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S02E01 'Cool War - The Jazz Ambassadors'
129 Plays9 months ago
During the Cold War, America recruited some of its most talented Jazz musicians in a cultural propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington were all enlisted to perform in the Middle East, South America and post-colonial Africa, parts of the World where America’s interests were dictated by its geo-political strategy. Musicians that experienced racial and economic hardship at home were suddenly being celebrated by the American Government for their musical innovation, and representation of cultural freedom. Their place on the world stage and the celebration of Jazz music abroad altered the perception of the music at home. Jazz music would develop a political importance and establish itself during the 1950s as the distinctive American artform. This official State branding was problematic in many ways, and as we move through the season, we will discuss how some of the greatest American musicians and political activists of the 20th Century; Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane among them, would revolutionize musical culture and the position of Jazz musicians in relation to American society. In doing so they would effectively deconstruct the Americanization of the music, re-infusing Jazz with an African heritage that was by the mid-50s in danger of being stripped away. The development of Jazz music is representative of the shifting social and economic patterns of the United States during this period. These artists managed to tie their music to the everyday social struggles of their people and the political challenges of the time, while at the same time creating music that was deeply spiritual and transcendental.
Tracks:
'Cherokee' - Duke Ellington
‘Koko’ - Charlie Parker
'Saturday Night Fish Fry' - Louis Jordan
'Kush (Live)' - Dizzy Gillespie
'In A Persian Market' - Wilbur De Paris
'The Real Ambassador' - Dave & Iola Brubeck, Louis Armstrong
'The Eternal Triangle' - Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt & Sonny Rollins
Books:
This Is Our Music: Free Jazz, the Sixties, and American Culture (The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America) Paperback - Iain Anderson
Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism - Richard Brent Turner
Freedom Sounds, Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz In Africa - Ingrid Monson
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Jazz and Politics
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Season 2, Episode 1 of Real Gone. We're going to spend this season examining how revolutions within jazz music intersected with the political and social structures of the United States of America during the 1950s and 1960s.
Jazz as Cultural Diplomacy
00:00:14
Speaker
As America exited World War II and promptly entered into the Cold War with the Soviet Union at a time of racial segregation in the southern states,
00:00:22
Speaker
African-American jazz musicians were elevated to the status of national ambassadors and their state-funded foreign tours to the Middle East, Africa and South America. Their place on the world stage and the celebration of jazz music abroad altered the perception of the music at home. The mainstream acceptance of jazz music broadened its audience and created platforms for musicians to shine light on the underlying issues of racial discrimination and violence towards black people that would intensify during a turbulent period of its history.
00:00:50
Speaker
where the civil rights movement would drag America kicking and screaming towards social progress.
00:00:56
Speaker
Jazz music would develop a political importance and establish itself during the 1950s as the distinctive American art form. This official state branding was problematic in many ways.
Jazz and African Heritage
00:01:06
Speaker
And as we move through the season, we'll discuss how some of the greatest American musicians and political activists of the 20th century, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane among them, would revolutionize musical culture and the position of jazz musicians in relation to American society. In doing so, they would effectively deconstruct the Americanization of the music
00:01:26
Speaker
re-infusing jazz with an African heritage that was in the mid-50s in danger of being stripped away. The development of jazz music is representative of the shifting social and economic patterns of the United States during this period.
Jazz and Social Boundaries
00:01:38
Speaker
These artists managed to tie their music to the everyday struggles of their people and the political challenges of the time, while at the same time creating music that was deeply spiritual and transcendental.
00:01:49
Speaker
As written by Arts Professor Ian Anderson, at various times during the 1960s, musicians, critics, fans, politicians and entrepreneurs claimed jazz as a national art form, an Afro-centric race music, an extension of modernist experimentation, a music of mass consciousness and the preserve of a cultural elite. The debate over its meaning framed the reception of free improvisation and greatly influenced the standing of jazz in American culture.
