As it turns out, “it don’t mean a thing unless you’ve got that swing” applies to global politics as well as music.
At Fortune’s Global Forum conference on Monday in New York City, Wynton Marsalis, trumpeter legend and director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, spoke about the state of America post election, drawing parallels between politics and music. He added like Jazz, U.S. democracy is always “in swing.”
“Swing is the constant reconciliation of opposites,” he says. “It’s a constant attempt to find the balance of opposing forces.”
The recent presidential race brought those opposites starkly into the foreground, with different policy proposals from both parties on everything from immigration, abortion rights, and the economy. After Trump was announced the next president of the U.S. last week, many citizens were split between feeling cheerful or disappointed. Marsalis says that the momentum of politics, just like jazz music, is subjective to the individual.
“What I’m describing is a momentum, and the momentum goes well or not based on your perspective,” he says. “For some people it’s going well. For others, it’s not.”
Marsalis used jazz musicians as an example of how politicians or voters might be at risk of thinking, trapped in their own echo chambers of thought. He says that a very loud drummer may believe everything is going great, because all he can hear is the thumping of his instrument. A base player might ramp up their amp to the max, and be of the mindset that the sound is exactly what they wanted. But just like government officials or citizens, they can get lost in their own perspective.
The music has no set leader, pattern, rhythm, or flow—so the musicians constantly have to negotiate amongst themselves to get the right tune. Politicians should have to do the same to best serve the needs of others, according to Marsalis.
“Democracy has no king. Because you don’t have a king, and we have to figure out how to negotiate in space,” he says. “Democracy has the element of choice. You can choose to expend as much of your energy as you can extend on the rights of others, or you can extend it all for yourself.
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