Musical magic of Bob Mowday band lifts audiences to gates of heaven
PEW 24 in Strand Street’s Lutheran Church has its own door but the seat was designed to keep your mind on the sermon.
I was there last Saturday afternoon, fortified by Weizenbier and heavenly veal schnitzel from the nearby Hemelhuijs restaurant for the Bob Mowday show band recital. In this first for the church, now almost 250 years old, even Pastor Walter Schwär participated with his saxophone.
During Elton John’s Crocodile Rock I am sure the magnificent swan which crowns Anton Anreith’s pulpit masterpiece had pulled on bobby socks and was swaying along with the music like everyone else.
Of course, Saturday was a propitious day for this new venture, being Martinmas, the feast day of St Martin of Tours for whom Martin Luther was named.
I had come across St Martin only a week before when walking the streets of Lisbon. The warm weather was referred to as St Martin’s summer and sweet chestnuts were being consumed in uma duzia to the incessant boom of big drums.
Martin was the first of the non-martyred saints. A Roman soldier who, it is said, cut his cape in two and gave one half to a wretched beggar on the road outside Amiens. Shivering as he rode onward, the sky cleared and the sun shone, hence St Martin’s summer. A later vision revealed that the beggar had been Christ.
Martin’s feast day, celebrated in Portugal with new wine and Magusto, previously signalled the onset of 40 days of fasting to prepare Christian souls for Christmas.
His half cape or “cappella” was France’s first flag, carried into battle by the French kings. it is remembered in the tricolour’s blue, and was housed in a “chapel” protected by “chapellani”, who became army chaplains. He is a patron saint of France and the patron saint of South Africa.
Five hundred years before, almost to the day, Martin Luther, who had been baptised on Martinmas, published his 95 theses against the practice of Indulgences. Some say he nailed them to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. This ignited the Reformation, splitting both Europe and the Catholic church. It also changed the way that people thought about themselves, giving us individualism, capitalism and the modern world. Centuries later in 1934, an American pastor attending a Baptist convention in Berlin was so enthused with Martin Luther that he changed his name and that of his son to Martin Luther King.
The 11th day of the 11th month is also Remembrance or Armistice day when countries honour their military dead on the day the World War I ended in 1918.
While there were many factors that brought that terrible conflict to a close, I suspect its last day was nudged into Martinmas if only because Martin was the saint of poor soldiers and was honoured on both sides of no man’s land. Ending hostilities on the feast day of the pacifist soldier saint contained sufficient symbolism to make the Armistice hold.
Back in the Lutheran church, with “God’s trombones” accompanying When The Saints Go Marching In, Bob Mowday’s pied piperlike clarinet solo made one realise that good jazz makes time stand still, allowing the world to pause and all humans to enjoy themselves together.
Like Anrieth’s Herculean pulpit statues, the musical magic lifted the audience to the gates of heaven and encouraged Martin and all his namesakes to come marching in.
Cunningham lives and works in Cape Town where he manages a business which manufactures and installs specialised racking systems.