Polyhymnia: Notes for a Jazz Mass

This page offers notes and links for a post-patriarchal jazz mass. Please use materials freely or create your own. The heart of the mass is the psychedelic, Arabic jazz of Yazz Ahmed, whose recent album is Polyhymnia (2020). Ahmed is a British-Bahraini trumpet player and composer. Polyhymnia is a Greek Goddess of art, poetry, and dance. The artwork below is from Ahmed's albums. The inspiration for the mass comes from the music, of course, and also from the Church of Our Common Home, which focuses on the arts and a recovery of the sacred feminine as key to a renewal of the human spirit and a celebration of life on earth.

Album Art by Yazz Ahmed

Church For Our Common Home

Dedicated to the Earth, the Divine Feminine and the Arts

Bonni Tarwater

A non-profit that provides artistic, religious and psychological services to awaken to the moral and ecologic crisis as an invitation for spiritual growth and creating loving community with all of creation, caring for our common home, Mother Earth. The minister is Bonnie Tarwater, Ordained in 1999 she has served both Unitarian Universalist and United Church of Christ Churches, and has a M. Div. from Claremont School of Theology, a M.F.A. from the American Conservatory Theater in S.F., a B.A. in Visual Art from U.C.S.D. and a certificate as a dream worker, from the Marin Institute for Projective Dream.

"What does it mean to reclaim the feminine? It means to honor our sacred connection to life that is present in every moment. It means to realize that life is one whole and begin to recognize the interconnections that form the web of life. It means to realize that everything, every act. even every thought, affects the whole. And it also means to allow life to speak to us." -Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Church for our Common Home

“This album is a celebration of female courage, determination and creativity. In 2015, the Tomorrow’s Warriors commissioned me to write an extended work, to be performed by members of their Nu Civilisation Orchestra, for a concert at the Women of the World Festival, in London’s Southbank Centre, on International Women’s Day.

Whilst gathering ideas for my composition, I came across the character of Polyhymnia, the ancient Greek Muse of music, poetry and dance: a Goddess for the arts. Perhaps inspired by her, I conceived the form of a suite of movements, each dedicated to women of outstanding qualities, role models, with whom I felt a strong connection. Whereas La Saboteuse, the embodiment of my inner-destroyer and the catalyst for the creation of my last album, could be viewed as my anti-muse, maybe Polyhymnia herself became my Muse, inspiring an intense period of creativity, which resulted in the six pieces on this album....more

Polyhymnia: The Album

Yazz Ahmed Website

Notes for the Mass

At our First Church of Sonic Wandering, our calling is to create a life with others. We believe that listening to the sounds of the world -- other people's voices, the sounds of animals, the sounds of the human environment, the sounds of the earth -- is one way that we create with others.
Withness is another word for appreciative, respectful, life-enhancing, felt connections. Another word for love.
We are with others most deeply, not simply when we know what they do, but when we are intuitively attuned to their feelings: their emotions and subjective aims.
These feelings are always context specific. People do not feel abstractly; they feel concretely, in response to the given circumstances of their lives.
Today we focus on the inner lives, the feelings, of courageous women who resisted the injustices they faced in a society gone rotten. With are with them by listening to their bravery, humor, courage, forgiveness, and ferocity.
Feelings can be known in different ways. One common way of knowing them is verbal. We talk about them. Such is the world of what philosophers call logocentrism or, perhaps better, print-centrism, since, after the invention of the printing press, words on a page became the dominant medium for so mamy. Today the "page" has become the screen, and visual imagery is giving the printed word a run for its money.
But feelings can also be known intimately in many other ways: through eye-contact and facial expressions, through gentle touch, and through music.
Music is what feelings sound like.
The purpose of our jazz mass today is to hear the feelings of courageous women. Our hymn is the album Polyhymnia, created by the psychedelic, arab-influenced, post-rock jazz of Yazz Ahmed.
Jazz can be especially helpful in understanding the complexity and nuance of feelings. The sounds we hear can be beautiful but not comforting; engaging but not clear; evocative but not familiar; intense but not harmonious. Liike ife itself. And the sounds can present themselves in ways that are polyphonic - sometimes consonant and sometimes dissonant. Again like life itself.
Our need is not to understand what we hear in a verbal way, not to place the sounds we hear into a mental frame and say "I got it." Our opportunity is much more fundamental. It is to hear what we hear. To be present to the sounds. To be bathed in sounds.
There can be a holiness in the sound bathing. In our hearing we can partake of a Deep Listening in whose life the universe unfolds. This is how we think about things at the First Church of Sonic Wandering, influenced as we are by process philosophy. We believe that the universe has a a Soul.
Male-centered religiions have often imagined the Listening in male terms. They have rendered unto the world what belongs to the insecure male psyche.
Moreover, male-centered religion have often heard the world itself in male terms.
The Deep Listening is not male. The Listening is polymorphous: forever shape shifting, forever becoming the image most needed in the circumstance at hand.
In our time, ever so needful of ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that are post-patriarchal, the Deep Listening comes as Polyhymnia: a Greek goddess of the arts, poetry, and dance.
As we listen to the music, let us listen with Polyhymnia and then, after the listening, let us go out and help create a world that is deeply ecological: creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind.
This ecological world is post-patriarchal. It is what can come after the reign of patriarchy. It canl be a world that is good for women, men, and all. For human beings and the earth. Hearing ourselves into that world, with help this evening from Yazz Ahmed's album Polyhymnia, is our calling.

Prayer of Preparation

O Polyhymnia,

May we hear the sounds of today's jazz mass with wide-open ears. May our habitual patterns of listening be broken, our presumptions concerning rhythm be dissollved, so that we might hear the polysonic harmonies of a world in need.

Yazz Ahmed speaks of you as her muse for the album. May you be our muse, too.

We know that you have many faces and names. Some call you Love, some call you Sophia , some call you Durga, some call you Elohim. Today we call you Polyhymnia.

May the music we hear bring us close to you. May we be enlivened by the sounds of jazz, of arabic music, of and electronic music. And may the sounds carry us close to the hearts of the many women who've been channels of your spirit, named by Yaza Ahmed as her inspiratioins: Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai, Ruby Bridges, Haaifa Al-Mansour, Barbara Thompson, The Suffragettes.

Indeed, after our hearing, may their powers of these womenn -- forgiveness, resistance to oppression, hope, and power to overcome -- be our powers, too. May we, too, each in our way, be channels of your grace

"Yazz Ahmed is a British-Bahraini trumpet player and composer. Through her music, she seeks to blur the lines between jazz, Arabic folk and electronic sound design, bringing together the sounds of her mixed heritage in what has been described as ‘psychedelic Arabic jazz, intoxicating and compelling’."

Interview with Yazz Ahmed

Women in Jazz

"Yazz Ahmed once wrote that the question she was most sick of hearing was: “Are you the singer?” It was the only way many people could make sense of her place as a woman in jazz....Ahmed is one of a number of artists, including many women, who have emerged in what has been described as a British jazz explosion, fuelled by younger, more diverse, experimental musicians ..Audiences are also becoming younger and more diverse, far removed from jazz’s weighty reverence and stereotypical snobbery of old." -- The Guardian, Emine Saner, July 2018

NPR's Women in Jazz (I)

NPR's Women in Jazz (II)