Resilient Optimism: The Jazz-Inspired Balance Between Adversity and Hope

There’s a certain more-cynical-than-thou mindset, which sometimes passes for sophistication, in which optimism is derided as naive.

I’m not a fan. As someone of the “radical moderate” persuasion, it seems to me possible to steer between a blind optimism that we live in the best of all possible worlds and a blistering cynicism that the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Perhaps surprisingly, jazz great Wynton Marsalis viewed an underlying optimism as one of the key ingredients of jazz. Here’s a comment from Marsalis in a 2014 interview interview (just a little before the 13:00 mark):

There are three elements of jazz that have to be present. 

One is improvisation, which is the “I” part, freedom to express yourself. The second is Swing, which is the opposite of the “I”, it’s the “us”. Swing is a matter of coordination and balance. It teaches you diplomacy. Yes, you have freedom, but other people have freedom too, so how are you going to have that together? How is your freedom going to go from “yours” to “ours”? Then, the Blues aesthetics is our spiritual view, which is optimism in the face of adversity. An optimism that is not naive. This is life, bad things happen. That’s a fact of being alive. There’s no perfection. If you’re out here, you are paying dues. How do you deal with those dues? How do you use what you have to be resilient and to deepen your humanity through tragedy and the struggle. And how can you express the depth of that humanity that is earned in a way the will uplift people? The feeling that we call soul comes out of the Blues aesthetic and it’s also an essential ingredient to our music… All three of those things must be present.”

Anyone who listens to my opinions on jazz is an idiot, but for the sake of full disclosure, I’ll just say that my feelings about jazz are similar to my feelings about modern art in general: some of it I like a lot, and some of the more experimental stuff leaves me cold. However, at least according to my beloved wife, my tastes about art in general (modern or not, music, visual, or mixtures of the two) are only very weakly predictable.

My point here is just to note that an underlying optimism in the face of the fact that life brings adversity doesn’t have to be naive. Instead, optimism in the face of adversity can be a productive and beautiful aesthetic.