A book that should be a part of every high school curriculum in America is Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Safe Your Life by Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis is America’s most famous jazz musician. He is also a man who tolerates nothing less than excellence and ability in the arts. Anyone who knows anything about jazz knows that one doesn’t get on the bandstand unless he has the chops to play. Once there, one also must present oneself with dignity.

Jazz is also a reflection of the democratic culture that birthed it. There is a kind of meritocracy in the performance of it, but it is also by its very nature about getting along with others and realizing that human existence, while often tragic, requires the perpetual hope that we can do better. It’s about compromise and approximation while retaining core truths and fundamental excellence.

That’s a great message, especially considering the war going on between the Trump administration and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the D.C. arts venue that has long been home to top American jazz performances. The Trump administration has been threatening to clear out all the “woke” shows at the Kennedy Center, and several artists have canceled performances just to spite the Republicans.

Hamilton and the Gay Men’s Chorus walked. Yasmin Williams, an award-winning musician, emailed Kennedy Center interim Director Richard Grenell: “These events have caused a major negative reaction in my musical community to playing at the Kennedy Center, with lots of individuals I know ultimately canceling their shows there. Most folks seem to be placing the blame on the president for degra[ding] the formerly prestigious institution.”

Grenell fired back, accusing Williams of believing “newspapers who exist to hate Republicans.” “Every single person who cancelled a show did so because they couldn’t be in the presence of Republicans,” Grenell wrote in messages Williams later posted on Instagram. “We didn’t fire a single show. We don’t cancel a single show … Read more. Don’t swallow what the media tells you. Don’t be gullible.”

President Trump is planning to attend the June 11 opening of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center. Expect a lot of virtue signaling and protests from the left.

In Moving to Higher Ground, Marsalis writes that jazz is about “the importance of expressing the core of your unique feelings and the willingness to work things out with others.” Marsalis also celebrates Bach, Beethoven, and even the French artist Matisse, arguing that their greatness was only possible through hard work. Ditto jazz. Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane and Miles Davis were not just artists of instinct but spent hours in rehearsal. “Social order on the bandstand is determined by ability,” Marsalis writes. No DEI diktats here. 

Marsalis criticizes our “wild, out-of-control young people.” Kids need to appreciate artistic masterpieces, he argues, which are “an expression of feeling and a supreme expression of our humanity.” Marsalis argues that “we have an artistic imperative to understand and reengage creativity and innovation, not merely as tools for economic growth but as tools for democracy and accomplished scholarship … The best jazz has always been the embodiment of integrity and conviction.”

In a sense, jazz concerts at the Kennedy Center under the Trump administration could be like the anti-communist jazz tour that occurred in 1958. That year jazz musician Dave Brubeck played a series of concerts in Poland, which at the time was under the boot of a communist regime. In 1948 the Soviet Union annexed most of the territories it had invaded in 1939, and Stalin subsequently banned jazz, which only existed in secret underground concerts. But by 1955 the ban had been lifted. One Polish journalist called Brubeck’s concert “a breath of fresh air to local music lovers and jazz aficionados, hungry for live performances of original American jazz.” Crowds flocked to Brubeck and followed him and his band around the country.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that jazz helped bring down communism.

One musician who saw the Brubeck tour in Poland was Thomasz Stanko, who was born in Poland in 1942. Before he died in 2018, Stanko once recalled what it was like finding jazz in a communist system: “It was an adventure because it was hard to find records, but we were clever, we would always find a way. If someone was coming to Poland we would tell them what we wanted. And we would only get the best, of course.”

“The message was freedom,” Stanko recalled in a New York Times interview in 2006. “For me, as a Pole who was living in Communist country, jazz was synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”

Brubeck, in a 1958 interview in Down Beat, described his tour: “Whenever there was a dictatorship in Europe, jazz was outlawed. And whenever freedom returned to those countries, the playing of jazz inevitably accompanied it.” In Poland, added the pianist, the word freedom “was in the mouths of everybody we had anything to do with.”

Along with Moving to Higher Ground, schools should also teach Victory Is Assured: Uncollected Writings of Stanley Crouch. Crouch, a great music writer and social critic, compares the U.S. Constitution to the nature of jazz and the blues.

“There has never been anything more American than jazz,” Crouch writes in an essay repainted in Victory is Assured. “Jazz music remade every element of Western music in an American way, just as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution remade the traditions of Western democracy, expanding the idea of freedom to levels it had never known in any prior time.”

American democracy, he says, “updated the social order with its checks-and-balances system and its amendment process.” These measures were, again, “based in tragic optimism, the idea that abuse of power can create tragic consequences but if there is a form in place that allows for the righting of wrongs, we can maintain an upbeat vision that is not naive.” 

Crouch then offers this observation:

American democracy is also the governmental form in which the interplay between the individual and the mass takes on a complexity mirrored by the improvising unit of the jazz band. In jazz music, the empathetic imagination of the individual strengthens the ensemble. This happens as the form, which is an outline that is followed but is also played with, is given dimension through the collective inventions of the ensemble. In that sense, jazz is a democratic form itself, one in which, as the great jazz critic Martin Williams observed, there is more freedom than ever existed in Western music.

Crouch, Marsalis, Thomasz Stanko and all others who truly appreciate what jazz represents, should see that it is something the modern left, particularly the modern cultural left, cannot abide—maturity, equipoise, excellence without compromise, the rejection of resentment, and empathy for fellow Americans. It’s appropriate that the next Jazz Freedom Tour should be launched at the Kennedy Center, in the heart of Washington, D.C. Like postwar Poland, it’s a city that’s been overtaken by socialism.