00:02:41
Speaker
From its inception in the smoky bardellos, cabarets and speakeasies of Storyville in New Orleans and Harlem in New York City, jazz music had moved to a position of respectability in a relatively short period of time, by the 1950s occupying university halls and art foundations, dissolving social boundaries along the way.
Evolution of Jazz Styles
00:03:00
Speaker
Jazz had emerged in the 1950s as the harbinger of a new cultural style, urban, permissive and spread by new radio and phonographic technologies. For decades it had been maligned and demonised by mainstream American society and would become a flashpoint between modern and traditional values. Its association with racial and ethnic outsiders solidified its marginal status, but as the decadent 1920s gave way to the aftermath of the Great Depression,
00:03:25
Speaker
widespread celebration of the common man underpinned in new respect for the pluralist, collectivist swing orchestras of the day. The sophisticated sound of the big band orchestras appealed to dancers and listeners of all backgrounds. For a decade or so after 1935, swing music served as America's popular music, but few of those bands survived the economic pressures imposed by World War II.
00:03:50
Speaker
The big band orchestra is led by the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway, which feature Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, via stiff competition from former swing vocalists like Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra, who are launching their solo careers, and the more stripped-down, up-tempo, jump blues bands of the day. A kind of prototypical R&B music played by the likes of drummer Lionel Hampton and saxophonist Louis Jordan, whose track, Saturday Night Fish Fry, is reportedly one of the first to feature a deliberately distorted electric guitar.
00:04:20
Speaker
It was a rocket, you never seized that scuffing and shuffling till the break of dawn. It was a rocket, it was a rocket, you never seized that scuffing and shuffling till the break of dawn.
00:04:44
Speaker
The most innovative, experimental performers of the war years developed an abstract, unpredictable and frenetic style of jazz music known as bebop. Despite the novelty and obvious brilliance of the bebop musicians, it was difficult for even well-known artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie to gain approval in the respectable circles and music clubs once inhabited by the famous swing orchestras. The image of modern jazz at that time, hip and transgressive, was in opposition to the mainstream world of art and commerce.
00:05:11
Speaker
For the time being at least, this new jazz music was for outsiders only. Any suggestion of the wider cultural acceptance of jazz that would transpire in the 1950s would have seemed highly unlikely during the 40s. Bebop was initially geared towards a niche urban market. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clark all struggled to make money on the fringes of a collapsing dance band economy.
00:05:35
Speaker
also failed to make the transition from popular music to art status. In many cases, the persistent racism of the music industry had dashed many artists' hopes of meaningful professional advancement that had been raised by the regularity of their performances during the swing era. Bebop's coded language, behaviour and dress, and its association with illegal drugs, carried the allure and menace of racialised non-conformity. Its comedic and tragic sides were modelled respectively by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, known by his nickname of Bird.
00:06:05
Speaker
The appearance of bebop artists adorned in zoot suits, hornroom glasses with berets and goatees, an image that's still associated with the music, distilled the public's perception of them as deviant outsiders. This made it difficult for those critics who championed the music to shepherd it to widespread acclaim and respectability. But all of that aside, the excitement created by the music was undeniable, and its influence ran deep for those musicians, including the likes of John Coltrane,
00:06:33
Speaker
That would take improvisational music to extreme levels of innovation over the next 20 years.
Jazz as National Symbol
00:06:38
Speaker
This is Coco by Charlie Parker, a bebop reworking of the re-noble track Cherokee performed by Duke Ellington that we played earlier.
00:06:59
Speaker
so
00:07:10
Speaker
The jump in recognition from outsider music to national acclaim was to a large extent attributable to a combination of external factors. We'll discuss some of the technological and cultural developments that help bring jazz music to a wider audience in the next few episodes. For this episode we intend to focus on the political factors which relate to America's position on the global stage in the years following World War II.
00:07:32
Speaker
The elevation of jazz music to the status of national cultural symbol was enabled by Washington's foreign policy objectives and the desire of its supporters to widen the audience for jazz music throughout the USA and overseas. During the Cold War, both the US and Soviet Union used propaganda to win allies abroad. US State Department officials searched for artists it could display to counteract the Soviet depiction of the USA as culturally barbaric, deeply racist and religiously intolerant.
