From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Opening Address, Berlin Jazz Festival, 1964

Over the years, many historians and writers have approached the mystery of jazz in many ways from Langston Hughes to Amiri Baraka to Nat Hentoff to Robert E. O’Meally, to the too few women that have brashly insinuated themselves into writing about the genre. Each person has had their own take on the music. Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis believes that jazz is the perfect metaphor for democracy: the epitome of the American meritocratic zeitgeist, reached via individual talent and persistence. But many wonder what really happens when black and white men and women meet each other on the bandstand? Documentarian Ken Burns, with Marsalis’ help, based his entire 2001 PBS miniseries on this question; writer Ralph Ellison, inspired early in life by jazz players gigging in Oklahoma City, explored the importance of a musician’s complete devotion to the art form as the supreme motivation for individual artistic expression. Writer Stanley Crouch, in his essay “Blues to be Constitutional,” reached for an Americanness inspired by the black experience that defined the American Constitution as a blues document due to its malleability and improvisational nature. How American society comes face to face with the contradictions inherent between, what Ellison wrote as our “sacred words” of liberty and justice for all (an abstract pledged to the nation every school day) and how Americans fall short time and again of living up to our sacred creed is important here. How does jazz performance allow and enable musicians in a multiculturalist society to cross social, economic and political boundaries to meet each other on the bandstand on equal terms? And how has Philadelphia, the historic contextual setting, hurt or nurtured this dynamic over the years?