The Politics of Jazz: Black Origins and National Mythmaking

The narrative of jazz as “America’s music” has long been promoted by Western institutions. In this story, jazz is a triumphant account of cultural struggle and genius musicians: a uniquely American art form born from adversity and ultimately representative of the nation’s democratic spirit.

But that framing can be selectively applied. Jazz is deeply rooted in Black experience and resistance, emerging from communities forged by segregation, displacement, and oppression. It could only have developed under the specific historical conditions of the United States, through the aftermath of slavery and Caribbean, European, and African diasporic exchange. Yet when institutions declare jazz to be “America’s classical music,” they tend to acknowledge its history only in ways that feel safe, celebrating struggle while depoliticizing it. Jazz then becomes something like the musical equivalent of the Constitution, comfortably patriotic.

This narrative “blackens the origin but whitens the ownership,” acknowledging jazz’s Black creators but framing the music as a national symbol in a way that centers white audiences and a nostalgic vision of American unity. In doing so, it turns a once radical cultural practice into a polished symbol of America.

The irony is hard to ignore. The same America that now hails jazz as its greatest product once relegated it to speakeasies and tolerated it only as dance music. It’s even more striking when you consider that Europe and Japan embraced jazz long before the U.S. did. Only after bebop asserted artistic autonomy and rejected entertainment roles expected of Black musicians did American institutions begin calling jazz high-brow art. 

At one White House event, President Carter asked Stan Getz about the origins of bebop while Dizzy Gillespie, one of bebop’s founders, stood beside him.¹ Symbolically, that moment reveals how easily institutions can celebrate jazz while overlooking the very people who shaped it.

¹ Eugene Holley, Jr., “My Bill Evans Problem — Jaded Visions of Jazz and Race.” New Music USA, n.d., https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/my-bill-evans-problem-jazz-and-race/.

This is why debates about calling jazz “America’s music” are more than just semantics. They reveal a deeper struggle over cultural power and authorship. Jazz is both a national art form and a distinctly Black cultural practice, but the institutional narrative often privileges the first idea at the expense of the second, framing jazz as a finished, canonical historical object rather than a living Black tradition.

The Ken Burns/Wynton Marsalis version of jazz — arguably the most popular and widely accessible introduction to jazz history — has been criticized for foregrounding Armstrong and other early figures, yet treating post-1960s innovation as decline instead of evolution. Musicians who challenged tradition or any musical boundaries are marginalized, not necessarily because there was no room for them in a single documentary, but because they complicate the simple patriotic myth. Burns and Marsalis had the power and space to tell a fuller story; they simply chose not to.

That said, institutional recognition can also be meaningful. For Black musicians, institutional support has sometimes offered resources and visibility they were otherwise denied. The danger is that the music only gains visibility when it’s shown through a narrative of unity and heritage.

Jazz is a living tradition – always evolving, yet rooted in its earliest voices and traditions (ask any jazz musician about their influences; somewhere in the list, there’s always one of the early greats). Calling it “America’s music” can be true – but only if we recognize whose America it came from, and whose voices risk being erased when we make it a national monument instead of a living Black art. The question isn’t whether jazz belongs to America (it clearly does) but whether America is willing to honor jazz without turning it into a sanitized symbol of itself.