More than a half century ago, in the early years of the Cold War, the US State Department organized tours to counter Soviet propaganda. At first they sent symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours. But Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the US representative from Harlem, had a better idea.
Send out the bands — the jazz bands that is!
Powell’s rationale was simple. Competing with the Bolshoi or with Russian classical musicians would be futile. Better to show off an authentically homegrown art form that the Russians couldn’t match.
The Jazz Ambassadors
The Jazz Ambassadors Program was launched at a bitter point in the Cold War to bring the best of American culture to the rest of the world. The program not only focused on Iron Curtain nations, but also on the Third World, where many developing countries were exploring Marxism as a possible political identity.
The jazz tours went hand in hand with the Voice of America’s jazz broadcast, introduced 7 nights a week by Willis Conover. One of the most famous American broadcasters of the 20th century, he was largely unknown at home. Host of the VOA Jazz Hour, Willis was a celebrity from Warsaw to Moscow during the Cold War. His program had millions of listeners behind the Iron Curtain and “helped to lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Jazz Ambassadors.”
Conover usually avoided overt pro America propaganda, but he described jazz as “structurally parallel to the American political system” and saw its structure as embodying American freedom.
As the New York Times noted in a 1955 headline: Jazz was America’s “Secret Sonic Weapon.” The novelist Ralph Ellison chimed in, calling jazz an “artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants,” he said, “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.”
Dizzy Goes to Greece
Dizzy Gillespie led the State Department’s first goodwill jazz tour in March 1956, traveling all over southern Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia with his 18 piece band. Quincy Jones helped organize that first tour and here’s what he has to say about it.
The entire trip was an adventure. We didn’t know what we were getting into; neither did the State Department. It was new for everyone.
From Pakistan to Iran, Syria, and Yugoslavia we had a great time — learning about local customs, jamming with each country’s musicians, and letting the music bring us together. We became the kamikaze band representing our country. I say that because there was conflict of some kind going on in every place we visited.
Believe it or not, some of these countries had never seen or heard trumpets, trombones or saxophones play together.
The video below is a tribute to Dizzy’s visit to Greece on that first tour. It was recorded in New York on May 18-19,1956.
Subsequent Jazz Ambassador tours lasted weeks, sometimes months, featuring greats like Dave Brubeck, Thelonius Monk, Benny Goodman, and Miles Davis.
The tours were well received, reaching audiences in the millions. The artists’ outreach was multifaceted, They performed, met with heads of state, and reached thousands of everyday citizens through their music.
Louis Armstrong in Ghana
Louis Armstrong served in many ways as America’s premier jazz ambassador. He and his All Stars Band made their first unofficial ambassadorial trip to the British Gold Coast in 1956, soon to become the newly independent nation of Ghana. When Armstrong was met by thirteen African bands perched atop trucks and singing All for You, Louis, All for You, he raised his trumpet and joined in. Be sure to watch the wonderful footage from this trip below.
In October 1960, when Louis arrived in the Congo, drummers and dancers paraded him through the streets on a throne.
Dave Brubeck Behind the Iron Curtain
The 1958 State Department tour of jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck and his integrated classic Quartet marked the first foray of the Jazz Ambassadors across the Iron Curtain. The experience of crossing into East Berlin to acquire the visas needed for Poland inspired Brubeck’s composition Brandenburg Gate. Here’s a performance at Juan Les Pins, Antibes, France, July 23, 1967.
Brubeck often spoke at his performances and drew tremendous applause when he said:
No dictatorship can tolerate jazz. It is the first sign of a return to freedom.
Dave and his wife Iola later celebrated the State Department trips in their 1961-1962 musical The Real Ambassadors, a collaboration with Louis Armstrong. Iola said:
. . . the entire [American] jazz community was elated with the official recognition of jazz and its international implications.
Duke Ellington in Moscow
Duke Ellington — composer, pianist, and band leader — toured for the State Department more than any other musician. As late as 1971, when Duke Ellington arrived in Moscow, an American diplomat wrote in his official report that crowds greeted the Duke like it was the “Second Coming.” One young Russian yelled, “We’ve been waiting for you for centuries.”
