One of my favorite albums to listen to around the Fourth of July is Nightmoves by the jazz singer Kurt Elling. This great record has always expressed to me what America represents: faith, freedom, beauty, and American originals like Walt Whitman and Duke Ellington, whose work Elling covers.

I almost exclusively listen to jazz on July 4th. Ironically, the music that began over a century ago as the rebellious sound played in houses of ill-repute now represents the best of America. Jazz musicians are strict adherents to meritocracy as well as artists who respect the canon of their art and dress with pride. Like America, they represent both tradition and innovation. One of America’s best new artists is a 23-year-old singer named Samara Joy, who gave a thrilling live performance at last year’s Grammys. Joy was all class, introducing her band, thanking the audience, and singing with extraordinary skill and feeling. She looked and sounded radiant.

I want to make clear that I don’t know the politics of the jazz musicians I love. Historically the arts have tended to be more liberal. Furthermore, Elling did a cover of Paul Simon’s "American Tune," a 1974 song that expressed disillusionment with the country in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. I don’t imagine many musicians in general are Republicans.

Still, jazz has become the art form that conserves great American traditions. In the 1980s and 1990s, Wynton Marsalis, America’s most famous jazz musician, defended the music against those trying to pull it in radical new directions. As the Washington Post put it, Marsalis "faced down the fakers of fusion and restored classy comportment and elegant dress to the jazz stand. He reset history's clock to the bop era, heaving overboard the excesses of the '60s and the cheap simplicities of the '70s. He made it cool to be a jazz player once more."

Marsalis also defended Louis Armstrong, who had been dismissed by the left: "Some people called Louis Armstrong an Uncle Tom. But he took a very heroic stand on the school integration controversy in Little Rock in 1954. All those jazz hipsters didn't speak out and they didn't come to his defense. Louis Armstrong was a revolutionary in the context of his time."

As I once wrote in the Washington Examine r , the jazz critic Stanley Crouch compared the Constitution to the soul of jazz and the blues. "There has never been anything more American than jazz," Crouch wrote. "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 any prior time." American democracy "updated the social order with its checks-and-balances system and the amendment process." These measures were, again, "based in tragic optimism, the idea that abuse of power can create tragic consequences but there is a form in place that allows for the righting of wrongs, we can maintain an upbeat vision that is not naive."

Upbeat but not naive — there’s no better description of the country at its best than this.

I once got to interview Harry Connick Jr., the jazz musician who once hosted a TV show dedicated to honoring America’s troops. "I’m a big fan of our troops," Connick told me. "Any chance I get to meet those folks I’m always humbled. To think that these people are dedicating their lives for us, to us, is really a humbling notion, so we wanted to do something special. When I walked out and saw all those impeccably dressed proud Americans out there it makes your heart flutter. We had a guest on our show who was the first African-American fighter pilot. I’m always humbled by those folks. I have a very special place in my heart for members of the military."

You won’t hear too many American pop stars say the same.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.