Patriotic jazz

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.