Democracy and All That Jazz

Ken Burns’ “Jazz” series on PBS has generated a river of commentary by critics, much of it over the “great man” approach to history, as captured in biographical portraits of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington and others. A subtler message permeates the film: jazz as a metaphor of democracy. The music is an improvisational art form, spinning off spontaneous melodies that make people dance. The great soloists, from Armstrong to Wynton Marsalis, have inherently known how to make soaring instrumental passages circle back to the melody, back to the band.

Democracy has multiple meanings, much like jazz. Free elections, unfettered public opinion, consent of the governed hold the promise of personal liberty balanced by responsibility to community.

Burns’ thematic structure owes much to three consultant-interviewees in the film and companion book: Marsalis, Stanley Crouch and Albert Murray.

As artistic director of Lincoln Center’s jazz program, Marsalis has organized concerts premised on the concept of a jazz canon, a body of identifiable classics by the major jazz artists, thus drawing an inherent parallel with master works of the European classical tradition. Wynton is one of four brothers who followed the path of their father, Ellis Marsalis, a pianist and professor who holds a chair in jazz studies at the University of New Orleans.

In the early 1980s, when Wynton Marsalis arrived in New York and began drawing media attention, it was Crouch, a noted jazz critic and often acerbic social essayist, who became mentor to the young trumpeter. Marsalis eventually enlisted Crouch as a consultant to the Lincoln Center program. Crouch has written of Murray: “This great man is my mentor and far more my father than the fellow whose blood runs in my veins.”

At 84, Murray is the elder statesman of jazz aesthetics, a novelist (“Train Whistle Guitar”) biographer of Count Basie, literary critic and cultural historian. In an interview for the companion book to Burns’ film, Murray says: “Jazz is the embodiment of the American experience, the American spirit, the American ideal.”

Murray has famously explored the blues as a metaphor of American experience. In “The Hero and the Blues,” in 1973, he compared the wandering blues man to a figure out of Hemingway, the solitary artist enduring fear and sorrow in the quest to become a mythic hero. Blues music distills that sense of lost love and sorrowful travel into cameos of epic struggle. “If you didn’t have the dragon, you wouldn’t have the hero,” Murray has remarked.

In his 1995 collection “The All-American Skin Game,” Crouch did a riff off Murray, writing that “jazz is about slaying the dragon and making cuisine out of his corpse. When that dragon is our industrial world, we have to face its menace and slay the temptations of the cynical and defeatist. It is the transformative power of jazz and its possession of that industrial lyricism which cause me to come back to this music over and over.”

Crouch’s passionate embrace of democracy sets him apart from many black writers. Jazz and democracy are Crouch’s articles of faith: “Just as American democracy, however periodically flawed in intent and realization, is a political, cultural, economic and social rejection of the automated limitations of class and caste, jazz is an art in which improvisation declares an aesthetic rejection of the preconceptions that stifle individual and collective invention.”

In his master work, “Stomping the Blues,” Murray considers blues and church music opposite faces of the same coin, equal elements in the melding of early jazz. “What counts in a work of art,” writes Murray, “. . . is not the degree to which it conforms to theories, formulas and rules, but how adequately it fulfills the requirements of the circumstances for which it was created.”

Jazz began as functional music. The New Orleans pioneers knew that if they didn’t make people dance, there might not be a next gig. In the 1920s, as the tight economies of New Orleans ensemble jazz mushroomed into big band orchestrations in New York, the fearless young dancers on ballroom floors became a mass tableau, an emergent popular culture for whom the surging swing rhythms matched the booming pace of city life, the rush of a young country impatient for more. Jazz became a “national soundtrack,” in Murray’s words, of a society with complex layers. Ralph Ellison, with whom Murray shared a long friendship, reflected on a similar parallel to the national soundtrack idea in a 1953 speech accepting the National Book Award for his novel, “Invisible Man.”

“Thus to see America with an awareness of its rich diversity and its almost magical fluidity and freedom--I was to dream of a prose which was flexible and swift as American change is swift, confronting the inequalities and brutalities of our society forthrightly, but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity and individual self-realization.” That tension between “fraternity” or community and individual liberty is central to jazz and a cornerstone of democracy. Interpretations of this sensibility are as varied as jazz improvisations.

Improvisation in jazz signals the interplay of two or more instrumental voices, ranging from the melody yet always resolving the solo back to the melody.

Webster’s includes a more general definition of “improvise”: “to make, invent, arrange offhand.” Politicians as different as Barry Goldwater and Bill Clinton have shown the skills of improvisation.

After Goldwater retired from the Senate and moved back to Arizona, he set off depth charges in the Republican Party--caught in the tide of the Christian right--by speaking sympathetically of gay people, endorsing their dignity and right to privacy. Goldwater’s remarks struck some commentators as contrarian, yet individual freedom was central to the libertarian ideal that animated Western conservatives of his generation.

Clinton bounced back from crisis after crisis: Gennifer Flowers, the 1994 midterm elections that gave the GOP a majority in Congress, the battles with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Kenneth W. Starr and impeachment. He reinvented himself by getting his enemies to expose their vindictive impulses. His sense of improvisation was instinctive; maybe all those years playing saxophone as a kid in Arkansas taught him to turn on a dime. Sensing a solid majority behind him, he cast himself in the mold of Murray’s blues hero, pitted against reactionary dragons. The public that detested his behavior with Monica S. Lewinsky loathed his enemies’ tactics even more. When dozens of newspaper editorials and GOP leaders tried to make him quit, the novelist Toni Morrison called Clinton the first black president because his struggle touched a common nerve in the African American psyche.

American democracy predates the rise of jazz, circa 1900, by slightly more than 100 years. Thomas Jefferson enshrined equality in its Bill of Rights, yet was blind to slavery, a contradiction that haunts us today. Democracy is tied to the quest for an American identity, negotiating the meanings of a multiethnic nation. In the tension between continuity and change, a million anonymous blues heroes fight the dragon every day, demanding more, demanding better.