Why isn’t this being shown on TV?

That’s the question I found myself asking after watching a recent performance by the great jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant at the gorgeous Strathmore Music Center just outside Washington, D.C. Strathmore is the place where I recently enjoyed and interviewed another jazz great, Kurt Elling. With Elling, as with Salvant, I couldn’t help but wonder why these greats are not known to most Americans the way the names Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington once were—and, among the culturally literate, still are.

And then it hit me. The reason is that at some point the gatekeepers with access to the biggest platforms stopped promoting America’s great art and artists and, instead, began to showcase our worst, most obnoxious, or “most controversial” figures. This wasn’t always the case. For example, jazz performers used to appear regularly not only on public television but on mainstream programs like The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Twenty years ago the critic Martha Bayles observed that the popular culture America was exporting to the rest of the world was largely crap. Our nation had gone from the Voice of America exporting jazz during the Cold War—the uniquely American form of music she called “a secret weapon” promoting freedom—to sending our raunchy sit-coms and gansta rap. Bayles added:

American popular culture is no longer a beacon of freedom to huddled masses in closed societies. Instead, it’s a glut on the market and, absent any countervailing cultural diplomacy, our de facto ambassador to the world. The solution to this problem is far from clear. Censorship is not the answer, because even if it were technologically possible to censor our cultural exports, it would not be politic. The United States must affirm the crucial importance of free speech in a world that has serious doubts about it, and the best way to do this is to show that freedom is self-correcting—that Americans have not only liberty but also a civilization worthy of liberty. From Franklin’s days, U.S. cultural diplomacy has had both an elite and a popular dimension. Needless to say, it has rarely been easy to achieve a perfect balance between the two. What we could do is try harder to convey what the USIA mandate used to call “a full and fair picture of the United States.” But to succeed even a little, our new efforts must counter the negative self-portrait we are now exporting. Along with worrying about what popular culture is teaching our children about life, we need also to worry about what it is teaching the world about America.

It is now citizens of the United States, not just people in desperate corners of the world without access to other options, who are deliberately being fed this crap from our elites.

Salvant was mesmerizing at the Strathmore, singing classics and selections from her lovely new record With Every Breath I Take. In his book Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century, critic Naste Chinen described Salvant in this way:

Rather than evoke the past from a stance of decorum or deference, Salvant is bent on stirring it up with sly intellectual rigor. Given how much effort has gone into the canonization of the jazz tradition, she’s a stealth subversive, working within a recognizable framework in ways that feel ecstatic and unbound.

In other words, while once “jazz was enshrined in the popular imagination as a historical practice, a set of codes to be reenacted endlessly”—Salvant is offering something new and exciting without divorcing it from the past:

Salvant shows that she’s neither wrestling with ghosts nor shouldering a weight of obligation. Instead, she carries herself like the beneficiary of a trust: she’s got a little secret, and she’s letting her audience in on the action … There’s a hint of Vaughan in Salvant’s bell-like tone and swooping inflection, but also abundant creative liberties in her phrasing.

It was the kind of performance millions of Americans ought to have seen. Why not replace what passes for late-night entertainment on network TV with performances like this? That medium, which insults what remains of its audience while consuming the scarce supply of government licenses to public airwaves, gave up the ghost years ago. Late-night ratings are deservedly in the dumpster.

It is true that America could use an artistic renaissance, but if we really would like to see it happen, perhaps it is time for us to take back the public airwaves in the service of elevating souls. I’m not talking about censorship. Any artist or musician is free to livestream themselves doing anything they want to do within the limits of the law. But our official channels should be presenting America’s best.

Two decades have passed since Bayles offered her incisive commentary on the American popular culture we’re exporting overseas. And even before that, a cottage industry developed producing think pieces and books lamenting our cultural degradation and fall. Today, writers continue to wonder if we’ve entered a dark age.

Americans are tired of the hectoring and didactic tone of the late-night hosts whom the networks foist on them. Yet Americans are hard workers who don’t always have the time or resources to attend expensive concerts that usually happen only in major metropolitan areas, in any event. This wasn’t always the case.

I’ve noted how the social historian Fred Siegel noted that in 1955 “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games but 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts.” The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of “15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.” There were arbiters of taste in those days working to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Saul Bellow’s novel, The Adventures of Augie March, a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early 1950s.

Johnny Carson was a jazz fan. Buddy Rich, Wynton Marsalis, Dave Brubeck, singer Joe Williams—all these greats, and William F. Buckley, appeared on The Tonight Show. There was also Jazz Casual, a show that appeared on public television in the 1960s and featured geniuses like Dave Brubeck. 

Now we get Knocked Loose screaming at us on Jimmy Kimmel. (None of this, of course, is to say that rock acts should be banned from TV.)

Of course, there will be the usual shrieks from the left, insisting that cultural rot comes from the right . Last weekend’s UFC fight at the White House celebrating America’s 250^th birthday was criticized by all the usual whiners crying that it signals the end of high culture in America and a new epoch of bowing to the gauche and the Trumpian. Please. As if high culture somehow prevailed at the Biden White House, which in 2024 hosted a “pride” event that included drag queens and other displays of debauchery? The UFC event, at least, never pretended to be anything other than what it was—a raucous good time.

After the Salvant show at Strathmore, I took a walk to the gazebo that is just adjacent to the concept hall. From the hill I could see the cupola of Georgetown Prep, the Jesuit high school I attended in the 1980s. It was there that I learned about Shakespeare, J.D. Salinger, Hemingway, Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor—and John Coltrane. We also indulged in the Moody Blues, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. We were free to listen to punk rock and New Wave music and anything else we wanted, but we were also encouraged to strive for excellence and expose ourselves to the best literature and music. We became, if not experts, then at least culturally literate.

It’s time to end the politicized and demeaning late-night TV that serves up pop culture garbage in the name of dividing us. Show the world, including and especially Americans, our best—the excellence that should unite us with real pride. As I wrote in Chronicles, jazz musicians, as well as novelists, actors, sculptors, and all other artists who have an ounce of pride, tend to be more focused on ability and excellence than on wokeness, anyway. DEI won’t get you on the bandstand with Wynton Marsalis—only excellence will.