I wrote this liner essay in 2017. Posting it here by request. It's the day after Ron's passing and my sorrow is still too deep to say much more. Ron Miles will be missed.

When Ron Miles teaches Jazz Styles to college students, he likes to open the first day of class with a 1926 quote from Langston Hughes:
 
“We younger Negro artists who create, now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.... We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.... We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”
 
It’s a smart way to start, emphasizing jazz’s essential relationship to blackness and to defiant creativity, the latter of which is sure to resonate with young students. Ron Miles also likes to discuss this quote with his peers, because he truly believes that expressing the full complexity of the human condition is the primary work of every artist at every stage of a career. “That quote gets at the sense that this music and art in general have to embrace everything,” Ron says. “To really go as deep as we can, we have to embrace our failings as well as our success; the beauty of the human condition but also the parts that aren’t so great, because we’re here, and we have to deal with it.”
 
So when Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Thomas Morgan, and Brian Blade arrived at Ron’s Denver home to rehearse for this album, their big hugs for Ron mattered. The December snow that hadn’t fallen quite thickly enough to be scenic mattered. The pleasant studio at the back of the brick house whose modesty left money for his children’s education mattered. The musicians’ deep moments of active listening during the session mattered. The seismic upset of the 2016 U.S. presidential election that had come only a month before mattered. The flattened, calloused pads of musicians’ fingers and the bulging veins in their hands mattered. The willingness to travel to Denver and make music with Ron when this record didn’t yet have a home, not knowing what place it would find in the world, mattered. And their obvious joy in the intimacy of musical collaboration mattered. “Love fuels my work the most,” Ron says. “My love for my fellow musicians. My love for my audience. My love for the tradition that I’m a part of.
 
* * *
 
As profound as Ron Miles’s relationship to the jazz tradition may be, he’s a rare musician who’ll admit to having as much of the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb as Miles Davis in his trumpet sound. Omnivore musicians proliferate in jazz, but Ron is different. When he plays pop or country, he doesn’t give them a Pygmalion treatment; he doesn’t feel the need to make over or reform certain genres as he incorporates them into his own sound and style. Ron truly welcomes all musical styles without fear or shame. Unconcerned with coolness and seemingly free of the anxiety of reception, Ron, for example, carries his mutes in a Scooby-Doo lunch box without any hipster irony; he simply delights in the lunch box’s function and graphics, and so he uses it.
 
This loving embrace of all things great and small, beautiful and ugly—the Non-Hierarchical Aesthetic Gospel of Ron Miles, if you will—likely is a product of his personal history. Ron was born in Indianapolis in 1963 and moved to Denver in 1974 at age 11. “Growing up here,” he says, “it’s not like there’s tons and tons of black folks around. So everyone in my family had friends from a lot of different places. One sister, I’d go into her bedroom and she’d have Teen Beat and Tiger Beat stuff all over the walls, pictures of Michael Jackson and Sean Cassidy. So I was hearing all this different music all the time and it just all made sense.”
 
When Ron discovered his affinity and talent for jazz as a teenager, he left pop behind for a time. After earning a music degree at the University of Denver in 1985, he studied the trumpet at the Manhattan School Of Music while taking private lessons from legends like Lester Bowie and Ornette Coleman. His New York stretch coincided with jazz’s 1980s conservative turn, when young musicians were expected to side stylistically and philosophically with either “tradition” or the avant-garde. Ron identified with the progressive faction, and felt most comfortable within it.
 
After a year in New York City, Ron moved back to Denver and took a teaching job at Metropolitan State University. Having immersed himself in avant-garde jazz, he had to become familiar with the music’s early traditions to teach jazz history, going deep into the work of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington. His realization that early jazz styles were themselves avant-garde for their time radically challenged then-prevailing categorizations in jazz. My theory: This shake-up of known categories so profoundly affected Ron that it somehow made him receptive to all music, including the pop and roots styles that he’d heard everywhere in his Denver youth. After this awakening, the Partridge Family and Hank Williams, Burt Bacharach and Prince, were All God’s Children in Ron’s musical cosmos. “When you get into playing music,” Ron says, “that’s where the lines can come down: jazz is this, jazz is not that. If you’re lucky you have a chance to rediscover what and who you really are and become comfortable with that. Once I really admitted who I was and what I liked, music just opened up for me.”
 
