred. Well, the African mind said all is sacred. And so when jazz musicians got bit by the bug of faith, or wanted to cross over, when Coltrane wanted to cross over, when Duke Ellington wanted to cross over and wrote sacred concerts, he was hassled, too. When he wrote “Come Sunday,” they said, Why would you write that? You’ve been writing “Take the A Train.” You’ve been writing “Sophisticated Lady.” You’ve been writing all this stuff out here. He said to his critics, when asked how do you respond to your critics, he said, “Well, somebody has to have a job. Mine is to write music.” So you cross over. It’s all out there and when God begins to speak, it gets into your music. Lillian Daniel: You’re a very well known preacher and pastor. Do you feel that you chose that over the music or do you feel that perhaps you didn’t have to choose? Ozzie Smith: I feel like I didn’t have to choose because I accepted the calling at the age of forty and anybody who would accept a call to the ministry at the age of forty has to be out of their mind! I left everything to come to Chicago, when Dr. Jeremiah Wright said, “Look, you come to Chicago and we’ll send you to seminary.” So I didn’t understand at the moment what was happening. But like Abraham had to leave Haran, I had to leave Memphis and come up here and go to seminary. So all of that stuff got mixed in the roux. Theological education was the roux and then what has happened since that is the gumbo. Lillian Daniel: That’s wonderful. Daniel Pawlus: That’s fantastic. We’re so glad that you’ve been with us today. You’re doing great work with your new church building. We wish you all the best in that moving forward and keep inspiring us with the music, okay? Ozzie Smith: Thank you. |
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