You may not like jazz. But the next time your friends tell you that art just has to have heavy public subsidy, tell them that jazz is America's sui generis artform. It got virtually no public subsidy as it began to spring up from the streets of New Orleans, New York and Chicago. And yet it thrived in the the spaces -- between work and love, pain and happiness.
Most subsidized art is imported from Europe. How many cities have a symphony and a ballet? That's great, but it crowds out art from the bottom up, or "emergent" art. Jazz is emergent art -- both in its history and in its execution. No government. No planners. No regulation.
What is emergent order? As Steven Johnson writes:
Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts. It's what happens when you have a system of relatively simple-minded component parts -- often there are thousands or millions of them -- and they interact in relatively simple ways. And yet somehow out of all this interaction some higher level structure or intelligence appears, usually without any master planner calling the shots. These kinds of systems tend to evolve from the ground up.
And, of course, that sounds a lot like jazz. Let's zoom in:
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
(from The Weary Blues, by Langston Hughes)
That, folks, is art happening in its own way. All those happenings create something bigger. They create giants like Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock. They create an artform that nobody owns and everybody can enjoy. Jazz is emergent. America's singular artform was not born from largess, but from ghettos, music markets, smoky places and a people in the process of becoming.
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