00:07:59
Speaker
The capacity of musicians to sell an image of progressive racial harmony was seized on by Voice of America, the state-owned News Network, and the U.S. State Department. The U.S. government's cultural diplomacy contributed to and benefited from a resurgence in jazz music throughout the United States, most notable for its embrace by a large middle-class audience who read magazines such as Esquire, Harpers, and The New Yorker, all of which featured regular jazz columns by the mid-1950s.
00:08:26
Speaker
The development of television created an alternative exhibition space for those in the suburbs, and the arrival of long-play records with their ability to approximate or reproduce live performances boosted the audience for jazz and classical music.
00:08:39
Speaker
There was a democratic participatory spirit of consumption that pervaded the affluent society of the 1950s and extended to the field of the arts. Conductors like Leonard Bernstein, painters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, as well as jazz musicians like Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis became household names.
00:08:58
Speaker
through new media and cultural forums, including music festivals and college campus performances, manufacturers and madmen-style advertisers, spread stylish modern images, translating modernist gestures into saleable fashions. By commodifying culture as a means of self-improvement, these developments tied the arts to a consumer ethic that everyone in this affluent new society could hope to fulfil.
00:09:21
Speaker
The new styles of jazz, including Kool, West Coast, Third Stream and Heartbop, were the vehicles for the presentation of jazz music to this new audience. International rivalry in the environment of the Cold War added credibility to the notion that great nations should produce great art, and the US was determined to champion jazz music as a precious national symbol in its ongoing cultural propaganda war with the USSR.
00:09:48
Speaker
The US government promoted the representation of freedom, cultural richness and innovation within jazz music at home, and among cultural leaders in foreign nations that had not yet aligned with the Soviet Union. This promotion significantly shaped the reception of jazz music in the US, with its listeners able to take kind of nationalistic pride in the music due to the manner in which it was deployed abroad. On 20th April 1950,
00:10:13
Speaker
President Harry Truman appeared before the American Society of Newspaper Editors and called for what he called a campaign of truth to counter Soviet propaganda and its supposed policy of deceit, distortion and lies about the USA. Truman was acknowledging the importance of propaganda to maintaining allies and influencing neutral countries in favour of what he saw as the American way.
00:10:35
Speaker
Following World War II, the US and Russia viewed each other's attempts to impose their influence on Europe with suspicion. Intent on curbing Russian influence, Truman framed his military aid packages to Europe as matters of principle rather than strict geopolitical necessity. He equated victories for communism as defeats for democracy, and in doing so won support for foreign interventions to assist strategically significant regimes that went some way to overcoming American isolationism.
00:11:05
Speaker
America would present itself as the defender of the free world, but this would stretch its resources and extend its commitments permanently. Challenges frequently arose, including the testing of nuclear weapons by the Soviet Union in 1949, the Korean War, and the Cultural Revolution in China. Truman's call for the campaign of truth and the Smith-Munt Act of 1948
00:11:26
Speaker
which aimed to regulate broadcasting of programs for foreign audiences produced under the guidance of the State Department, acknowledged that the use of culture could be an effective weapon to actively refute Soviet overtures and to build a favorable consensus towards the US in Europe and further abroad. American agencies used various methods to educate allies, enemies and neutral countries about the advantages of a partnership with the US. Propaganda was often considered to be most effective when its governmental origins remained hidden.
00:11:56
Speaker
The CIA often concealed its funding and involvement with cultural initiatives. Between 1950-1967, the Congress of Cultural Freedom was an anti-communist cultural organization operated by CIA agent Michael Jocelyson out of West Berlin. Its sponsorship of news services and magazines, musical performances, touring art exhibitions and international conferences were designed to court European intellectuals towards sympathizing with an Americanist worldview.
