Goodbye, Billie Holiday

Yesterday was a good day. I got rid of most of my jazz albums.

A year or two ago, I put all my blues CD’s in bags and took them to the dump. It was somewhat unpleasant, but I also felt unburdened. I knew God didn’t like them, and that they opened doors to spirits that hated me. At that time, I didn’t feel compelled to get rid of my jazz, but a while back, I started to feel it was time.

I talked to my young friend Travis about it. He’s a jazz musician. The thought of getting rid of jazz recordings disturbed him, but he took notice of something. Many jazz musicians have had filthy, ungodly lives. I agree.

Chet Baker was a junkie and a sociopath, and he killed himself by jumping or falling out of a window. Billie Holiday was a junkie. Louis Armstrong was a marijuana addict who destroyed his talent with drugs. Bix Beiderbecke drank himself to death. Thelonious Monk was mentally ill. Miles Davis was a wife beater who had drug problems. John Coltrane was a zealous Buddhist; so was Maynard Ferguson.

Heroin addiction has been so common among jazz musicians, it almost seems mandatory.

If you want to make it in jazz, what do you have to do? Play in bars. There is no way to avoid it. You can’t start out at Carnegie Hall. Bars, other than male-only establishments, were created to facilitate fornication. We don’t say that out loud, but it’s true. The secret to making a bar succeed is to attract women, not men. When women come, men follow in hopes of fornicating with them, and men pay the checks. You can look this up.

Centuries after Eden, women still lead men to perdition. We are supposed to lead. Without God, men are followers.

Jazz is not godly music. That’s obvious. You may cite exceptions. Dave Brubeck tried to create Christian jazz; he was a Catholic. But he wasn’t listening to the Holy Spirit. It was a carnal idea.

I don’t know how much jazz I had. When I cleaned out a USB drive containing all the albums I had ripped, Windows said I had gotten rid of 680 items, and I know I didn’t have all my albums on the drive.

I had two huge Art Tatum box sets. I had Billie Holiday. I had Dinah Washington. I had a set of Lionel Hampton LP’s in great condition. I haven’t located the Art Tatum sets, but when I do, they’re gone. The other things are already in the landfill where no one will ever see them again.

While I was at it, I came across Etta James, and I got rid of her albums, too.

I was allowed to keep a few things. I had some Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. I have an Ella Fitzgerald box set. There is very little left, though.

You can’t have objects that displease God. He has helped me to understand that having such an object is like painting a sign on your wall, welcoming demons to toy with you and dominate you.

We hold onto things like pornography, astrological paraphernalia, playing cards, dope, items related to yoga, and idols we think of as art, and when problems come, we pray to God for help, while holding onto the things that hold the door open for Satan. It doesn’t make much sense.

I’ve thrown many things out. I threw out my dad’s Masonic stuff (freemasonry is an occult religion). I threw out a treasured souvenir figurine he and my mother got on a trip to Italy. I threw out expensive porcelain because the shapes represented evil things. I threw out thousands of dollars’ worth of Cuban cigars. I’m glad it’s all gone. I’m glad no one else will ever have it; it would just poison them as it did me.

I have an expensive Muslim prayer rug in Miami. I told my house-sitter to get rid of it.

When the apostles taught in Ephesus, converts made a big pile of religious books worth a great deal of money, and they burned it. Paul didn’t say, “Let’s keep them as investments.” He didn’t say, “They have important historical value.” He didn’t make the excuses we would make today.

Here’s a good thing to know about spending time, money, and effort on ungodly things: the more you invest, the more you will lose when you finally repent and have to get rid of what you’ve built. It’s best not to invest much.

Derek Prince told an interesting story. He inherited some Chinese art from his grandfather. It consisted of two depictions of dragons. They were worth a lot of money, and they had great sentimental value. God asked him what a dragon represented in the Bible. Knowing the answer, Prince got rid of the artwork.

At the time, Prince was having a problem with inherited property. I can relate. Like me, he had irresponsible relatives who kept delaying the distribution of some of his wealth. When he got rid of the dragons, the wealth was released. I believe I have delayed God’s help by holding onto counterproductive music. Things are going great for me, but I have some nagging problems that resist resolution. I want to see what happens now that I’ve cleared away some supernatural obstacles.

God hates carnality. Anything you create, without being told to do so by God, is a carnal work. All carnal works will eventually be burned, and it won’t just be things like jazz compositions. Many Christians have done carnal works in God’s name. They’ve written Christian books God will burn in front of them. They’ve built churches and orphanages God didn’t want them to build. When the world is judged, all that stuff will be destroyed. People will come to God full of confidence, thinking he’s impressed by their works, but he will destroy what they’ve created and tell them it was the result of iniquity.

Might as well start the destruction while you’re alive, instead of waiting until it’s too late to do anything to purify your life.

No one in heaven listens to Lionel Hampton or Dizzy Gillespie. No one listens to rock, the blues, disco, or rap. It’s wrong to try to hold onto these things here on earth.

It may well be that all of the jazz giants I enjoyed are in hell right now, never to be heard from again.

The Lord’s Prayer says, “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re supposed to bring a little bit of heaven into the earth. We’re not supposed to bring worldly things into our godly lives. It’s perversion. We can’t live here without getting a little soiled, but there is no excuse for increasing the problem unnecessarily.

I suppose people say I’m a fanatic, but so was Jesus. He was, and is, much more fanatical than I am. Enoch was a fanatic. Noah was a fanatic. Moses, the other prophets, John, Paul, Peter, Stephen…all fanatics. We’re supposed to be fanatics. The Bible says, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Nothing ambiguous there. I may seem fanatical, but I don’t begin to approach that standard.

I wonder what else I have that I should destroy. I don’t want any more signs on my walls, inviting my enemies and granting them permission to harm me.