Blue and taking note

I returned to a rainy Chicago Sunday evening after seven hours of driving through one torrential downpour after another. At least I didn’t see any of the hail that was being warned about in emergency announcements over the radio in western Indiana.

Little did I know I was coming H.O.M.E. to another sprinkler-system flood due to a fire!!!! The first clue was the elevators didn’t work and there was no ceiling for half of the lobby! Thank the dear Lord once again that my little studio was not affected. As it turned out, the fire originated from the studio directly below me!

Getting caught up on all the news Monday morning included learning that one of my resident assistants moved out. She didn’t give any notice or anything. I now have to cover her Wednesday night shift until at least the end of the month. Just grateful I have internet access in my office to watch the Shorewood services!

As always, I listened to old Bible studies during my driving time. Here is a passage from the 2008 Soldiers Conference, entitled “The Vital Signs of Grace”:

“If you know anything about music you know what blue notes are, says Jordan. “Jazz music is the incorporation of blue notes. People say we like country and western or we like bluegrass, like that’s godly. Country & Western music is just as fleshly and ungodly as rock music can be.

“Rock music, by the way, structurally, is built . . . Martin Luther built a choral system that is a form of the hymns we sing today and rock music is a development off of that. So rock music really is an outgrowth of the structure of a hymn. Country & Western music is a development of folk music.

“Bluegrass was developed by Bill Monroe. He did not develop bluegrass music because he lived in Kentucky, the Bluegrass State. That’s what people think. That’s not it at all. What he did is he took the Kentucky folk music and added blue notes to it.

“Go to Wikipedia and type in ‘blue notes.’ They’ve got a marvelous section about it. Blue notes are a certain kind of chords that are not major chords. You play the C6 and C9s and that kind of stuff in the chord and it literally is a different structure of music.

“Blue notes are called ‘jazz chords.’ You add jazz chords and then the improvisation. My flesh loves jazz but I know it’s my flesh that loves it, see, and when I want to go satisfy my flesh, I go listen to it.

“The thing about is there is a structure to those things. You guys, if you’re in leadership, you need to know at least some rudimentary things about these things.

“If you don’t know what bent notes are, or bent shapes and sounds, and what it means structurally when you add a set of drums to an orchestra or when you take it away, you need to go learn because there are four things that make up a song. One is the lyrics. But three of them are the music and you need to understand those things so you’re not just saying, ‘Well, I don’t like that music,’ because you weren’t raised with it or you just don’t happen to like it.

“People say, ‘Rock music is the most ungodly thing I ever heard!’ Well, listen, ‘I want to hold your hand’ is a whole lot better for your kids to sing than, ‘You took a fine time to leave me Lucille.’ Beer-drinking, wife-swapping music isn’t any more godly than the drug-infested, dope-smoking music.

“The drug infested, dope-smoking, maggot-infested stuff of the long-haired army of the great unwashed isn’t very godly either. I recommend to you that you use Bible music.

“My point to you about Chuck Smith and the Calvary Chapel, and the Vineyard group that split off of that, is they’ve had such an impact that the average evangelical fundamental church today uses their style of music.”