On 13 June 1993, President Bill Clinton addressed a crowd at the White House that included, among the usual dignitaries, some of the most famous names in jazz. Clark Terry, Wynton Marsalis, Illinois Jacquet, Dorothy Donegan, Herbie Hancock, John Lewis, Rosemary Clooney, and Joe Williams were among the guests invited to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Newport Jazz Festival.Footnote ¹ In his scripted remarks, President Clinton eulogized the role of jazz in American culture, alluding both to the contributions of black musicians and to the international position of jazz:

Neither the occasion nor the language used by President Clinton was entirely unique. There had previously been several celebrations for jazz at the White House, including President Nixon's seventieth birthday celebration for Duke Ellington in 1969 and President Carter's commemoration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festival in 1978.Footnote ³ What was different about this occasion was that the White House crowd was also celebrating what one newspaper reviewer called “America's recently rekindled love affair with its own music, jazz.”Footnote ⁴

The renewed affections resulted from the passage of the Jazz Preservation Act (JPA) in 1987, which has since had a notable impact on American foreign and cultural policy, education, and media industries.Footnote ⁵ The JPA was a government mandate to preserve a history and canon that it defined, primarily, through a wide variety of publicly supported jazz performances, historical studies, and educational initiatives. As with President Clinton's remarks above, the JPA identified jazz as a black American art form. Sponsored by John Conyers Jr., a Democratic representative from Detroit and leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus, the resolution received support from both parties, and there was little debate. In his comments to the House concerning the resolution, Conyers remarked,

There were no dissenters in the House vote in September, or the Senate vote in December.

Conyers's success was partially due to contemporary developments both in the jazz industry and in federal bodies such as the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Although faced with a proposed budget cut of 50 percent by President Reagan in 1981, the NEA emerged under chairman Frank Hodsoll as an advocate for “projects that advance the art forms or bring a diversity of art to a broader audience.”Footnote ⁷ The pre-1970s styles of jazz fit perfectly into this rubric, as they appealed across a wide spectrum, could be played in a concert setting, had enormous potential for education, and had an important and underrepresented historical value, especially for African Americans. If concentrating primarily on these older styles was too conservative for some in the jazz community, it was a relief for the NEA, which had been continuously embroiled by debates about using public funds to support inaccessible, avant-garde art.Footnote ⁸ The NEA started the Jazz Masters fellowships in 1982, with the first three awards given to giants of the jazz canon: Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sun Ra.Footnote ⁹ This program was the first significant national award for jazz and a culmination of the efforts of several important jazz advocates who worked either for the NEA or for the National Council on the Arts (NCA). Among these were Duke Ellington (1968–74), Billy Taylor (1972–78), and David Baker (1987–94) in the NCA and A. B. Spellman in the NEA (1975–2005). Spellman was instrumental in creating the Jazz Masters fellowships, and remembered,

As Spellman made clear, the definition of jazz was integral to its role in federal funding schemes such as the NEA. Being recognized as a fine art allowed jazz to adopt the approach of classical music institutions while focusing on black American contributions that had long been ignored by funding bodies. Race was not explicitly stated in the aims of the Jazz Masters fellowships, but arranger Gil Evans, popularly known for his work with Miles Davis, was the sole white recipient during its first twelve years, amongst thirty-six of his black colleagues.

Complementing developments in favor of jazz in the NEA was the emergence of a group of musicians commonly dubbed the “Young Lions” after their appearance under that title in Carnegie Hall in July of 1982. Leading this group of new stars was trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, at the time a twenty-one-year-old sideman of legendary drummer and band leader Art Blakey. Marsalis was immensely talented as well as articulately outspoken about “real” jazz, representing a far more politically acceptable return to the musical and sartorial styles of the 1950s and 1960s and publicly shunning the contemporary pop-rock-fusion vogue in jazz exemplified by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock.Footnote ¹¹ Consequently, what the Young Lions presented to jazz advocates like John Conyers Jr. was a group of talented musicians able to embody, and therefore to “preserve,” their social and musical history of jazz in America. Conyers recognized Marsalis's potential to promote the vision of the JPA, and so the day after the resolution passed, Conyers and the Congressional Black Caucus invited Marsalis to lead their celebrations by hosting a panel on jazz.Footnote ¹²

