And — of course — we’ve wanted to continue believing it was true.
Alas … no.
When the Rev. Charles Gompertz contemplated the notion of a Jazz Mass to help celebrate the completion of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral — the first major Anglican cathedral to be consecrated in the United States — he knew this notion was radical. Indeed — as he told me more than once, during our numerous interviews — to his knowledge, no American church had ever employed jazz in a worship setting. Gompertz was aware of only one earlier near-miss. Geoffrey Beaumont, a London priest, had composed a Jazz Mass in 1956: a work scored for a cantor and a jazz quartet. Beaumont and his composition made the news in 1957, but the vicar’s performances of this work always took placed after his regular services at St. George’s, in Camberwell.
During preparation and the lengthy rehearsals that went into Vince Guaraldi’s Grace Cathedral Mass, and thereafter for the rest of his life, Gompertz firmly believed that it was the first Jazz Mass presented during an American church service of any kind. During the extensive research for my Guaraldi biography, back in 2010 and ’11, I found nothing to contradict this belief.
Ah, but my good friend Bill Carter — reverend of the First Presbyterian Church in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania — had “inside tipsters” and access to better resources: most crucially, Derick Cordoba’s 2017 doctoral dissertation, Liturgical Jazz: The Lineage of the Subgenre in the Music of Edgar E. Summerlin, presented at the Graduate College of the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign.
Bill, this blog’s readers will recall, officiated a 50th anniversary presentation of Guaraldi’s Mass at his Clarks Summit church on September 6, 2015; the jazz elements were performed by his Presbybop Quartet: Bill (piano), Al Hamme (sax and flute), Tony Marino (bass) and Tyler Dempsey (drums). In addition to the lengthy rehearsals preceding this presentation, Bill also had spent many months transcribing the Mass: something that hadn’t ever been done (and a process made even harder by the fact that Vince never played the Mass’ music the same way twice, as proven by the few recorded excerpts that exist in addition to Fantasy’s At Grace Cathedral album).