That opennesss has made for albums so beautifully personal that calling them “luminous” or “original” feels like shooting paintball splatters at a sunset. Ron’s tunes gently apply compositional sophistication to pop and roots musics, with his lyricism connecting any and all stylistic strands. In Ron’s home state of Colorado, you can walk along a foothill ridge and look down on one side to a river feeding a lush green valley, and on the other side to a desert sculpture garden of curious rust-colored rock formations. I hear Ron’s melodies as the high ridges of his music, melodies as backbone and nerve center for his rootsy sounds on one hand and knotty abstractions on the other. Ron’s commitment to lyricism gives him and us a clear and defining perspective on his musical surroundings. His tunefulness keeps his music honest.
 
“So much contemporary music has a certain intentional difficulty,” Ron says.“Some musicians call it ‘mo-jazz,’the music with assertively modern stuff like shifting meters. I just write songs, not meters. I write notes and chords, and then I figure out, ‘shoot, that is bar 7 and then bar 4.’Things can be tricky to play, and that’s fine, but you always want musicians to feel like your song is worthy of the effort.”
 
* * *
 
“It’s impossible and unnecessary to separate spirituality and politics, and art and politics,” Ron says. “Because we’re in the world that we’re in. From the beginnings of this music, particularly black American music, a sense of triumph over adversity has always been a central part.” For Ron, being in the jazz tradition means making music that speaks to his time. Not necessarily always topical, but relevant. “We’re in some trying times right now, that’s for sure,” he says, referring to America’s political landscape in 2017. “But we’ve seen this before. Culturally, black folks have had to do this over
and over again, fighting injustice and finding a positive solution.”
 
In 1968, a malfunctioning garbage truck crushed and killed two workers in Memphis. With this accident, the ongoing frustrations of black employees over their neglect and abuse flared into righteous outrage. Sanitation workers took to the streets with “I AM A MAN” signs, asserting the fundamental dignity and humanity of workers of every profession. Today, “I Am A Man” carries that specific civil rights history for Ron but has also taken on broader significance. “It’s a claim that we are of a human body,” he says, “a human person, and there are all kinds of ways that we express ourselves.”

To suit the “I Am A Man” theme, Ron wrote this music with a more definitive blues sensibility, he says, though a definitive Ron Miles blues sensibility is not necessarily in 12-bar form; it’s intriguingly skewed. I haven’t counted the flattened 3rds, 5ths, and 7ths, the blue notes, to see if musicians play more of them here than on his previous albums, but do know that my own embodiment of Ron’s music begins with his intimate, singing tone, and that I feel the blues in that tone here more than ever.
 
“His sound is so pretty that it’s easy to forget how much strength is in it,” Bill Frisell says. “There’s just this incredible power and clarity in what he does. It’s coming from the inside, from the center of where everything comes from. When I play with him it’s really easy to just grab a hold of his sound, or lean on it—and because it can be flexible, I can even move through it.”
 
“Ron’s tone also really sets the pace,” adds Jason Moran. “Those notes of his, they nudge open the screen door, then they slowly close the screen door. They don’t come racing out, you know, full speed ahead with the helmet on, bowling over anything in their way.”
 
Ron’s Dave Monette cornet, a mellower cousin of the trumpet, allows him to be “inside the music,” he says, where he can exert a subtle but valuable influence as he improvises. “His playing sort of goes against what you think a trumpet is supposed to be,” says Bill. “He can call and scream out, but he’s one of the most amazing accompanists that I’ve ever played with. He makes everybody sound better. It’s like playing with Herbie Hancock, somebody who affects the music from the inside. Everything he plays is more than a solo statement; it’s also for the good of the group.”
 
