From an essay on Cornel West:

Like jazz, democracy is fundamentally about self-criticism, self-correction, self-examination, says Dr. West. It allows for society to engage in critical, reflective, experimental, improvisational modes of being. What does that mean? It means you’re against dogma. Against rigidity. Against orthodoxy in all forms, he maintains.

What links democracy and jazz? Energy. Joy. Both require the combination of individual performers and the whole group. Neither is about fetishized “success” or “winning.” Both unleash sensibilities which are radically against the grain. They are processes that encompass all contexts and are not limited to the closed, controlled systems elites prefer. Jazz, like democracy, is always unfinished, open-ended, shot with contest. And dialogue is the life-blood of both.

Both also encompass the “blue notes.” Dissonance. Defiance. They pull the cover off sentimental claims for harmony and liberty, get beneath superficial glitter and glitz to wrestle with history and its struggles; reality and its misery; forms of death that American mainstream culture evades and avoids.