00:12:24
Speaker
Josephson's Jewish family, opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, had emigrated from Estonia and eventually settled in Germany. He joined the US Army during World War II, and his ability to speak four languages landed him in the intelligence service, where he was stationed in Berlin, interrogating captive Nazi officers during the war. During the Cold War, the CIA commissioned Josephson to manage the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which recruited many former communist intellectuals to combat the influence of Marxist ideas throughout Europe.
00:12:55
Speaker
The first conference of the Congress in June 1950 was attended by reputable writers, critics and philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, Tennessee Williams and Nicholas Nabokov. The Congress was just one early example of America's weaponization of culture as a means of asserting its supremacy abroad. This strategy would in the next few years capitalize on the innovations of jazz musicians by sending them abroad as agents of American culture.
00:13:21
Speaker
The Soviet leadership had labelled America as culturally barbarous and had invested in touring demonstrations of their own artistic successes, including travelling shows by the Bolshoi Ballet. Furthermore, the poor treatment of black Americans in the racist Jim Crow southern states was seized on by Russian propagandists to undermine the US government's presentation of America as a state devoted to equality, racial diversity and freedom of expression.
00:13:47
Speaker
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had secured an emergency fund of $5 million for American participation in international trade fairs and presentation of musical and theatre performances. This was the beginning of the U.S. Cultural Presentations Program, which according to Eisenhower was intended as a cultural exchange program capable of demonstrating the superiority of the cultural values of free enterprise.
00:14:11
Speaker
With permanent State Department funding in place by 1956, the role of the arts became integral to America's efforts in the Cold War. For the next decade, the American National Theatre and Academy, or ANTA, under the direction of the State Department, sent 206 artistic groups on goodwill tours to 112 different countries.
00:14:32
Speaker
These groups included ballet companies, modern dance troupes and symphony orchestras. These programs were aimed at the intellectual leadership of non-aligned nations, meaning countries that had not yet hitched their wagon to the USA or Soviet Union, and segments of youth showing the greatest signs of eventual leadership.
00:14:51
Speaker
The State Department selected groups based on their moral utility. Players such as Abe Lincoln in Illinois by Robert Sherwood was selected for its celebration of liberalism and democracy, while Julius Caesar was rejected due to its supposed glorification of dictatorship. When the US government concentrated its efforts on sending bebop musicians abroad, there was a certain element of risk.
00:15:14
Speaker
Bebop had been associated with the supposedly deviant behavior of the burgeoning counterculture well into the 1950s. Its association with marijuana use and celebration by beat generation angel-headed hipster writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac only reinforced this perception. The State Department put its weight behind reconstructing the image of Bebop and jazz music generally as being symbolic of the more noble aspects of American society rather than some sketchy and subversive subculture.
00:15:43
Speaker
The motivation for Washington to reinvent the public perception of jazz in America originated largely from how the music was perceived abroad as a symbol of freedom and resistance. The young cosmopolitan audiences in Western Europe and further abroad who had adopted jazz music as a reaction to the more conservative and traditional taste of their elders were targets for American propaganda.
00:16:05
Speaker
Some of the most prominent writing about jazz music had come from European music critics who had documented the aesthetics of the music and who in the 1930s had begun promoting jazz concerts, supporting tours by the likes of Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins, who would soon make extended stays in Europe. In his brilliant book, This Is Our Music, Ian Anderson writes about how World War II invested jazz music with renewed ideological significance in Europe and provided the foundation for its later use as a diplomatic tool.
00:16:32
Speaker
The Nazis' labelling of jazz as degenerate music and the banning of its performance in the late 1930s helped consolidate the identification of the music with resistance to oppression. Jazz music's popularity as a symbol of liberation became apparent during the stunning reception given to Louis Armstrong at the first European Jazz Festival in Nice during 1948. A 1950 tour, which included an audience with the Pope, drew enough attention for the State Department to send Satchmo a thank you note.
00:17:02
Speaker
The repurposing of touring jazz musicians as agents of American diplomacy became increasingly important for the US government as the 1950s progressed into the Cold War. After Armstrong performed in Geneva in 1950, The New York Times, referencing Armstrong's foreign jazz performances, printed the front page headline, United States Has Secret Weapon.