Because Ron believes in transcending traditional instrumental roles, and because he wants everyone to feel free to compose in real time, he gives his band members not their individual parts, but the full score. Each musician ponders his role in a Ron Miles composition on a sheet of unusually wide score paper that extends beyond the edges of his music stand. Ron likes his fellow musicians to have the capacity to make every note purposeful, so that they can practice the musical integrity that he practices himself. "When he hands out a piece of music,” Jason says, “he gives you the world. Visually, it tells me everything I need to know about where my part lines up with another line, whether to the rhythm or to whoever else I’m working with in the composition. Ron wants to give the musicians the full score because he cares about how people understand the world around them.”
 
On I Am A Man, Ron grows his trio with Bill Frisell and Brian Blade—which released Quiver in 2012, and Circuit Rider in 2014— into a quintet, with the addition of Jason Moran and Thomas Morgan. Ron makes the most of this expansion with the extended, episodic form of “Darken My Door.” What he calls the “chewy pop center” of this tune has been around for a while, and it comes from a dream involving his late mother-in-law. “She wasn’t very happy when my wife and I first got together,” he says. “I had this dream where she said, ‘He will never darken our door again, that guy over there,’ pointing at me. And then in the dream my wife stood up for me, she championed me.”
 
In the opening, a piano trio pulls off some drama big and vivid enough for a silent film score, and then the music resolves into the aforementioned “chewy pop center,” with sustained chords laying down loyalty and support. In the same way that a dream tends to stay with us, though, the music cycles back to the original drama, this time with a touch of wry humor that de- stresses it. And if the Ron Miles aficionados were wondering what exactly two chordal instruments would do in his already role-elastic band, listen to the syncopated dance of Bill and Jason trading notes at the start of Bill’s solo. No one’s stepping on anyone’s toes here.
 
For Ron, the song “Revolutionary Congregation” is about “religion at its essence being revolutionary.” He counts as his religious heroes political figures like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi, “these powerful folks who didn’t sit back and accept the old traditions. Their tradition is standing up and fighting for others. That to me is the thing: the idea of social change and fighting social injustice as a holy cause.”
 
If the deepest spiritual conviction for Ron is a commitment to social change, he also finds sources for racial pride in religion. The song “Jasper” is named after the vibrant red- brown gemstone that shows up in the Book of Revelation “as part of a multi-hued message,” Ron says. “Jasper is one of many precious stones that studs walls, and brown feet were definitely jasper-colored. For sure, nothing looks like Downton Abbey on Spring Break, like it does in all those movies about the Bible.”
 
Ron calls the ballad “Mother Juggler” a “love song” for his Mom, and for mothers in general. “My Mom got a college degree by going to night school, and I remember my three siblings and I—this was when none of us was much older than ten—we’d all get on a bus with her at night and go to college, sitting in the back of the classroom drawing and doing homework during her classes. Then we’d go home and she’d get up early the next day and get everything ready for us. She had to make everything happen in a magical way.”
 
“Is There Room In Your Heart For A Man Like Me?” concludes the album. “It’s one of those love odes that says, ‘This is enough, and I’m going to put it all out there,’” Ron says. The music’s mood of searching, of collective quest rather than attainment, gives you a felt sense of Ron’s metier. Like those Memphis sanitation employees, Ron has a worker’s pride, particularly in the musicians’ art and craft of improvisation. For him and for jazz, collaboration counts more than results. Process counts more than product.
 
Throughout the album, the 1968 declaration by sanitation workers accrues other meanings and rhythms and forms, so that I Am A Man ultimately sings out as a modernist jazz gospel. With its deep reserves of beauty, faith, and humor, this music becomes a place to which we can bring our own conflicts and doubts, and maybe even resolve a few of them, all while being lifted up by some consummate artistry. In this music, it’s safe for us to be nothing more, and nothing less, than fully human.
And that’s plenty.
 