If the Jazz Preservation Act's definition of jazz as a black American art form was conceptually influenced by its predecessors, it was also necessarily rooted in the practicalities of its goals. The first half of the JPA's text defined jazz and its contribution to America, but the second half was centered on the proclamation that “it is the sense of the Congress that Jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood, and promulgated.”Footnote ¹³ One of the primary ways in which Congress showed its support was through institutions created to represent its new cultural status.Footnote ¹⁴ These institutions have been the foundation of the government's effort to engage the public in America and abroad with jazz. They not only host their own repertory orchestras, they lead in efforts at music education that have reached millions of children and adults. American educational programs in particular have developed rapidly and were a specific focus of the JPA, which stated that it was “important for the youth of America to recognize and understand jazz as a significant part of their cultural and intellectual heritage.”Footnote ¹⁵

On a national level, two institutions have been the center of most of the funding and media attention: Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) in New York and Smithsonian Jazz in Washington, DC.Footnote ¹⁶ Their repertory orchestras are led by Wynton Marsalis and David Baker respectively. These organizations have grown immensely in the past twenty years with NEA funding, and each has their own educational curricula and programs, archival work, events, and recordings.Footnote ¹⁷ Their success in attracting audiences and teaching schoolchildren about jazz has been in part due to the definition of jazz as a black American art form. Being recognized by Congress as “high” art has been essential to gaining access to music classrooms, as well as building the programs and facilities that attract millions of dollars in public and private funding. Within the classroom, the issues of race and American national identity have allowed jazz to be addressed not only as music, but as an integral part of American social and political life in the twentieth century. Jazz is not only introduced under the subject of music, but also in history, social studies, and politics. Race and national identity have also been central to the performances of the repertory orchestras, which often address these issues in their printed material and stage presentations, and in commissioned work such as Wynton Marsalis's Pulitzer Prize-winning Blood on the Fields.Footnote ¹⁸ Identification of jazz as indigenous American music has also continued the State Department's sponsorship of international jazz tours meant to promote American culture and democracy, including JALC's program The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad.Footnote ¹⁹

As these institutions first sparked the country's rekindled “love affair” with jazz, they helped draw attention and funding to foundations that were already working locally to promote jazz. Some of these, such as the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (TMIJ), the Jazz Foundation of America, and Jazz Institute Chicago, have their own educational programs, concert series, and competitions.Footnote ²⁰ The TMIJ in particular has grown into one of the largest national organizations for jazz, attracting funding from national governmental bodies such as the US Commission of Fine Arts, the NEA, and the Department of State.Footnote ²¹ The growing interest in jazz during the 1990s consequently drew the attention of music- and book-publishing industries, which attempted to capitalize on record reissues and reprints of jazz histories and autobiographies.Footnote ²² All of these developments drew the attention of scholars across America, and university jazz departments and studies started to flourish in the early to mid-1990s.Footnote ²³

These activities show the accumulation of over twenty years of effort connecting form and function in government-sponsored programs for jazz. Their success has ensured that institutions such as JALC and Smithsonian Jazz remain the leading jazz proselytizers favored in Washington DC, a group that have been labeled “neoclassicists” by their critics. This group comprises some of the most influential names in the jazz industry, including Wynton Marsalis, Stanley Crouch, Albert Murray, David Baker, and Billy Taylor. For the most part, the rhetorical battles between these figures and their critics had begun before the JPA, but the new outpouring of resources and legitimacy on neoclassical jazz placed much more at stake.Footnote ²⁴ Critics complained that publicly supported musicians and critics promoted a narrow definition of authentic jazz and a particular stance on the histories of race and discrimination in the industry, when these had been sources of disagreement, competition, and creativity since the release of the first jazz record in 1917.

