Michael Kelly Mort Kondracke Ch. OKAY, this is what you do Monday night. If this doesn't cause your pulse to pound, either you're dead or you're a waste of food. It will change the way you hear America's finest music, and how you understand America's path to the present. By the dawn of the 20th century the port city of New Orleans was an ethnic gumbo simmering in music.
Improvisation is inherent in America's errand into the wilderness, the conquest of a continent.
And as Marsalis says, improvisation was the warp and woof of black experience. This is not exactly what Ralph Waldo Emerson had in mind when, speaking in 1837 at Harvard, he called for America's cultural emancipation from Europe. Emerson would have been startled by the emancipator, who first came to public notice just past midnight, Jan. 1, 1913. Armstrong made jazz the soundtrack of this modern world. And I think that jazz certainly makes the whole country more than a little bit African American.