[Dixielandjazz] Jazz Ambassadors from NYT

[Norman Vickers]

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comments may be sent to the list unless otherwise instructed.

 

To:  DJML and Musicians and serious jazzfans list

From:  Norman Vickers, Jazz Society of Pensacola

 

Yesterday I sent out an article on jazz ambassadors from New York Times.
Charlotte Colson of Atlanta sends this note to check out the 15 photos from
the art exhibit.  I did and they are wonderful-photos of Armstrong, Benny
Goodman, Gillespie, Brubeck, Woody Herman and others on their foreign
ambassadorial trips for the state department.  Thanks to Charlotte for this.
I commend these historic photos to you.

 

For those who have not seen it before, Bill Crow, bassist and jazz writer,
has a long article about the trip to Russia with Goodman.  It was a success
from the point of view of the state department but from the point of view of
the sidemen, a horror story.  It's long but a wonderful read.  Search  for
Bill Crow

To Russia without Love and you'll likely find it.

 

Now, I highly recommend viewing the photos from the art exhibit.  Site
listed below.


 

Make sure you also go to the NYT website and check out the awesome
slideshow:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/06/29/arts/0629-KAPL_index.html

 

From: Norman Vickers <nvickers1 at cox.net>
Subject: Jazz Ambassadors from NYT
To: nvickers1 at cox.net
Date: Wednesday, July 2, 2008, 5:40 PM

This is a discussion list.  Contributions solicited. Your pertinent comments
may be sent to the list unless otherwise instructed
 
To:Musicians List
From: Norman
Re Jazz Ambassadors.
 
Thought you might enjoy reading this NYT story.  I believe that Armstrong's
trip was to Africa rather than Europe.  I'm sure some jazz scholar will
correct me in event of my error.
Nice story!
 
norman
 
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June 29, 2008  New York Times
Music
When Ambassadors Had Rhythm 
By FRED KAPLAN
HALF a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during
the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from
Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies
on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world
experience what he called "real Americana": send out jazz bands
instead.
 
A photography exhibition of those concert tours, titled "Jam Session:
America's Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World," is on display at the
Meridian
International Center in Washington through July 13 and then moves to the
Community Council for the Arts in Kinston, N.C. There are nearly 100 photos
in the show, many excavated from obscure files in dozens of libraries, then
digitally retouched and enlarged by James Hershorn, an archivist at the
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. There's Dizzy Gillespie in
1956, charming a snake with his trumpet in Karachi, Pakistan. Louis
Armstrong in '61, surrounded by laughing children outside a hospital in
Cairo. Benny Goodman in '62, blowing his clarinet in Red Square. Duke
Ellington in '63, smoking a hookah at Ctesiphon in Iraq.
 
The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda
portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. Powell's insight was
that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case
unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets
couldn't match - and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also
racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late '50s, when segregation
in
the South was tarnishing the American image.
 
Jazz was the country's "Secret Sonic Weapon" (as a 1955 headline
in The New
York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison
called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The
soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and
the chord changes - just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do
whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz
show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted
100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that
people "love jazz because they love freedom."
 
The Jazz Ambassador tours, as they were called, lasted weeks, sometimes
months, and made an impact, attracting huge, enthusiastic crowds. A cartoon
in a 1958 issue of The New Yorker showed some officials sitting around a
table in Washington, one of them saying: "This is a diplomatic mission of
the utmost delicacy. The question is, who's the best man for it - John
Foster Dulles or Satchmo?" 
 
Powell arranged for Gillespie, his close friend, to make the State
Department's first goodwill jazz tour, starting out in March 1956 with an
18-piece band and traveling all over southern Europe, the Middle East and
south Asia.
 
The band's first stop was Athens, where students had recently stoned the
local headquarters of the United States Information Service in protest of
Washington's support for Greece's right-wing dictatorship. Yet many of
those
same students greeted Gillespie with cheers, lifting him on their shoulders,
throwing their jackets in the air and shouting: "Dizzy! Dizzy!"
 
When Armstrong arrived in the Congo as part of a 1960 tour through Africa,
drummers and dancers paraded him through the streets on a throne, a scene
captured by a photograph in the exhibition. As late as 1971, when Ellington
came to Moscow, an American diplomat wrote in his official report that
crowds greeted the Duke as something akin to "a Second Coming." One
young
Russian yelled, "We've been waiting for you for centuries!"
 
The stars were happy to play their parts in this pageant for hearts and
minds, but not as puppets. After his Middle East tour Gillespie said with
pride that it had been "powerfully effective against Red propaganda."
But
when the State Department tried to brief him beforehand on how to answer
questions about American race relations, he said: "I've got 300 years
of
briefing. I know what they've done to us, and I'm not going to make any
excuses." 
 
Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Dwight D.
Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce
school-integration laws. "The way they are treating my people in the
South,
the government can go to hell," he said. "It's getting so bad, a
colored man
hasn't got any country."
 
Administration officials feared that this broadside, especially from someone
so genial as "Ambassador Satchmo," would trigger a diplomatic
disaster.
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Attorney General Herbert Brownell
that the situation in Arkansas was "ruining our foreign policy." Two
weeks
later, facing pressure from many quarters, Eisenhower sent the National
Guard to Arkansas. Armstrong praised the move and agreed to go on a concert
tour of South America.
 
The jazzmen's independence made some officials nervous. But the shrewder
diplomats knew that on balance it helped the cause. The idea was to
demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union,
freedom over Communism, and here was evidence that an American - even a
black man - could criticize his government and not be punished.
 
The photographs in the exhibition evoke this time when American culture and
politics were so finely joined. Curtis Sandberg, the curator at Meridian
International, said that during the three years it took to prepare the show
his staff would frequently gaze at the photos and say, "Why aren't we
doing
something like this now?"
 
But in today's world what would "something like this" be?
 
Jazz was a natural for the cold war. Soviet citizens who hated their
government found anything American alluring, especially jazz (and later
rock), which was such a heady contrast to Moscow's stale official culture.
The same was true, to a degree, in some of the nonaligned nations, which
were under pressure from both superpowers to sway toward one side or the
other.
 
The pianist Dave Brubeck recalled in a phone interview that, when his
quartet played in 12 Polish cities in 1958, several young musicians followed
the band from town to town. When he went back to Warsaw just a few years
ago, one of those followers came up to him - Mr. Brubeck recognized his face
- and said, "What you brought to Poland wasn't just jazz. It was the
Grand
Canyon, it was the Empire State Building, it was America."
 
What aspect of American culture would present such an appealing face now -
not to potential dissidents in Poland or Russia but, say, to moderate
Muslims in Syria or Iran? And in a multipolar world, what would make them
turn to the United States as an alternative to their own regimes?
 
Even in its heyday jazz diplomacy, like any sort of cultural diplomacy, was
at best an adjunct to the more conventional brand. As Penny M. Von Eschen
wrote in her 2004 book, "Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play
the Cold War" (Harvard University Press), the audiences abroad "never
confused or conflated their love of jazz and American popular culture with
an acceptance of American foreign policy." The biggest impact on hearts
and
minds comes, as always, from what the American government does. 
 
And yet the State Department has a program in jazz diplomacy now. It's
called Rhythm Road, it's run by Jazz at Lincoln Center (a three-year
contract has just been renewed), and it sends 10 bands (mainly jazz, some
hip-hop, all of which audition for the gig) to 56 countries in a year. 
 
It's scaled more modestly than the program of yore. For one thing, no jazz
musicians - for that matter, few pop stars - are as famous as a Gillespie,
Armstrong or Brubeck in his prime, and the jazz musicians in Rhythm Road are
not well known even by today's standards. The program's goals are more
modest too. There is no pretense of competing for geo-cultural primacy. But
that is what gives this program its cogent post-cold-war spin.
 
The State Department doesn't tell the musicians what to do, but some of
them, either jointly or on their own, have decided to emphasize not their
music's peculiarly American quality but rather its resonance with the
countries they're visiting.
 
When the saxophonist Chris Byars took a band to Saudi Arabia this year, he
played the music of Gigi Gryce, a jazz composer of the 1940s and '50s who
converted to Islam and changed his name to Basheer Qusim. "When I announce
that I'm going to play compositions by the American jazz musician Basheer
Qusim, that gets their attention," he said. "Afterward several people
came
up, very appreciative, saying very intensely, 'Thank you for coming to our
country.' "
 
Before the bass player Ari Roland went to Turkmenistan last year, he learned
some Turkmen folk songs. His band played jazz improvisations of these songs
with local musicians - the first time such mixing had been allowed - and a
15-minute news report about the concert ran on state television several
times the next day.
 
"They saw Americans paying homage to their cultural traditions," he
said.
"Several people at the concert came up and said, in effect, 'Wow,
you're not
all imperialists out to remake the world in your image.' "
 
The Jazz Ambassadors of a half-century ago did some of this too. Gillespie
played sambas in South America. Goodman played a Burmese oboe with local
musicians in Rangoon. But the intent was to showcase the unique - and
superior - vitality of the United States. The task today might be, once
more, to highlight that vitality but to show that it - and, by implication,
America itself - might fit in harmoniously with the rest of the world.
                                     --end--