Tag: Gospel

Open Mic Adventures CLXII: “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Last week I made a big deal about how I’m shifting Open Mic Adventures into New Music Tuesday, and how it’s inaccurate to call these features “Open Mic Adventures” because they’re not really at open mics—blah, blah, blah.  All of that is true, but this week, I have a bit of a conundrum:  what do I do if I don’t have any new, original music, but have a cover of a song?

Well, my hasty solution is to use the old “Open Mic Adventures” label for those pieces that covers, as 1.) anytime I feature a cover, it’s me playing it, even if it’s not at an open mic night; and 2.) I don’t want to further muddy the waters with some other title, like “Saxophone Covers Tuesday” or whatever.  What a nightmare!

So, here’s how it’s going to be going forward:

  • Any performance that is a cover of someone else’s work will be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any live performance will also be an Open Mic Adventures
  • Any original music—whether electronic or me playing a piece I’ve composed—will fall under the new New Music Tuesday feature

Shew!  Hopefully that’s all sorted.

With that tedious business out of the way, let’s get to this week’s piece!  A potential client is booking a saxophonist to play the BeBe & CeCe Winans song “I Found Love (Cindy’s Song)” for their wedding.  The piece will play as the bride walks down the aisle.  At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for the official booking (fingers crossed), but I recorded a quick, abbreviated version of the piece on my alto sax Sunday afternoon [read my full guide on buying a budget sax if you, too, want to start your saxophone empire—TPP].

Here’s my humble attempt at noodling out this smooth gospel/R&B classic:

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Go to Church

The Portly Politico47 Comments

Easter is just a few days away, and churches will be filled to bursting with twice-a-year “Christians,” people that still feel some vague sense that they should go to church on Easter and at Christmas, even if they can’t quite articulate why, and don’t attend for most of the rest of the year.

That church attendance is in decline is no mystery.  Sure, there are plenty of nominal Christians who attend church regularly for their own reasons—the social aspects, the opportunities for professional development and career advancement, etc.—who aren’t truly Believers, but since we cannot know the content of one’s heart, church attendance is a pretty good gauge for religiosity in the United States.

I live in the rural South, so there are churches on every street corner.  There are tiny cinderblock buildings in the middle of nowhere with names like “First Church of the Holy Apostolic Prophecy” that look like tool sheds that have been converted into places of worship.  There are decadent megachurches.  There are churches that date back centuries, and churches that were planted a week ago.

Yet even here, Biblical illiteracy stuns me.  Sure, I’m one of those guys who knows that something is “in the Bible,” even if I can’t always place exactly where it is (that’s what Bing is for).  But when I write “Biblical illiteracy,” I mean that people lack a basic understanding of the simplest Bible stories.

I’ve related this anecdote elsewhere, but I’ll never forget teaching a philosophy class years ago in which we were discussing Danish Christian existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard famously argued that attempts to prove the existence of God rhetorically, logically, or otherwise were the philosophical equivalents of building the Tower of Babel—man’s Gnostic attempt to “reach” God, not to be close to Him, but to challenge God’s Supremacy.

The Tower of Babel is Vacation Bible School 101—really, it’s Sunday School 101.  The Tower of Babel would be Track 2, Side 1 of The Old Testament’s Greatest Hits, if such an album existed.

Despite that, none of my students knew the story of the Tower of Babel.  Even a young lady who was a very committed Christian did not remember the story, and I know her parents, at the very least, had taught it to her!

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