Whatever its shortcomings, American society has made two unquestionably great contributions to the world: jazz and constitutional democracy. But the two rarely interact.
The typical political attitude toward music is exemplified by Richard Nixon’s declaration, “If the music is square, it’s because I like it square!” Bill Clinton played the saxophone, of course, but his taste veered distressingly into Kenny G territory. Barack Obama paid lip service to jazz but stuck to basics such as A Love Supreme. Jimmy Carter’s ecstatic reaction to the avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor represents a rare exception to this history of bland musical taste.
But you can’t question the devotion of Doug Emhoff, the husband of Vice President Kamala Harris. The second gentleman, who might also be called the first jazz fan, is such a devotee that he named his children, Ella and Cole, for Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane, two of his favorite musicians.
[Read: The deceptively accessible music of Cecil Taylor]
“It’s like the soundtrack of my life,” Emhoff told me last week at an event in Durham, North Carolina, where the Biden campaign was marking Juneteenth and working to mobilize Black voters ahead of the November election. June is also Black Music Month.
Emhoff first fell in love with the genre as a kid perusing the extensive record collection that his father, “a real music aficionado,” kept. In it, he discovered classic albums such as Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and Chet Baker Sings. “If I had more kids, there probably would be a Miles and a Chet, a Betty and all these things,” he said, laughing.
Though few political figures enthuse over jazz like Emhoff, scholars of the style have long identified similarities between it and the American form of governance. “Jazz music is the perfect metaphor for democracy,” Wynton Marsalis, the trumpeter, composer, and educator, has said. “We improvise, which is our individual rights and freedoms. We swing, which means we are responsible to nurture the common good, with everyone in fine balance. And we play the blues, which means no matter how bad things get, we remain optimistic while still mindful of problems.”
Emhoff said the metaphor makes sense to him. “Jazz isn’t constructed,” he told me. “It’s a little messy, like democracy can be at times.” Both democracy and jazz privilege listening. “So many people, you know, want to shout and beat their chests, and they think that’s strength and they think that’s power, but it’s not,” Emhoff said. “One of the most powerful things that you can do in leadership is listen, and then be able to work together with someone else. So that sounds a lot like jazz.” If his description seems like a shot at the former president, note that the closest the Donald Trump rally playlist gets to jazz is Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” and, yes, Kenny G.
