The core idea behind the blues genre, what is commonly known as jazz, is that disparate people can come together to express their deepest emotions through a cooperative act of organic orchestration, while also improvising, picking up from each other the rhythmic thread, and grooving right along. This practice is, at its bottom, the entire American experiment, from 1776 until now, set to music. This is one of the many reasons why jazz is a uniquely American genre of music. Other countries have picked it up, but they’ve got to work at it.

But through the cultural flattening brought on by institutions at one end, and your neighbor endlessly posting highlight reels of their lives on social media, the last twenty-five years of culture in America have convinced us that we need to conform rather than stand out. Losing our collective jazz tuning and only hearing the music that the technological gatekeepers would rather play.

We are on the cusp of a new Golden Age, and it’s one where the soundtrack will be based on the blues. But in order to recover that soundtrack, in order to recover the blues–or jazz–in service of a new Golden Age, we must go back into the mid-20th century and revivify the musical bones of our long-dead, modernist grandfathers. The myth of return is indeed that, just a myth. But as a practical matter of course, the myth needs a soundtrack, and the toe-tapping improvisation of blues—or jazz—provides that.