In his article “Analyzing Gospel”, Braxton D. Shelley describes the gospel vamp as “a ritual technology, a resource many African American Christians use to experience with their bodies what they believe in their hearts” (181). He describes the vamp as a complex consisting of text, music and escalatory procedures, which facilitates religious experience, an experience only heightened by the communal and experiential components of gospel performance (194-5). I am sure that I am not alone in feeling as though, through music, I have had near-transcendental or “religious experiences” in which God and religion did not have the slightest involvement. Most of my own such experiences occurred during live performances with some degree of improvisation and/or communal participation, be it as a member of a background vocal ensemble, as an audience member at a music festival, or nodding my head at a jazz gig. The combination of musical accumulation and release as embodied by the vamp, and the sensation that one is involved in the creation of the music through shared experience, can produce these religious experiences.
The performance of “Henrietta Our Hero” from Jazz composer and tenor saxophone player Kamasi Washington’s “The Epic in Concert” presented by NPR in 2017, serves as an excellent example of religious experience in a fully secular musical setting, through the utilization of a gospel-like vamp. This is not entirely surprising, as many parallels can be drawn between Washington’s orchestra and the gospel tradition. Both Jazz and Gospel were developed by African Americans in the early 20th century, and thus build off of similar musical idioms derived from both Western Art Music and African American slave songs and spirituals. The vamp could be one such idiom; Guthrie Ramsay describes the vamp as a “musical and ideological [remnant] of the ring shout from the slave past” (194-5). Ramsay also states that gospel vamps “work as microrepresentations of the syntax of rituals present throughout the African Diaspora” (194-5), implying that the vamp is itself an embodiment of religious (or at the very least ritualistic) experience, irrespective of the content. Additionally, Washington’s inclusion of a choir, albeit a classically trained choir, serves as a nod to the choral components of gospel.
“Henrietta Our Hero” follows the A, B, A’, C structure that Shelley states is popular in gospel music, in which the C section serves as the vamp. The first A section includes the first verse and chorus (0:00-2:00), sung by Patrice Quinn; the B section includes all of the instrumental solos, ending on a short instrumental rendition of the verse (2:00-8:05); the A’ section includes another verse and chorus (8:05-9:57); and the C section occurs as the instrumentalists solo over two additional repetitions of the final chorus (9:58-10:53), which is followed by a short outro in which the Quinn sings the chorus a final time (10:54-11:33). While this vamp differs from the gospel vamp in that the singer is not doing the improvisation (the instrumentalists are), it does resemble the gospel vamp in two key ways: the repetition of the chorus ensures a repetitive chord progression over which the improvisation can take place, as in gospel vamps; and the presence of “improvisations of increasing intensity [cause] a corresponding shift in the music to a higher energy level” (195), to quote Ramsey. Quinn’s singing keeps the music grounded, while the instrumentalists play as if releasing ten minutes of pent-up musical energy, a release only enabled by the slow accumulation of energy throughout the song, and especially throughout the A’ section.
The accumulation begins in earnest during the B section, as the instrumentalists trade solos, although due to the nature of the back-and-forth in this section we are treated to a series of smaller climaxes rather than a single accumulative climax. These smaller climaxes throughout the B section whet the listener’s appetite for a true climax – a true release. The momentum builds throughout the A’ section, finally accumulating to the point of release in the vamp. An ecstatic eruption of overlapping solos; greater intensity in the accompanying keyboard, piano, drums, string ensemble, and choir; increased dynamics; and an increased tempo build to their highest point, then dissolve for the outro. The experience is immensely satisfying and, when coupled with the live performance, certainly results in an experience one might dub transcendent or religious (even when viewed after the fact on a computer screen).
In Shelley’s discussion of gospel, he draws from Travis Jackson’s own discussions of meaning in jazz performance, which is perhaps more relevant to “Henrietta Our Hero.” For Jackson, meaning comes in part from the formation of community, and in part from subjective expression, with the result of potentially transcendent musical experience (195). Building off of this, Shelley suggests that gospel performance should be conceived as a means for congregants to “move back and forth between the material world and the spiritual realm where musical sound grants intimacy with the divine” (196). This spiritual engagement is enabled by the experiential nature of gospel music – the fact that the congregation is involve in the music making process.
While the audience is not engaged as a gospel congregation would be in the Kamasi Washington performance, the band itself sometimes acts similarly to a congregation.
Due to the nature of the piece, there are various points during which band members are inactive on stage and engage with the music rather as an audience member than as a performing musician. The musicians on stage applaud for the other musicians’ solos, they react to the music occurring on stage as it happens, and then respond in kind through their own music making, either concurrently, or through later solos. “Henrietta Our Hero” also contains the subjective expression that Jackson considers necessary for granting meaning to jazz music; the song was written as a tribute to Washington’s own grandmother, and the musicians are expressing themselves not based on any religious notions, as the song is secular, but based on their own subjective feelings at a particular moment in time. When watching the live NPR performance, you feel as though you are in the room with a group of musicians who are jamming out and just having a good time. This intimacy, this sense that the music-making experience is shared, bridges the divide between audience and band just as that divide is bridged in gospel music, wherein the audience – the congregation – doubles as musicians. When you feel as though you are an active participant in the music making process, in the here-and-now, you can feel that the music has granted you intimacy with the divine, whatever that “divine” is. Coupled with the accumulation and release of the vamp, you are delivered to a state of musical “religious” experience.
As long as humans have existed, humans have been making music together. There is a reason why people choose to stand in the rain to listen to live music at festivals, or shoulder to shoulder with sweaty strangers in cramped theatres, even when they can stay clean and dry at home and listen to more or less the same music in higher fidelity off of Spotify. Once you have been brought together in a live musical setting, the accumulation and release embodied by improvisational vamps can deliver you to a state of shared, pseudo-religious experience, regardless of the presence of any actual religious content. This is exactly what occurs in the live recording of Kamasi Washington’s “Henrietta Our Hero.”