The Politics of Jazz: Black Origins and National Mythmaking

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

But that framing is dangerously selective. Jazz is deeply rooted in Black experience and resistance, and it emerged from communities forged by segregation and oppression. Yet when institutions declare jazz to be “America’s classical music,” they often depoliticize it, celebrating the art while leaving out the history. Jazz then becomes a national treasure, something like the musical equivalent of the Constitution: museum-worthy and comfortably patriotic. 

This narrative “blackens the origin but whitens the ownership,” acknowledging jazz’s Black creators but reclaiming the music as a national symbol in a way that centers white audiences and a nostalgic vision of American unity. 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. Symbolically, that moment reveals how easily institutions can celebrate jazz while overlooking the very people who shaped it.

This is why debates about calling jazz “America’s music” aren’t just silly 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 — reinforces this. Their story foregrounds Armstrong and other early figures, yet treats post-1960s innovation as decline instead of evolution. Musicians who challenged tradition or any musical boundaries are marginalized, not 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.

Jazz is not a museum artifact. It’s 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.