Perhaps the most controversial definition of jazz under the JPA is that of jazz as a fine or “high” art. Because of its importance to their institutional status, members of the JALC including Marsalis, Crouch, and Murray have been vociferous supporters of this concept. Crouch called jazz the “highest American musical form,” a form that others referred to as “America's classical music.”Footnote ²⁵ Associations between jazz and classical music were first developed in the 1920s by musicians such as Paul Whiteman, who became the country's most famous band leader by blending the two styles and commissioning works such as George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. Much like Whiteman, JALC wanted to take advantage of the accessibility and national identity of jazz while gaining the prestige and financial support bestowed by Western culture on artistic, “serious” music. Nonetheless, on musical and racial issues JALC's project stood in stark contrast to Whiteman. Their acknowledgment of jazz as both a black music and a classical art form confronted another legacy from the 1920s tacitly accepted by Whiteman, namely the racist images of jazz as degenerate, unsophisticated music incapable of emotional depth.Footnote ²⁶

This view of jazz was stubbornly persistent for decades as many classical critics defended their genre as the sole high art form in music. Even when mainstream jazz critics and musicians had begun to accept the end of jazz as popular dance music in the mid-1940s, the development of concert forms such as bebop had not come with a new artistic status. To many of those looking down from the bastions of classical music such as concert halls and music conservatories, jazz remained an inhabitant of nightclubs and was at its worst the hedonistic inspiration of a counterculture rife with drug use and miscegenation.Footnote ²⁷ For example, conservative music critic Winthrop Sargeant's famous 1946 article “‘Hot Jazz’ vs ‘Fine Art’” derided the “lofty critical language” of writers like Leonard Feather who supported bebop. Sargeant complained,

Sargeant's dismissive comments can be seen as exactly the type of criticism challenged by the JPA, for Sargeant believed that jazz

Still, advocates such as Billy Taylor and Stanley Crouch did not question Sargeant's formulation of the artistic qualities of music so much as assert that jazz fitted into that formula.

In reality, jazz had often occupied an ambiguous position between art and popular music, as epitomized in the career of one of the most famous jazz composers, Duke Ellington. He was at various times accused by critics of either pandering to audience expectations for financial reward or, as in the case of his 1943 extended composition Black, Brown and Beige, of being “pretentious” and of going beyond his place.Footnote ³⁰ The tension between the rhetoric of popularity and that of art remained through to the 1980s, in part prompted by the commercial and critical success of the Young Lions as well as some incendiary talk from Wynton Marsalis. Marsalis had a high-profile conflict with Miles Davis throughout the 1980s that epitomized the two positions. Marsalis claimed that Davis's fusion bands “ain't playing nothing” and that he had “sold out,” while Davis in turn said, “Who does Marsalis think he is? The savior of jazz?”Footnote ³¹ The nature of their debate transformed when the subject of artistic quality and cultural value had more practical implications concerning public funding. The preservation of jazz brought up factors beyond musical tastes or ideologies by giving more weight to the social and political contexts of jazz's artistic status.

Billy Taylor, an influential jazz educator and musician, was one of the first to articulate the materiality of these contexts through essays such as “Jazz: America's Classical Music.”Footnote ³² The foundation of Taylor's argument was that jazz was uniquely American and was socially worthy of being considered art: “As an important musical language, it has developed steadily from a single expression of the consciousness of black people into a national music that expresses American ideals and attitudes to Americans and to people from other cultures all around the world.” Although this could be said of other genres based on the blues, such as R&B and rock and roll, Taylor made the distinction that, “Though it is often fun to play, jazz is very serious music.”Footnote ³³ This quality of seriousness was essential to the creation of the JPA and had practical implications. As Taylor well knew, classical music was the subject of most of the formal study and public endowments for music. If jazz was to compete in these realms, it needed to be equally worthy, serious, and “classical.”Footnote ³⁴