Duke’s encounters with local musicians as well as unfamiliar musical forms influenced his compositions and can be heard in his album Far East Suite.
Duke’s greatest diplomatic triumph came in 1971 when his orchestra toured the Soviet Union. Jazz critic Leonard Feather called the tour “the greatest coup in the history of musical diplomacy.” The 72 year old jazz great immediately followed the Soviet experience with performances in Eastern Europe and a tour of Latin America in late 1971. He visited Asia in 1972 while the Vietnam War unfolded around him.
Benny Goodman in the Soviet Union
Clarinetist Benny Goodman and his orchestra began their first State Department tour in 1956. In 1962, he became the first jazz musician to tour the Soviet Union for the State Department, making 30 appearances in 6 cities. Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev attended the band’s opening night in Moscow and was welcomed with Let’s Dance and Greetings Moscow, a number based on a Russian folk song.
Although Soviet policy had long declared jazz a decadent modern art form, Goodman and his orchestra discovered thousands of underground fans.
Jazz and Civil Rights
Because many jazz musicians were black and their bands were racially mixed, they were a powerful antidote to visions of America’s segregated South. Still, at home, they helped push the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations to expand civil rights.
For example, Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school integration. “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.” In response, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told the Attorney General that the situation in Arkansas was “ruining our foreign policy.” Two weeks later, Ike sent in the National Guard.
The idea was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union, freedom over Communism. Here was evidence that an American — even a black man — could criticize his government and not be punished.
Dave Brubeck argued that jazz was “the voice of freedom all over the world. Our government’s talking about freedom. Jazz seemed to always work and express freedom. That’s what we’re all about. The way to get to the rest of the world is through cultural exchange.”
Carrying this thought a step further, Brubeck’s wife wrote a song for Louis Armstrong to sing. The lyrics go like this.
The State Department has discovered jazz
It reaches folks like nothing ever has.
When our neighbors called us vermin,
We sent out Woody Herman.
That’s what they call cultural exchange.
Jazz and American Foreign Policy
Jazz seemed a natural for the Cold War. But as Penny M. Von Eschen wrote in her book Satchmo Blows Up the World, the audiences abroad “never confused or conflated their love of jazz and American popular culture with the acceptance of American foreign policy.”
From the late 1960s onward the high cost of touring led the State Department to develop a fruitful relationship with the Newport Jazz Festival. The collaborators were able to take advantage of the presence of famous musicians already performing abroad by sending them to diplomatically sensitive areas at the conclusion of their commercial tours.
The State Department received a great boost as the Newport Jazz Festival brought artists to musical gatherings behind the Iron Curtain while also sending them to developing nations elsewhere. The groups were also able to reach a younger audience drawn to avant garde jazz.
In 2006, the American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice opened the 50th anniversary commemoration ceremony of Dizzy Gillespie’s 1956 State Department funded world tour. She remembered how, during a crucial phase of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War, the Eisenhower administration turned to jazz music to contain the communists. As the emigre novelist Vasily Aksyonov writes in his book, In Search of Melancholy Baby:
In those days jazz was America’s secret weapon number one: Every night the Voice of America would beam a two-hour jazz program at the Soviet Union from Tangiers. How many dreamy Russian boys came to puberty to the strains of Ellington’s “Take the A Train” and the dulcet voice of Willis Conover, the VOA’s Mr. Jazz.
Rhythm Road
It’s interesting to note that the State Department has a program in jazz diplomacy even now. It’s called Rhythm Road and is run by Jazz at Lincoln Center. While it’s scaled more modestly than earlier programs, it sends 10 bands to 56 countries a year.
Remember Soft Power? Joseph Nye coined the term, asserting that it’s characterized by a nation’s ability to attract and persuade. It springs from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.
We live in an era when American leadership is once again challenged. Maybe it’s time, once again, to ‘Send Out the Bands’!
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Featured Photo Courtesy of National Museum of American Diplomacy in Cameroon (Flickr)
Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power,” first introducing it in his book Bound to Lead: the Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), chapter 2. You can buy the book on Amazon. Just click here.
To summarize, hard power is the ability to coerce, and it grows out of a country’s military or economic might. Soft Power, on the other hand, is characterized by a nation’s ability to attract and persuade. It springs from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.
