Hosea 8
Put the trumpet to your lips ..
Wynton Marsalis, one of the most easily recognizable jazz musicians in our day and one of the premier jazz trumpeters of all time was playing with a small, little-known band in a New York basement club. A few songs into their set, he walked to the front of the bandstand and began an unaccompanied solo of the 1930s ballad, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance with You.” One journalist records that the audience became rapt as Marsalis’s trumpet virtually wept in despair, almost gasping at times with the pain in the music.
Marsalis came to the final phrase, with each note coming slower and slower, with longer and longer pauses between each one: “I
don’t
stand
a
ghost
of
a
chance”
Then someone’s mobile phone went off.
It began to chirp an absurd little tune. The audience broke up into titters, the man with the phone jumped up and fled outside to take his call, and the spell was broken. “MAGIC RUINED,” the journalist scratched into his notepad.
But then Marsalis played the cellphone melody note for note. He played it again, with different accents. He began to play with it, spinning out a rhapsody on the silly little tune, changing keys several times. The audience settled down, slowly realizing that they were hearing something altogether extraordinary. Around and around Marsalis played for several minutes, weaving glory out of goofiness.
Finally, in a masterstroke, he closed the set seamlessly to the last two notes of his previous song: “ with you.” The audience exploded with applause.
(John G. Stackhouse, Jr., Faith Today)
Let’s copy our God today who brilliantly brings beauty out of ashes, applause out of annoyance, heroes from holocausts and love out of loss.
Learn to play the trumpet not with a sound that everyone has to listen to or else, but learn to play weaving in the sounds around you. Be adaptable, blend and embrace the true sound into the hurts and sounds of loss that are definitely there.
Missions Paul 