In 1958, the great jazz musician Dave Brubeck played a series of jazz concerts in Poland. Poland at the time was under a communist regime, but things were starting to thaw: Jazz had been banned in 1949, but the ban was lifted in 1955.
One Polish journalist called Brubeck’s arrival “a breath of fresh air to local music lovers and jazz aficionados, hungry for live performances of original American jazz.” Crowds followed Brubeck and his band around.
In 2024, there should be another series of anti-communist jazz concerts — except, this time, they should be held in America.
Jazz, an original American art form, has always stood for meritocracy, free expression, personal excellence, and working with others in a cooperative and nonresentful setting. It’s the best of America and can help us reinforce the values that the Left has spent several decades trying to strip away.
Liberals are driving wedges between people based on race, religion, and ethnicity — walls that dissolve under the influence of jazz and the other great arts. A Jazz and American Freedom Tour could do for socialist-sliding America what Brubeck did for the Iron Curtain in 1958: demolish it by offering people excellence and freedom.
The conductor of the 2024 Jazz and American Freedom Tour could be Wynton Marsalis, a jazz master and one of America’s best-known musicians. Marsalis is also the author of the book Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Save Your Life. It’s a book that should be part of every high school curriculum.
Jazz, writes Marsalis, is about “the importance of expressing the core of your unique feelings and the willingness to work things out with others.” Marsalis defends the masterpieces of Bach, Beethoven, and Matisse and argues that they are only possible because of hard work. Likewise, jazz musicians such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, he says, were not just artists of instinct but of endless hours of rehearsal and performance. “Social order on the bandstand is determined by ability,” Marsalis writes. No DEI diktats here.
Marsalis also blasts our “wild, out-of-control young people.” They need to appreciate artistic masterpieces, he argues, which are “an expression of feeling and a supreme expression of our humanity.” Rather than just downloading Cardi B, “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.”
Another jazz artist whose work should be represented in the new Jazz Freedom Tour is Thomasz Stanko. Stanko was born in Poland in 1942. In 1948, the Soviet Union annexed most of the territories it had invaded in 1939, and Josef Stalin banned jazz, which only existed in clandestine concerts in Warsaw’s catacombs. Stanko, who died in 2018, once recalled the attempt to pursue 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 jazz ban was lifted after Stalin’s death in 1953, by which time, as jazz historian Stuart Nicholson has noted, “jazz musicians were already an informal party of opposition, making common cause with painters, writers, poets, playwrights and filmmakers.”
In 1958, Stanko went to see the jazz pianist Dave Brubeck perform as part of a concert series that the U.S. State Department sponsored. Brubeck, in a 1958 interview in Down Beat, described this famous 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.”
“The message was freedom,” Stanko recalled in a New York Times interview in 2006. “For me, as a Polish who was living in Communist country, jazz was synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”
That freedom, that “different style of life,” is now under assault by the American Left. It’s been going on as far back as 2014, when Jed Pearl wrote that “Liberals are killing art.” Pearl wrote:
“Do more and more liberals find the emotions unleashed by the arts—I mean all of the arts, from poetry to painting to dance—something of an embarrassment? Are the liberal-spirited people who support a rational public policy—a social safety net, consistency and efficiency in foreign affairs, steps to reverse global warming—reluctant to embrace art’s celebration of unfettered metaphor and mystery and magic?. … Art itself, with its ardor, its emotionalism, and its unabashed assertion of the imagination, has become an outlier, its tendency to celebrate a purposeful purposelessness found to be intimidating, if not downright frightening.”
Jazz is a meritocracy that requires not only imagination but hard work. It dissolves racial animosity and elevates the soul. It opens the door to other forms of art and, indeed, all of art history. It signals to us that America can work, in fact is working, and we can all get along. It sells freedom.
Like the communists of the 1950s, the American Left fears that message. All the more reason to promote it.
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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.