“The bloodlines of all important modern American music can be traced to Congo Square,” musician and trumpeter, Wynton Marsalis once said of this BaNtu treasure on American soil – a cultural and spiritual intersection which, like nearby Angola, was named after countries of origin of Louisiana’s predominant enslaved African population. It’s been said that jazz grew up in a thousand places, but it was born and given all its essentials for life within the creative nucleus of Congo Square (New Orleans). Jazz is considered America’s quintessential and greatest art form. Its orally grounded modes of BaNtu discourse demonstrate a working “art-for-life’s-sake” model of democracy with improvisational techniques that optimize the capacity for dialogues which reflect and respect difference. Guided by UbuNtu – the unity-conscious cultural philosophy which at its existential core says “I am, because we are…” – African oral-aesthetic traditions became one of the greatest civilizing forces in America. Custodians of BaNtu oral-aesthetic traditions navigated this foreign space in ways that generated musical conversations (jazz, soul, rhythm-&-blues, etc.). Jazz flowered in Harlem [NY], among other places, in the 1920’s – a cultural renaissance period known by its oral-aesthetic signature – the ’Jazz Age’ – defining a new era of civil discourse through Black Pop Music….

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