00:17:22
Speaker
Its writer, Felix Belair, lobbied for federal funding to subsidize foreign jazz programs to promote interest in American culture abroad. America's position as a new global superpower stirred greater interest in its cultural practices and exports. Any location where American troops were stationed saw the presence of jukeboxes, radio, and often Victory Discs records being played to foreign listeners. Victory Discs, or V Discs, was a record label operating between 1943 and 1949.
00:17:52
Speaker
provide records exclusively for military personnel abroad. The label managed to bypass the 1949 musician strike by members of the American Federation of Musicians. Captain Robert Vincent, who supervised the label, convinced union leaders to allow musician members to record for the military, provided the records were not sold commercially and that the master recordings were disposed of.
00:18:14
Speaker
Musicians, including Louis Armstrong, Art Tatum and Coleman Hawkins, who were contracted to different labels, were suddenly able to record for this not-for-profit enterprise. Inevitably, some records were smuggled back to the US. One unfortunate Los Angeles record executive ended up in prison for his illegal stockpiling of 2,500 priceless V-discs records after the FBI were tasked with ensuring the music was taken out of circulation.
00:18:40
Speaker
While playing in Thailand, another US military stronghold in 1957, Benny Goodman and his orchestra were joined on stage by the King of Siam, who insisted on being allowed to play a saxophone with the band. Such was the popularity of US jazz in mainland Southeast Asia. Most of the audience members were already familiar with the American style jitterbug dancing. US government officials had picked up on the popularity of jazz abroad even before 1950.
00:19:06
Speaker
Voice of America, the state-owned news network and international radio broadcaster of the USA, had produced a series of programs titled Jazz Club USA. Although the program only lasted a few years, its popularity in foreign countries, most notably the Soviet Union, drew the attention of the Washington political hierarchy. By introducing American culture and ideas into foreign countries, the State Department hoped to create favourability towards what it saw as the American way of life,
00:19:34
Speaker
The premise of the Smith-Munt Act of 1948 was to impose a familiarity that made foreign countries more amenable to American influence and control at the geopolitical level. During the 1950s, Bebop had become the music of choice for the Stilagi, translated literally as style hunters, or hipsters to use the more familiar term in English. A stratum of upper-class Soviet youth whose dress, language, search for individuality and rebellion against official mass culture marked them as a kind of Soviet beat generation.
00:20:04
Speaker
The Stilagi were openly mocked in Soviet newspapers where cartoonists portrayed them as a kind of slacker layabout with an unhealthy fondness for American hair product and bubble gum. In 1954, the US Ambassador to Moscow, Charles E. Bolan, recommended to his superiors that a jazz program aimed at Soviet youth would attract a large audience. Acting on this advice, the Voice of America launched a new program of music in 1955 that contained a 45-minute jazz segment.
00:20:33
Speaker
By 1962, this program was playing to 30 million fans in 80 countries. Feedback from Soviet controlled countries was hard to obtain, but Western visitors reported back about the Voice of America programs being taped and exchanged by a large number of enthusiastic music fans behind the Iron Curtain.
00:20:51
Speaker
Surveys completed by the US Information Agency, or the USIA, indicated that the government's strategy of broadcasting to certain opinion moulders, including teachers, authors and journalists, and decision makers, being leaders in politics, industry and labour, was having the intended effect. The next stage of the plan was to arrange public performances across the world by touring ensembles. The voice of America's success in broadcasting jazz led the groundwork for the defining moment of the Cultural Ambassadors programme.
00:21:22
Speaker
Anta would finally include a jazz band after much campaigning by the Democratic US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr, who represented the Harlem District of New York City. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York. Powell Jr, played by Jeffrey Wright in the brilliant 2023 film Ruston, had pressed the government to focus on what he called real Americana.
