“Jazz music is the perfect metaphor for democracy,” says famed trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. At a time when America—and indeed, the whole world—finds itself at a crossroads, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has been inspired to write a poignant and buoyant work, The Democracy! Suite, which proves that the joy and beauty of jazz can bring us all closer together.

That new suite is now a digital album from Marsalis and a septet composed of members of the famed Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Recorded live in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room during the Covid-19 lockdown, the work is irresistible and irrepressible. Tracks like Out Amongst the People (For J Bat) and Be Present are an impassioned reflection of turbulent times that find peerless musicians working as a harmonious community, urging us to reflect on the past and reconsider the future.

“The question that confronts us right now as a nation is, ‘Do we want to find a better way?’” Marsalis says. The music of The Democracy! Suite may be instrumental, but it speaks for itself, urging us onto action—to get out of our seats and fight for the world we believe in.

This is a time of great struggle for health, wealth, life, and liberty. A panorama of timeless national and international human rights dilemmas has been surfaced and accelerated by the pitiless glare of 2020. As Americans and global citizens, we are increasingly uncertain about who, where, and how we are. The healing insights of jazz are right in time. This music is tough. In the face of tremendous social, political, and cultural resistance, jazz provides solutions to the central dilemma of our democracy and of our universal humanity: can we work together to create unlimited resources and agency for each other, or do we just accept that the strong will exploit and control the weak?

Since its inception as an art form, jazz has stood tall and unflinching in its defense of human rights. The fight for personhood and freedom is in the sounds, rhythms, and voices of those singing horns and dancing drums that stretch back to the years immediately after the abolition of American slavery. Jazz is the spirit of Congo Square, always advancing to meet the intentions of Constitution Hall.

From deep in the souls of those who put the foundations of this music in place sprang an entire sweep of collective creativity that would come to represent the rights and responsibilities that characterize our way of life. Its sound was powerful and provocative. Its nature was organic and deeply considered. It was and IS still called…jazz. And though there are many more fans of the name than the music, only the actual music has that combination of insight, virtuosity, grit, soul, invention, honesty, and integrity that makes the sound of jazz like nature herself: sweet and pungent.

The Democracy! Suite is a non-polemical, instrumental composition inspired by the facts, feelings, and fictions of our current global situation. Written a few months into the Covid-19 lockdown, it addresses the drama and beauty, the ugliness and the violence of these times, yes, but ultimately, The Democracy! Suite is optimistic in tone and execution.

Blue Engine Records presents The Jazz at Lincoln Center Septet with Wynton Marsalis and their 2021 release, The Democracy! Suite. Here are all eight arrangements from this new album!