For legions of people of all worldviews, sensibilities, and persuasions, the world feels like a chaotic mess. Despite this – or, more likely, because of it – people seem hungrier than ever for meaning, connection, community. One of the ways this manifests is giving. Giving is virtuous. Whether its any of the world's major religious faiths or a more secular set of life-organizing beliefs or principles, most with any kind of historical staying power seem to keep this close to their core.
But man's generosity is not infinite, nor are his resources. And the demands for both feel greater and more persistent than ever.
Which begs some version of the question stated above in this post's title.
When you're an organization like ours and you take to the airwaves to ask people for money and you tell them it's urgent and existential, it's a question you have a responsibility to ask yourself. So, first, I asked myself, "Why should our radio station continue to exist as a community resource?" And I think I answered that one okay. But, then, the radio station is one thing; the broader effort to ensure the future of the artform we champion is another, warranting its own explanation. So, why jazz? I've found it nearly impossible to answer without being nauseatingly maudlin and high-minded. So, indulge me; this comes from an honest place, and it's the best I've come up with so far.
For starters, jazz is a great value play. With jazz, you almost always get more than you bargained for. Because while it's certainly right to think of jazz as a distinctly American artform insofar as the confluence of cultural influences that constitute jazz’s foundations – including he African diaspora’s rhythmic inheritances, Western European harmonic conceptions, and the folk-inspired melody making of Tin Pan Alley via the Pale of Settlement – could only have happened in 20th century America, it's also one that's keenly informed by musical cultures from all over the world. It's kind of like being an American travelling to Montreal: You're getting a much more cosmopolitan experience than you could imagine given the relatively modest expense and effort it takes to get there. That's what jazz has effectively become: global entry. The fact that, in 2025, we, as Americans, probably import as much great jazz as we export should inspire hope; it illustrates the extent to which jazz has fostered camaraderie and accelerated acknowledgment of our shared humanity between musicians and music lovers across cultures that are otherwise very different from one another.
Jazz has a long history of proving itself to be greater the sum of its parts, amplifying the triumphs and troubles of our shared past and present and proving over and over again that individual creative expression and teamwork aren’t irreconcilable concepts, but actually better together – like the intellect and soul. Jazz is one of the few things that stimulates both, at the expense of neither.
At its most impactful, jazz can be the consummate manifestation of our better angels and highest aspirations. It’s proven to be that in the past. Take, for instance, the consequential role jazz played in the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the most celebrated jazz compositions ever written and played became civil rights anthems, just as they were intended to be. Long before universities and major American professional sports leagues integrated, jazz musicians and concert organizers demanded that bands and audiences be integrated. And they put their money where their mouths were, forfeiting jobs and jeopardizing social standing and professional reputation, enduring blackballing and even arrest.
That said, while jazz has proven a galvanizing force in the face of oppression and struggle, jazz isn’t only that; it’s much more multi-dimensional. It is documentary evidence of the inarticulable sensory, emotional, and intellectual complexity of the human experience.
Where spoken and written language fails, jazz succeeds as a finer, more nuanced form of communicating everything from varying shades of the sublime and fantastical to the most agonizing bouts of ambivalence. From grave heartbreak and the most acute despair to childlike frivolity and concepts of transcendence and the supernatural that hardly seem conceivable in other contexts.
As such, jazz isn’t just something to be preserved as though it were an inert museum piece. Rather, it LIVES — precisely because it must if our highest moral and intellectual aspirations are to have a fighting chance of being realized. Because it must if we value the possibility of our centuries-from-now ancestors having anything like a comprehensive understanding of who we were, what we were like, and all we were capable of.
Do we want our lives and the times in which we lived to be portrayed to posterity in black and white or in the most vivid and nuanced colors possible?
Like a mathematics for the soul, jazz allows for communication and camaraderie that transcends linguistic, ethnic, cultural, class and maybe, one day, civilizational boundaries. If that sounds crazy, consider that “Melancholy Blues” by Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven was included on the Voyager Golden Records, the message-in-a-bottle type time capsule that NASA shot into deep space in the late 1970s — ya know, just in case.
In other words, if there’s another form of intelligent life out there, jazz is officially part of what we’d like those life forms to know about human life and culture on Earth. It doesn’t (or shouldn’t) take an astronaut or rocket scientist to figure it out, though: jazz is an indispensable part of our story. And until our story ends, neither should jazz.