00:21:44
Speaker
include jazz musicians in place of the ballets and symphonies that had previously made up the roster of the more prestigious performers. He also urged US presidents to support emerging independent nations in post-colonial Africa and Asia. Parts of the world where the State Department would soon invest considerable time and expense in sending their touring musicians. In November 1956, Powell introduced Dizzy Gillespie at a press conference on the steps of the House of Congress in Washington,
00:22:12
Speaker
where it was announced that the State Department would be sending American jazz musicians on tour around the world as part of the cultural presentations program. He quipped how the press could stop talking about the Cold War and start writing about a cool war instead.
00:22:26
Speaker
On March 25, 1956, the State Department dispatched Dizzy Gillespie, the cherished and charismatic bebop bandleader on a 10-week tour of the Middle East, taking in the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey and Greece. Security agreements with countries hosting these concerts was essential. Many of these nations would have had US military bases or formal treaties with the United States. And to organise the tour on behalf of the State Department and the USIA helped book appearances.
00:22:56
Speaker
federal funds would cover the band's expenses. Gillespie was accompanied by a 12-piece orchestra. His band included Quincy Jones, Phil Woods, Walter Davis Jr., Charlie Persip, Ernie Wilkins, and female trombonist Melba Liston. The first half of his shows consisted of pieces of music intended to represent the history of jazz in America, and the second half was a demonstration of more experimental modern jazz stylings.
00:23:23
Speaker
The State Department's plan to kick off the tour in Bombay, India was altered at a late stage when Prime Minister Nehru announced the firm policy of non-alignment with the USA and the Soviet Union. The tour commenced at the Taj Theatre in Abadan, Iran on March 27, 1956. These were especially complicated times for Iran, with the Shah having only recently come to power in 1953 by way of an American-backed coup that was intended to secure US access to the country's vast oil resources.
00:23:53
Speaker
Having considered conversion to Islam in the 1940s, Dizzy was the ideal musician to play for audiences in the Muslim world. Dizzy Gillespie and his all-stars performed for Princess Shanaaz Palavi, daughter of the Shah of Iran. Most of the predominantly Muslim audience would have had no previous experience of jazz music. They were also initially concerned about the presence of performing female members in Gillespie's band, trombonist Mel Ballistin, and vocalist Doddy Saunders.
00:24:19
Speaker
The reception was initially quiet and respectful, but soon became incredibly enthusiastic. The crowd's excitement reportedly growing over subsequent nights, where audience members returned to see the band multiple times, bringing their friends with them. Melba Liston had returned to music after a few years away, specifically to work in Dizzy's band on the State Department tours.
00:24:39
Speaker
She had left music for a number of years, disillusioned with the sexual harassment from male musicians and hostility towards jazz music she had experienced while touring the southern states of the US with Billie Holiday's band in 1949. She compared the negativity of that experience with the positivity and respect she was given while working in Dizzy Gillespie's band. While on the State Department tours, she answered questions from young Muslim women about her experience as a traveling musician and the identity of black women in the United States compared to that of the Middle East.
00:25:12
Speaker
While playing in Ankara, Turkey, a local Turkish Muslim musician named Arif Mardin gave Dizzy's band member Quincy Jones a score that he would use in the United States. Jones would help Mardin secure a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston, which specialized in the education of professional jazz musicians. Mardin would later work as an arranger and executive at Atlantic Records.
00:25:37
Speaker
Sensitive to local customs and in keeping with the diplomatic character of the tour, when playing in Damascus, Syria during Ramadan, Dizzee's band halted their concert at the moment of sunset to allow his Islamic audience to break their fast and to enjoy the banquet of food that had been laid out at the back of the concert hall. Gillespie's tour proved to be a triumph for international relations.
00:25:58
Speaker
and its success as a propaganda exercise led to a second tour to South America later that year, and a steady stream of similar tours during the 1950s and 60s by a host of touring musicians including Dave Brubek, Duke Ellington, Randy Weston and Herbie Mann.
00:26:14
Speaker
Audiences were captivated by the mixture of sophisticated musicianship, compositional brilliance and the sheer inventiveness of the bebop style employed by many of the touring musicians. As written by Richard Brent Turner in his book, Soundtrack to a Movement, Dizzy's performances, like those of other jazz musicians who participated in the State Department programs, shaped black internationalism by circulating jazz in their transnational performances and celebrated the intertwined consciousness of the struggles for African freedom and third world decolonization.
