Jazz is the most democratic of music, holding the individual and the collective in delicate balance.
Small wonder, then, that it appealed from the start to many of those who had come to America in search of freedom and a safe harbor from persecution and oppression, and to their offspring, who were taught to remember the past. Though the concept of America as a melting pot seems to have gone out of academic fashion in these days of ethnic assertiveness, it fits jazz like a glove. That great port city was, by the end of the l9th century, a veritable microcosm of ethnic diversity. The inhabitants of New Orleans had come from every corner of the globe. Italian-born trumpeter Frank Guarente was l7 when he arrived in the U.S., and 2l when he settled in New Orleans in l9l4, where he befriended and swapped lessons with the great King Oliver .