Consequently, the effort to define jazz as “America's classical music” had to privilege certain aspects of jazz history. For Wynton Marsalis, this meant that any style of jazz that was not sufficiently artistic and classical should be excised from the genre. He was particularly dismissive of jazz fusion and believed its simplified musical structures and appeal for popularity threatened the artistic qualities of jazz. Fusion's adoption of rock and roll elements provided the perfect excuse for its dismissal from jazz history:

Ellington was a particularly important figure for Marsalis since he was seen by critics as the greatest jazz composer. Marsalis finds that the intellectual complexity of his compositions gave his music “formal aspects that make it worthy of study.” Furthermore, Marsalis saw Ellington's music as containing “information about being American,” and thus it served perfectly his promotion of jazz as America's classical music.

However, privileging composition over the collective improvisation of fusion risked undermining the system of value that had first distinguished jazz from classical European music and placed black music at the center of American culture. Jazz had first gained its status as particularly American and “worthy of study” by challenging the system of musical value that Marsalis accepts. What first attracted many to jazz was the secondary importance of composition. Improvisation made the musician the composer of the tune, with the melody and harmony subsumed by his or her personal expression. This quality had been long discouraged by classical musicians, as typified by the objections of an editorial in 1910:

The use of improvisation popularly accompanied the racial stereotype of “natural” playing by black musicians, which contrasted with the learned methods of European music. However, for a small but influential group of European classical composers, including Darius Milhaud, Igor Stravinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich, it also represented a value found in jazz they felt would influence the development of classical music.Footnote ³⁷

Despite Wynton Marsalis's respect for improvisation and its essential place in jazz music and history, he concluded that the classical sophistication of jazz was at times compromised by the focus on improvisational solos. Marsalis explained to an interviewer that the problem with jazz after 1940 was that “a lot of sophistication was cut out, because you have a genius like Charlie Parker who mastered single-line playing. So single-line playing became elevated over the mastery and genius of somebody like Duke Ellington, who had control over many lines.” While the interviewer was momentarily taken aback, Marsalis explained his logic by comparing the examples of Charlie Parker's solos in 1945 to Duke Ellington's 1938 extended piece Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. His conclusion was that Parker's work was

The formula for Marsalis was based on a directly proportional system: simpler harmonies and arrangement made the “level of social statement much simpler.”Footnote ³⁹

Wynton Marsalis was certainly not alone in these beliefs, but his high public profile meant that he drew a lot of criticism. Among his detractors were those who also used concepts such as “social statement” to forward their position that jazz should always be technically innovative and a reflection of contemporary times. For instance, scholar Lee Brown saw Marsalis's career as an effort to perpetuate the elevation of “serious music,” which removes jazz from the social milieu that had originally made it popular and subversive. Brown quips,

While many critics and musicians agreed with Brown's assessment, in the context of government funding of the arts “seething funkiness” was little competition for “America's classical music.”

The debate about the definitions of the JPA, however vitriolic at times, has remained largely within the small community of jazz musicians, journalists, aficionados, and academics whose lives or livelihoods were most profoundly affected. However, the goals of the JPA and its funding bodies were to reach well beyond this group to bring a basic knowledge of jazz to as many as possible. Only by creating an enduring conception of jazz could it be “preserved,” and so it was inevitable that the narrative of jazz history and the constituents of its canon used in publicly sponsored programs would be considered overly simplified and conservative by those with more extensive knowledge. This is certainly the case with regard to race. In the atmosphere of intense debate about neoclassicist jazz that started in the 1980s, the focus on black musicians and traditions was often divisive and emotional and has continued to be a challenge for JALC and other publicly supported programs. In many ways, the debate about role of race in jazz mirrored contemporary discussions in America often referred to as the “Culture Wars.” Just as intense as the internal debates about jazz, the Culture Wars tried to resolve the role of government in funding arts and humanities and the level of control Congress should have over their content.Footnote ⁴¹ Other issues were tangential but influential to the Wars, namely Affirmative Action in the Reagan and Bush years and “political correctness” during Clinton's tenure.Footnote ⁴² Both of these issues created an extensive debate about race in America and the government's role in mediating race relations and identity politics.Footnote ⁴³