00:26:45
Speaker
Thank you.
00:27:12
Speaker
In 1958, the State Department sent Woody Herman's Orchestra to South America. Less than three months after demonstrators, angry with US economic policies and support for regional dictators, had heckled, stoned and chased Vice President Richard Nixon out of Lima, Peru and Caracas, Venezuela. Herman's band were sent deliberately to alleviate some of the anti-American sentiment that had caused Nixon to cut his diplomatic trip short. State Department Memoranda documented the enthusiastic reception by Herman's band
00:27:42
Speaker
and areas that had seen violent protests against visiting American politicians only months before.
00:27:50
Speaker
Jazz groups selected by Yanta traveled all over the world, even to the Soviet Union, where Benny Goodman played in 1962. Musicians won the favour of their hosts by conducting music workshops, attending diplomatic events and spending time learning about local customs. In his brilliant book, Freedom Sounds, civil rights call out to jazz in Africa, writer Ingrid Monson writes about the attitudes of the musicians participating in the State Department tours.
00:28:16
Speaker
Jazz, in their view, offered an alternative, more democratic vision of American society and the musicians enjoyed enacting a sense of solidarity and diasporic interconnection with people outside European orbit. They did not view their participation in the program as an aspect of Western cultural imperialism, but as an alternative to it.
00:28:36
Speaker
The day before Dizzy Gillespie played a concert for students in Athens in 1956, the US Embassy had been stoned by many of those same students who were protesting American support for the British claim to control of Cyprus. Their political grievances were put aside when Dizzy took the stage, and he was given a rapturous reception and steady wall of applause, the audience chanting his name throughout the show.
00:29:00
Speaker
Dizzy Gillespie's leadership of a mixed race band was held up as a sign of social progress, even though the tours were not without their critics. American sociologist W.E.B. Dubois criticized the cultural presentations program for supposedly selling a lie about how, in his words, the success of capitalism had made the Negro free. Amidst the tours, Dizzy Gillespie and his band members faced questions about racism in the United States following widespread international news coverage of the Montgomery bus boycotts led by Martin Luther King.
00:29:30
Speaker
The musicians explained how they enjoyed representing America, but did not pretend to apologize for its many racist policies. The State Department's belief that the successful foreign jazz tours reflected positively on the American system was challenged by opposition within Congress. A congressional review of Dizzy Gillespie's Middle East tour revealed losses of $84,000.
00:29:53
Speaker
One conservative critic, Senator Alan Ellander of Louisiana, implored his colleagues on the Senate Appropriations Committee to block further funding for the State Department tours. He failed for the same reason that previous attempts to block foreign tours of abstract American art to Europe and Latin America had failed in 1947. International interest in uniquely American forms of modern art and music proved too enticing to ignore, as supporters of each media enshrined artistic freedom as its defining trait.
00:30:22
Speaker
The State Department, CIA funded institutions and the Museum of Modern Art had championed abstract expressionism as much as the State Department had presented jazz as the evidence and embodiment of a superior political and economic system. The emphasis on freedom in art as a reflection of the liberalism of American society was part of America's global message during the Cold War.
00:30:47
Speaker
Notwithstanding the success of the State Department tours, the manner in which European audiences, particularly influential jazz critics related to jazz music, concerned those officials within the US government who were essentially attempting to sell its value abroad. American historian Ted Gioa discusses the notion of the primitivist myth tied to the celebration of primitivist art in Europe at that point in time.
00:31:10
Speaker
This myth was, in Ted's words, a stereotype which views jazz as a music charged with emotion, but largely devoid of intellectual content and which sees the jazz musician as the inarticulate and unsophisticated practitioner of an art which he scarcely understands. The extent to which such a designation patronized black artists was a significant causal factor in the rupture that emerged within jazz music as the 1960s progressed.