—Michelle Mercer
 
Michelle Mercer lives in Colorado, just down the Front Range from Ron Miles. She is a regular music commentator for National Public Radio and the author of Footprints: The Life and Work Of Wayne Shorter and Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period.

It was the most ambitious global jazz event of 2013. It likely will be the most ambitious global jazz event of 2014. Yet if you aren’t part of the jazz world, you may not have even heard of International Jazz Day. And if you did hear about it, you may still be unsure what exactly it aims to do. 

In 2011, UNESCO designated April 30 International Jazz Day as a way to "highlight jazz and its diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe." UNESCO partners with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to produce the day’s festivities, which include events in hundreds of countries. A larger main celebration in a floating location—this year, Istanbul—involves performances, panels and workshops, culminating with a gala concert.  

Sounds great, right? But just a couple months after performing in Turkey, Esperanza Spalding expressed some ambivalence about Jazz Day in an interview for a Brazilian newspaper. 

"After I left Istanbul," she said, "I thought: 'Wow, that was wonderful, everything that everybody said and played was so beautiful. But what did we really give to the needy in Istanbul?' . . . So much money was spent on this event — so many lovely, powerful and creative people were there together — but what did we really contribute? Wherever the next International Jazz Day happens, I hope we will leave with better answers to those questions."

Jazz Day’s agenda was compelling enough for me to buy a plane ticket to Istanbul and check it out myself. Like Esperanza, I found beauty in the experience. At the gala concert in the 4th Century Hagia Eirene church, the dust of centuries sifted down from high ceilings, lending substance to the music. Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento and the legendary Wayne Shorter gave a rare performance together there. Guitarist John McLaughlin electrified the house with tabla player Zakir Hussain. Jazz Day's constellation of more than 30 musical luminaries, some of them my friends, made for great conviviality. I lost track of how many people I hugged there. And everywhere we went, the Turkish people gave us a warm and gracious reception.

Yet, like Esperanza, I left with questions about Jazz Day's value and impact. Eight months later, I'm still wondering if the event could have done more, especially considering what happened there after we left. Of course, back on April 30, none of us knew that only weeks later all hell would break loose over freedom of expression in Turkey; that peaceful protesters would be gassed and beaten and killed.

But if we couldn’t anticipate that Istanbul would become a site a bloody conflict, we did know that freedom of expression had long been under attack in the country. We knew Turkey had the highest number of jailed journalists in the world. We knew that, just before Jazz Day, world-renowned Turkish classical pianist Fazil Say had been handed a prison sentence for insulting Islam in Twitter posts. Jazz Day organizers didn’t address any of that. In advance of the event, when they were asked, “Why Istanbul?,” organizers emphasized the symbolic importance of the setting, particularly the geographical significance of Turkey bridging two continents. Wherever it lay on a map, I wondered how the country’s human-rights abuses could be reconciled with Jazz Day’s goals.


The Democratic Ideal

Jazz Day organizers say the music can achieve the loftiest of aims: make peace and save the world. No one expressed International Jazz Day’s goals to me quite as vividly as Russian saxophonist Igor Butman. “I play for a lot of different presidents,” Butman said. “For Vladimir Putin, for Yeltsin, for Bill Clinton, lots of other guys. I played for Chinese president Jiang Zemin. So when I play for them, if I play good, they can discuss and say, ‘I like this guy Igor, maybe we should drop some of the weapons—we like the same music, the same art, we have something in common.’”

Okay, so I’d caught Butman at a party after a few drinks. But his scenario of jazz as magic peacemaker was only a slight exaggeration of Jazz Day’s more official rhetoric. UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova launched the big day with these words:

“Jazz is more than music. Jazz embodies values. Jazz is a school of diversity, a school of dialogue and tolerance. Jazz has set the rhythm for struggles, for dignity, for equality, and civil rights. Our goal of UNESCO is to transfer these values to give voice to this message of dialogue and freedom.”

