Our last post began our occasional series “Images of Democracy” not by discussing a famous speech or political theory, but by describing the poetic vision of Walt Whitman. Continuing that theme, we turn now to music, specifically jazz.
Although I’ve drawn the comparison between jazz and democratic discussion myself,* I didn’t realize at the time that others had done so long before I did–and done a better job of it. Almost two decades before I wrote that good discussions involve both give and take and plenty of individual improvisation, no less a jazz luminary than Winton Marsalis was not only comparing jazz to democracy, but analyzing the parallel in terms far more acute than I had.
Early in the tenth and last episode of Ken Burns’ 2001 documentary miniseries Jazz, Marsalis says that jazz–like democracy–boils down to negotiating the relationship of the individual to the group. At the 1:20 mark of the same episode, he explains how this happens in jazz and reiterates the comparison to democracy:
In order to play jazz, you’ve got to listen to them [the other musicians]. The music forces you to address what other people are thinking and for you to interact with them with empathy and to deal with the process of working things out. And that’s how our music really could teach what the meaning of American democracy is.
For Marsalis, then, the essence of jazz and democracy are the same: conversation. So it is that he refers in the series less to how iconic musicians “play” than to what they “say.”
Not all of us are jazz musicians, of course. Still, I think most of us can appreciate what Marsalis had in mind when, during the course of a series of lectures in 2011 at Harvard he said this: “When something goes wrong, we instinctively seek communion with one another. We need to talk. And sometimes listen.” For Marsalis, it’s what motivates jazz musicians. It’s also what motivates discussion among citizens.
* See Let’s Talk Politics: Restoring Civility Through Exploratory Discussion, co-authored with Suzanne Goodney Lea. Parkersburg, WV: Interactivity Foundation, 2014. p. 57.