As a result, one of the essential challenges posed by the JPA was finding a politically acceptable balance between identifying jazz as representative of black American culture, and of the country as a whole. In the words of the JPA, jazz brought “to this country and the world a uniquely American musical synthesis and culture through the African American experience.”Footnote ⁴⁴ While a majority of innovations in jazz came from black musicians, specific reference to their experience became controversial among musicians and critics because it was perceived as marginalizing the contributions of others based on race.Footnote ⁴⁵ However controversial, recognizing jazz as a form of black music was essential to the purpose of John Conyers Jr. and the Congressional Black Caucus when proposing the resolution, as well as to those who were going to implement it. That is perhaps why Conyers read a statement by Larry Ridley, professor of music at Rutgers University, into the congressional record. After citing the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation and Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s to African Americans, Ridley called the JPA “landmark legislation” that “is significant because it recognizes the cultural and artistic contributions of African Americans as progenitors in the evolution of America's indigenous art form – Jazz.”Footnote ⁴⁶

This position has been firmly supported by musicological analysis, which has provided the most widespread agreement on the black and American origins of jazz. This consensus had built up over several decades preceding the JPA, and has only increased with the spate of jazz histories published in the last twenty years. This scholarship uniformly argues for jazz's black musical foundations, with special emphasis on African music and black American forms of ragtime and the blues.Footnote ⁴⁷ Scholars commonly depict the unique timbre, harmony, melody, rhythm and improvisation that are key elements of jazz as developing from black music and reflecting black experiences and history. Geoffrey Ward's judgment epitomizes the social commentary inherent in this approach: “Jazz music belongs to all Americans, has come to be seen by the rest of the world as the symbol of all that is best about us, but it was created by people routinely denied the most basic benefits of being American.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Establishing the link between the musical freedom and improvisation of jazz, issues of race, and “all that is best” about America also addresses the JPA's definitions of jazz as a microcosm of democratic function. In language indicative of its Cold War era origins, the JPA asserted that jazz “makes evident to the world an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process, thus fulfilling the highest ideals and aspirations of our republic.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Representing jazz as “democratic” music has been a central element to the work of JALC members such as Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch, and scholars such as Ken Burns, John Edward Hasse, Garry Hagberg, and Scott Saul. Hasse's comments in his introduction to Jazz: The First Century are representative:

Here the jazz band is itself a model of democracy arbitrated solely upon musical values and talent. This approach does not deny the history and importance of racial discrimination in jazz but externalizes it, locating it socially within the contexts of American society and the American music industry, and musically within its aesthetics.

The democratic model is admittedly idealistic, and the concern of many of those mentioned above has been to focus on the potential of this democratic model of jazz to transcend social and political barriers. As stated in the JPA, jazz has contributed to a fuller realization of the promise of American democracy, as it has been “a unifying force, bridging cultural, religious, ethnic, and age differences in our diverse society.”Footnote ⁵¹ In the words of trumpeter Quincy Jones, jazz has the “power to make men forget their differences and come together.”Footnote ⁵² The idea of cultural and social convergence through jazz resonated well with one of the most common images of American history in which the nation functions as a “melting pot.”Footnote ⁵³ Although the African elements of jazz first brought it popularity, their application to European musical contexts reflected America's diverse culture and made the music distinct from its antecedents in both continents, and thus a “uniquely American musical synthesis.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This view of jazz has been favored by musicologists throughout the twentieth century. For instance, Gunther Schuller's writing on the origins of jazz showed the impact of America's social environment on the music: “It seems in retrospect almost inevitable that America, the great ethnic melting pot, would procreate a music compounded of African rhythmic, formal, sonoric and expressive elements and European rhythmic and harmonic practices.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Since most of the innovators in jazz were black musicians, jazz writers have often portrayed them as the crucible in which these elements and practices melded together.

