The Central Brooklyn Jazz Festival, during what the Smithsonian Institution promotes as Jazz Appreciation Month, is a powerful statement of hard core, grass-roots support for the music Congress has ratified as “a rare and valuable American national treasure.” My City Arts column reports on how the fest and other Brooklyn jazz activities, despite best intentions, reprise the distances and suspicions people of diverse backgrounds hold about each other.
There’s probably no way out of the ethnic/racial conflicts that so hamper the United States, except for us to suffer through them. But maybe Jazz Appreciation Month should have a component of celebration of how citizens and residents of all backgrounds contribute to our culture, rich yet complicated and conflicted as it certainly is.
 
