June 15, 2026
As of this morning, the tarps are still hiding the wall at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, so we can’t be sure the hijacker’s name has been pulled down. However, it gives me hope that thanks to Representative Joyce Beatty and the courts, I can someday enjoy the place again.
For me, Trump’s egomaniacal obsession with remaking Washington hits close to home because for nineteen years, the city was my home. Between losing the Voice of America, where I worked for most of that time, and seeing that name on the Kennedy Center, I felt as if a big piece of my past had been wiped out. While I heard plenty of good music around town, including rock at the 9:30 Club and Americana down at the Twist and Shout, the Kennedy Center was hard to beat for jazz, along with its better-known lineup of classical, opera, theater, and dance.
On my first visit I saw Ella Fitzgerald, who was nearing the end of her performing career but still gave us a great show. Later came Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross, two-thirds of the best jazz vocal group of all time, and Mose Allison, the “jazz sage,” famous for wry humor on tunes like, “Your Mind Is On Vacation (But Your Mouth Is Working Overtime). Mose wrote another song called “Everybody’s Cryin’ Mercy.” Maybe “jazz Nostradamas” fits better.
I also caught father and son guitar maestros Bucky and John Pizzarelli; Mark Murphy, a pioneer of vocalese (setting lyrics to instrumental solos) and a hipster who did a tribute album to Jack Kerouac; Eliane Elias, bringing the Brazilian sound into a new century; and African legend Ali Farka Toure, who merged traditional music from Mali with its American descendant, the Mississippi Delta blues. Literally and figuratively, this is what Walt Whitman called “America singing.” All of America.
The Kennedy Center’s future probably won’t be fully secure until the voters run Trump and his mob out of town. But in addition to the many, many other blessings of that day, we’ll see more shows like the ones when Aretha Franklin brought the house down and the president sang along to “Whole Lotta Love.”