The contradictions between presenting jazz as a model of democracy and transcendence, and as a product and subject of racism, have brought much criticism. Perhaps no one has attracted more than director Ken Burns for his film Jazz.Footnote ⁵⁶ Burns's nineteen-hour documentary built on the work of a variety of historians, as well as JALC, by juxtaposing images of jazz as a model of democracy and “what is best about us” against the racism that black musicians faced and “turned into great art.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Despite a viewing audience for Jazz numbering an estimated twenty-three million and an impressive financial return, Burns was disappointed by the preponderance of scathing reviews criticizing his perspective.Footnote ⁵⁸ They cite his multimillion-dollar budget and nineteen hours of footage as ample resources to make a more nuanced and chronologically complete history of jazz.

While these criticisms have merit, they do not take into account that Jazz was the political and musical product of years of government programs on jazz and a faithful representation of the definitions present in the JPA. It is precisely Ken Burns's positivist vision of jazz, especially concerning race, that has thrived in Washington, DC throughout several changes in administration and ideology. Burns, along with scriptwriter Geoffrey Ward, sees race as not only a central question to American life, but also an essential element to the true preservation of jazz as a black American art form.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ward commented to one newspaper reviewer, “It just kills me that kids don't listen to this music today, especially black kids, but kids in general … So if this film gets a few kids more into jazz, that will be a very good thing.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Hence Burns gave prominence to Wynton Marsalis as a talking head, demonstrator, and charismatic role model. Marsalis's role can be summed up in the comment made by Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein in the final episode:

Such comments have even more significance when considering the only significant study on the demographics of jazz listeners, which was carried out by the NEA in 1982. It found that the jazz audience was predominantly “urban, young, white, well-educated, and from high-income-level households.”Footnote ⁶² As Burns clearly demonstrated, to be the definitive music of America, jazz needed to represent far more.

Whether or not critics and musicians agreed with Burns, the support supplied by the JPA meant that there had to be some method of “preserving” jazz. There was no shortage of musicians and critics who were in favor of public support for jazz, so most at least tacitly accepted the idea of identifying jazz as a black American art form. Indeed, the logic behind the support for organizations such as JALC was hard to rebut:

With such acceptance being given by the majority, the pronouncements of jazz educators like Billy Taylor have become increasingly difficult to question. Jazz, as America's classical music, “defines the national character and the national culture … No matter when or where it is composed and performed, from the ‘good old days’ to the present, jazz, our ubiquitous American music speaks to and for each generation – especially the generation that creates it.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For all of the opposition to neoclassicism there has not been a halt to comments like that of singer Tony Bennett: “Every civilization is known by its culture, and jazz is America's greatest contribution to the world – it is our ‘classical’ music.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Indeed, the programs under the JPA are still expanding in scope and accessibility. The executive director of the International Association of Jazz Education, Bill McFarlin, suggested in 2007 that the health of jazz education had dramatically increased under the JPA: “I don't have empirical data, but I would have to guess that the jazz education industry has quadrupled in the last 20 years.” The association's director of education, Greg Carroll, concurred, “I can recall back in the early ‘60s, when it was sort of taboo for jazz to be presented in the classroom. Now it's unusual if a music program does not have a jazz program embedded within it.”Footnote ⁶⁶ The Internet curricula have been an important part of this expansion because of their unique multimedia potential and instant accessibility. In 2006 alone, the NEA Jazz in the Schools website had over four million users, while TMIJ's Jazz in America has grown to an estimated twelve million.Footnote ⁶⁷ A similar result has been seen commercially, especially after the 2001 release of Ken Burns's Jazz, which doubled the share of jazz in total record sales.Footnote ⁶⁸ While there remains a vocal contingent of critics arguing against the JPA's definitions of jazz, such results will not likely see many calling for an end to its programs, but rather a more open interpretation of what it means to be America's music.