This editor’s statement will appear in the Winter 2009 issue of Jazz Notes, the quarterly journal of the Jazz Journalists Association.
Barack Obama believes that the arts should be a central part of effective teaching and learning.
Barack Obama supports increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Barack Obama will … improve and expand public-private partnerships to expand cultural and arts exchanges throughout the world.
Finding affordable health coverage has often been one of the most vexing obstacles for artists and those in the creative community…. Barack Obama’s plan will provide all Americans with quality, affordable health care.
I am quoting from a document by the Arts Policy Committee of the next President of the United States.
If it wasn’t clear enough that “change has come to America,” as President-Elect Obama said on that historic night in Chicago’s Grant Park, think about the fact that the next leader of the free world even has an Arts Policy.
We are not in the clear. Debates about the change agenda are now underway: How much is possible, and how fast? Support for the arts may be a lower priority at a time of recession and complex military redeployment. But we can cautiously say that America’s long night is drawing to a close.
Not only did Barack Obama win; John McCain and Sarah Palin were pummeled, humiliated and sent into full retreat. In overwhelming numbers, the American people rejected the veiled and not-so-veiled racial and xenophobic appeals. They chose an African-American of partly foreign ancestry to represent this nation on the world stage. If this isn’t a jazz outcome, I don’t know what is.
It is one of the great privileges of my life to have taken part in this process, phone-banking from Harlem on a Sunday morning, canvassing for two days in the white working-class wards of Northeast Philadelphia which, I’m relieved to say, chose Obama by a good margin.
It’s well known that Barack Obama is a lover of jazz. On October 1, at the Jazz for Obama benefit at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, my good friend and JJA colleague Ashley Kahn spoke from the podium, noting that one day, the sounds of John Coltrane’s Blue Train or Crescent may fill the halls of the White House. “But how about Ascension”? wondered Ashley. “Maybe in the second term.” Can we hope? Yes we can.
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