Jazz opens discourse with China

"Music is a universal language, but there's different dialects, so to speak," he added. "So we'll kind of be showing off our local dialect of music to a population of people who maybe aren't as familiar with it."

Jazz emerged in African American communities in New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century, drawing on blues, ragtime, brass-band traditions and other influences. Syncopation and swing became central parts of its sound, but improvisation gave the music one of its defining characteristics: musicians could make decisions and respond to one another in real time rather than only reproduce what was written on a score.

For Clark, that improvisational freedom is exactly what makes jazz useful across cultures.

"The improvisational aspect of jazz, I think, is something that doesn't require any kind of mutual understanding," he said. Music feels "wired into all of humanity", allowing improvisation to become "a connecting bridge between different cultures," he said.

Meyer, who begins the Harvard and New England Conservatory dual program this fall, has been playing jazz for two years, after starting on piano. She described the same quality of jazz from another angle.

In jazz, she said, every player is expected to bring an individual voice. A solo does not require shared spoken language, yet another musician can hear it, react to it and join the conversation.

"It connects people, and it allows people to feel like they've known each other," she said.

The NYO Jazz musicians had known one another for only about two weeks, she said, yet playing together had compressed the distance between strangers.

She has seen the same thing happen in jazz clubs. At Smalls Jazz Club in New York, she said, musicians can arrive from different countries, barely know one another and soon be playing together.

"That's a very special thing," she said. Unlike music that may require a group to rehearse a specific arrangement or learn lyrics beforehand, "jazz is something that you can just pick up and play together, like, instantaneously".

That is the argument Carnegie Hall has been testing since it founded NYO Jazz in 2018 and sent it to China for the first time the following year.

"NYO Jazz was created not only to develop exceptional young musicians, but also to give them a platform to serve as cultural ambassadors," said Joanna Massey, director of learning and engagement programs at Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute, who has led the program since its start.

"For our young musicians, the tour provides an extraordinary opportunity to engage with China's rich culture and history firsthand while performing for local audiences. Audiences in Shanghai and Beijing can experience the artistry, creativity and diversity of America's next generation of jazz performers, while our touring musicians find meaningful opportunities to bring people together across cultures and borders," she said.