It’s worth stepping back to unpack this loaded rhetoric. The idea that jazz embodies values has growing currency in mainstream culture, where the music has become a popular model for everything from conducting a business meeting to crafting a sentence. More specifically, the diversity, dialogue and tolerance that Bokova finds in jazz are characteristically democratic values. 

Among political and cultural institutions, jazz has had a recurring role as an exemplar of democracy. (First Lady Michelle Obama introduced a 2009 White House jazz concert like this: “There’s probably no better example of democracy than a jazz ensemble: individual expression but with responsibility to the group.”) Just as democracy comes with both individual freedom and collective responsibility, a jazz musician is simultaneously a soloist and a part of the group, contributing a personal sound to the ensemble as a whole. Sometimes a bandleader’s directive leaves little room for democratic participation, but more often than not, a jazz band can be seen as democracy in action, with diversity and tolerance necessarily coming into play.  

Jazz diplomacy has a rich history in U.S. foreign diplomacy. In the 1950s, Willis Conover’s Voice of America radio program began broadcasting jazz to the world with a distinct political message. “This is Willis Conover’s Voice of America Jazz Hour,” he’d announce at the start of each week’s show. “The music of jazz parallels the freedom we have in America. Something that not every country has."

The U.S. State Department decided jazz’s democratic ideal and artistic sophistication made it the perfect cold war weapon, a worthy opponent of Russian ballet and classical music. In 1956, the State Department sent Dizzy Gillespie out to win hearts and minds in its first jazz tour, with stops in southern Europe, the Middle East and south Asia. Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington soon hit the road on behalf of the American government, too.  

Notably, while these musicians connected to the citizens of the world through music, they stepped out of their official roles to confront injustice when and where they saw it. On a State Department tour, Gillespie looked down from the stage at a privileged audience in Pakistan and demanded the “ragamuffin” children be let into the show before he’d continue playing.

University of Michigan historian Penny Von Eschen tells this story in her book about the State Department tours, Satchmo Blows Up The World. Von Eschen says the touring jazz musicians emphasized a dynamic and inclusive democracy. “The musicians brought to these tours a much more egalitarian sense of what democracy was than the state department had,” she told me. “The musicians themselves had experienced exclusion in this generation—they’d go into the back door of restaurants, back door of clubs they played in; they were refused service in many places. To go into a venue anywhere overseas where they saw that repeated was unbearable, and they challenged that on every count.”

Before the civil rights movement, black musicians lived with the deep contradiction of representing freedom for a country that hadn't yet extended all its freedoms to them. With their advocacy of the oppressed, mid-century jazz emissaries sent a message that humanity superseded nationality or any institutional agenda — even the State Department agenda they officially represented.


Planning To Cultivate An Interest

Now Jazz Day ambassadors come from all around the world. In Istanbul, the Americans were joined by Hugh Masekela from South Africa, Keiko Matsui from Japan, and Anat Cohen from Israel, just to name a few. Though jazz is still connected to American democracy, Jazz Day ambassadors officially represent UNESCO’s peace-building mission. And today’s emissaries would have to go well out of their way to mix with the proverbial man on the street. In Istanbul, Jazz Day musicians were whisked from rehearsals to their five-star hotel, from panel discussions to palace receptions, none of which exposed them to mass culture or politics. The main Jazz Day concert was invitation-only, with so many Turkish A-listers in attendance that a fusillade of flashing paparazzi greeted concertgoers at the venue’s entrance. But there was little chance of Dizzy’s “ragamuffin” children being spotted, let alone championed, by jazz ambassadors in Istanbul. The ragamuffins didn’t get close enough.

