Religion: Swinging Priests

The Rev. Geoffrey Beaumont is a learned and dedicated man of the cloth. In the gloom of his musty church in London’s Camberwell section, he conducts services for his working-class parishioners in language hallowed by generations of solemn Anglican usage. But when he sits down at his creaky upright parlor piano, he is likely to let himself go in the foot-stomping rhythms of the South Side jukeboxes. Last week he held a little party at the vicarage to display an unusual wedding of his two talents: a Mass set to popular rhythms and already known in the U.S. as the “Jazz Mass.”

When Anglican Beaumont. 53, took over St. George’s in Camberwell early this year, he found that he was failing to draw the Teddy Boys and other loiterers off the street corners. So he decided to use a score he had been working on for several years to lure them with the kind of music they normally listened to and could sing. The last real folk Mass, he believes, was written in the 16th century by one John Marbeck, a convicted heretic “I took the liturgy of the Prayer Book, Beaumont explains, “and tried to regard it simply as a lyric that somebody wanted me to write the music for.”

Over an eye-glazing bowl of punch based on a Spanish drink called “Blood” *Beaumont beat out his 20th Century Folk Mass last week for the benefit of his church servers, who clustered around the vicarage piano. Designed for use by a small orchestra, or combo, the Mass sometimes sounds romantic echoes of Sigmund Romberg (the Credo), sometimes switches to a “beguine tempo” (Kyrie, Agnus Dei), sometimes soars in the harmonies of the Negro spiritual (“0 praise God in his ho-li-ness”) or thumps with a syncopated bass (“We praise Thee, we bless Thee we praise Thee, we bless Thee”). At several points in the score, instruments are invited to swing into their own improvisations, e.g., the trumpet after the passage, “Praise Him in the sound of the Trumpet.”

Beaumont regards his Mass purely as an occasional piece which can be used to “zip up” a congregation. Although it has not yet been performed at St. George’s, it got a free-swinging reading in the U.S. last week by a six-man Brown University combo known as the Brown Brunotes, led by visiting Anglican Priest Michael Fisher. When Father Beaumont performs it in his own church, he knows just the kind of combo he wants: a small, zippy dance band, perhaps with some of the gutty quality of a Louis Armstrong. Guy Lombardo, he feels, would be entirely too smooth.

Another musical apostle. Jesuit Father Aimeé Duval, 38, was drawing the teenagers into Paris’ Palais des Sports last week for a session of singing and guitar strumming. With permission from his superiors, Father Duval started out six years ago as a street musician, quickly became a provincial bistro favorite as a singer of folk songs, Negro spirituals (among which he includes “Me voilàa, me voilaà, old vieux Joe”) and religious songs of his own composition. His record of Seigneur, Mon Ami—which might be translated roughly as “Somebody up there likes me”—sold 45,000 copies, a big sale for France. Today Father Duval ranks as one of France’s leading entertainers, is mobbed by autograph-seeking teen-agers wherever he goes, is considering recitals in Western Europe and the U.S. His appeal is hard to analyze. No belting revival-style singer, he chants numbers in a low, slightly monotonous voice, in some songs’ exhibits a shaky sense of beat. He himself believes that he has simply tapped a burgeoning religious revival which is sweeping all France. On the other hand, a crooner m a clerical collar may simply be a novelty hit. Sighed one teen-age fan last week: “He looks so handsome and tired.”

*Father Beaumont’s recipe: Pour two bottles of Spanish red wine into jug, add two oranges two lemons and cucumber sliced, splash in one bottle of soda, lace with one-eighth bottle of brandy, drop in teaspoonful of Cointreau and two dashes bitters (or “anything like that”) mix well and serve ice cold.