Especially revealing was a Jazz Day morning concert at Istanbul’s elite Galatasaray High School—and by elite, I mean Galatasaray’s graduates include two Prime Ministers, eight Foreign Affairs Ministers and a good part of Turkey’s diplomatic service. A few of the students greeted the concert with enthusiasm and even ecstasy. A majority of the young audience seemed to accept the performance as another boring but necessary element of a finer education. After the concert, when I asked how students liked the music, most answered with the polite tact of the diplomats their school is training them to become: No, they didn’t listen to jazz, they said, but planned to cultivate an interest. 

I’m not proposing that Jazz Day musicians toss their champagne flutes over the palace terrace and head downstairs to join in solidarity with disgruntled kitchen staff. But I would like to suggest that Jazz Day programming broaden its approach and reach. Considering jazz’s longtime beleaguered reputation, it’s encouraging to see the music getting some respect in select social milieus. Jazz Day’s focus on legitimacy would be fine if the event’s only goal were to make jazz the official soundtrack of diplomatic functions. Jazz Day organizers say they also want to use the music as a school of dialogue and tolerance in the broader culture.

Jazz’s power to fulfill this role hinges on something it’s been lacking for a while: popularity. Back in the 1950s, when the state department jazz tours began, the music was still relatively popular in the U.S., and wildly popular in some parts of the world. A Jazz Day photo exhibit in Istanbul featured black-and-white images of Louis Armstrong being paraded on a throne in the Congo and Benny Goodman crowded by fans in Red Square. Today, hiphop is a more influential medium. At the morning concert, organizers might have conveyed a true message of cultural unity by holding a free outdoor concert in the street, and maybe inviting a Kurdish rap artist to perform with jazz musicians. For a less radical option, R&B-flavored jazz pianist Robert Glasper was in town; he might have moved the young crowd. Instead Jazz Day brought in the current class of Monk Institute musicians to perform a proficient but straitened jazz history lesson for the Galatasaray students.


Toward A True Cultural Exchange

So I grew ever more curious about Jazz Day’s strategy. At a press conference in Istanbul, I asked a panel of musicians to talk about their modern vision of jazz diplomacy. Could jazz still win the hearts and minds of young people? Could it offer a message of peace and unity to, say, moderate young Muslims in Syria or Iran?

By way of reply, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Herbie Hancock invoked technology, mentioning the Jazz Day concert webcast: “Streaming is something we didn’t have in the last century,” he said. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard answered my question more directly. “The liberation that happens when people get involved with this music is extremely powerful,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people of all these other countries like Syria and these other places—Iran—can pick up this music and be liberated by this music, and we’ll be the beneficiaries of their efforts.”

Playing jazz is no doubt a powerfully liberating experience for musicians. But Jazz Day comments often equated the experience of playing  jazz with its impact on the world; they espoused a belief that the music itself can somehow correct injustice and ease political conflict.

It was this sort of idealism that 1950s jazz ambassador Dave Brubeck took on in a biting musical satire called “The Real Ambassadors.” The musical was recorded in 1961 with Louis Armstrong in a leading role. A few sample lines:

“The State Department has discovered jazz,

It reaches folks like nothing ever has.

Like when they feel that jazzy rhythm, they know we’re really with ‘em.

That’s what we call cultural exchange.

No commodity is quite so strange

As this thing called cultural exchange . . . ”

If Armstrong's sarcasm doesn’t come through in the printed lyrics, it sure does on the recording, where his voice doesn't just drip but overflows with it. Armstrong and Brubeck had some fun with the notion that music could be a panacea for international conflict. 

Yet this seems to be Jazz Day’s very strategy: play jazz and peace will come. Organizers seem to believe they can avoid addressing conflict because music does that work for them. But of course jazz is not necessarily political or peacemaking on its own. Out of the dozen or so Jazz Day musicians I interviewed, Esperanza Spalding was the only one who emphasized this distinction to me. “There’s a lot of potential within the music for it be used, because it’s so potent,” she said. “It can move people’s hearts and minds . . . can manifest in symbolic ways those ideals of democracy . . . I guess it’s just important to note that it won’t do those things by itself."

In Istanbul we saw why it’s important to make that distinction. If an international cultural event subscribes to a jumble of artistic and political idealism, and wraps that idealism in the smooth, flattering language of diplomacy, organizers might say stuff they don't mean--and even condone something problematic, like a restrictive, censoring government. At Jazz Day, successive speeches celebrated jazz’s “message of dialogue and freedom” and assured Istanbul that it “exemplifies the beauties of jazz.” Dialogue and freedom aren’t at the top the Turkish government’s agenda, as the crackdown on protesters just weeks later made all too clear.  

Overconfidence in jazz’s natural peace-making ability also obscures some trenchant realities of the music. For a jazz band, every night on stage is an exercise in conflict negotiation—and it’s not all friendly. There can be serious drama in that give and take between self and collective, individual and group; there might be ruthless prodding from a drummer or a mean tempo from a pianist. Yet jazz players manage to lay down paths of meaningful expression through musical war zones every night. At Jazz Day I’d love to hear a panel of Miles Davis band alumni discuss some of the darker tensions on the bandstand, and how exactly they resolved them, both inside and outside of music. If jazz is going to be a model for dialogue and tolerance, group conflict as well as resolution needs to be considered—and thoughtfully explained, since again, music doesn’t do the work of diplomacy on its own.  

Jazz Day provides a rare opportunity to share some valuable messages, even if it’s only with the relatively limited audience that jazz claims today. UNESCO’s imprimatur and the Monk Institute’s organizational expertise make for the closest thing the jazz world has ever had to a superpower. So now is the time to demand the event come a little closer to doing what it says it wants to do.  

Any future host city is likely to have some of Dizzy’s “ragamuffin” children. Let’s make room for them at the official Jazz Day events. Let’s make sure the invited musicians, our jazz ambassadors, are briefed on the host country’s politics and culture. Let’s study the history of jazz diplomacy, looking at what made it effective in the past. The modern world is vastly different, but we can take some tips from the jazz ambassadors of old, who stood with people more than with institutions, who connected through music but pointed out injustice where they saw it, who treated artistic freedom and democratic struggle as matters of vital interest. 

I sure don’t have all the answers. So let’s start a conversation now about how to make next year’s Jazz Day better. Have you seen modern events of musical diplomacy that genuinely worked to bridge cultural divisions? How did they work, exactly? 

Like Michelle Obama and so many others, I believe jazz can be a thriving example of democratic values. I’d like to see International Jazz Day become a true reflection of the music’s many strengths.  

There’s so much more I’d need to know.

It’s hard to say why they went. Admiration for a musician, fear of missing out, love of jazz inherited from a grandmother, desire to please a new girlfriend?

How many walked too far in a cold, wet wind so that entering a warm, dry theater enhanced their receptivity to the music?

I’d need to know if seat N17’s boots pinched his toes. I really ought to take into account how deeply L6 breathes. It matters if her tongue tip rests lightly on the inside of her upper teeth, creating open space in her mind for the music.

For E6, is the singer’s sharp attack at a phrase’s start like a wine that’s all tannin at first taste? And if that phrase mellows into rounded tones, does the finish make sense of the initial harshness for E6?

There’s no telling what made C11 cry that night. Did he have one too many beers with his sushi dinner? Did the quartet’s discovery of an updraft in its density of notes give rise to C11’s insight that he was going to be fired? To be married?

I wonder if the music student heard anything beyond the pianist’s choice to flatten the melody and smooth the rhythm of the Monk tune. 

What magical combination of sensibility and circumstance made the smiling lady in the balcony lose herself in the trumpet solo so completely she dropped her festival program on the audience below?

If a city is an elegant and genial host for a jazz festival, that’s something.

If musicians give competent or exceptional performances at the festival, that’s something else.

But the mystery of how and why people put their hearts into music? I can’t tell you that, and it’s everything.