00:31:36
Speaker
as the divide emerged between moderate integrationist elements and those with a more radical approach. The manner in which black musicians were discredited for the intelligence and sophistication of their music and excluded from the commercial windfall enjoyed by music club operators and record label owners formed a major part of the discourse and motivating factor for free jazz musicians like Cecil Taylor, Archie Shep and black nationalist writers like Amiri Baraka.
00:32:03
Speaker
The tendency of European audiences to see jazz music as entertainment as opposed to a dignified art form comparable to Western classical music concerns State Department officials as potentially limiting their ability to capitalize on the success of the music abroad. Traditionally seen as vulgar and lowbrow, deviant and oppositional by the US leadership elite, the Voice of America was initially reluctant to program jazz and popular music despite frequent requests to do so by foreign listeners.
00:32:32
Speaker
The Americans were rankled by the Minister of Culture, claiming that jazz music was not cultured. When he played in Russia in 1959, bassist Willie Ruff reported back that the legitimacy of jazz and the literacy and intelligence of its players is the thing that needs to be proved here. US officials were intent on changing the perception of jazz from a folk or protest music to that of a more esteemed art form.
00:32:55
Speaker
Certain developments as to how jazz music was produced, performed, and consumed domestically within the US would lend the music the respectability that the US government so desired. While the State Department tours were intended to communicate a message of freedom in the arts and American society, jazz music as the 50s and 60s progressed would begin to address the biggest weakness in America's Cold War propaganda strategy, which was its own domestic policies regarding race and its treatment of African Americans.
00:33:24
Speaker
The Soviet Union constantly ridiculed American claims to democratic virtue by highlighting the policies of segregation in education and public services that effectively denigrated African Americans to second-class status and the racial and religious discrimination that blighted the country. The famous jazz singer Nat King Cole was physically assaulted on stage by five men during a performance before a white audience in Birmingham, Alabama. His home state in 1956.
00:33:52
Speaker
One of those behind the attack, a member of the White Citizens' Council of Alabama, which supported segregation, had publicly denounced jazz and rock and roll as an attempt to mongrelize America and force Negro culture in the South. Violence and discrimination against black people in the United States was given extensive coverage abroad, especially in countries with non-white populations.
00:34:14
Speaker
We're going to spend some time in the next few episodes discussing how jazz musicians, some of them prominent activists like Max Roach and Abby Lincoln, others divide Muslims and black nationalists like McCoy Tyner and Archie Shep interacted with the civil rights movement and in doing so made some of the most powerful American music of the 20th century.
00:34:34
Speaker
International attention to racial discrimination in the US meant that desegregation was a political imperative for the Truman and Eisenhower administrations during the Cold War. The State Department's efforts in exporting integrated jazz bands supports the viewpoint that Washington's concerns with world opinion motivated otherwise unlikely attempts to bring marginalized groups, including black Americans, into the mainstream of American society and culture.
00:34:59
Speaker
Tellingly, Justice Department briefs in several prominent civil rights cases, including Brown v. Topeka Board of Education in 1954, discussed racial discrimination within the context of the present-world struggle between freedom and tyranny. America was acknowledging that it had to do better, or from a more cynical viewpoint, that it had to be seen to be doing better.
00:35:20
Speaker
During the Brown case, President Truman's administration impressed upon the Supreme Court the negative consequences for world peace if a decision was made upholding the segregation of black and white school children. Within an hour of the judgment being announced in the Brown case, Voice of America broadcast news of the decision to Eastern Europe. This was America patting itself on the back on the global stage.
00:35:43
Speaker
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or the NAACP, was crucial to the success of legal challenges to institutionalized segregation across multiple states. Future Supreme Court Judge Thurgood Marshall spearheaded a group of talented lawyers affiliated with the NAACP who filed lawsuits across different states, accumulating legal precedence to support an assault on the separate but equal doctrine, which until then required that black and white school children could not be educated together in the same public schools.
00:36:13
Speaker
The case of Brown was the culmination of these efforts. This was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court, ruling that US state laws establishing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional, even if the segregated schools are otherwise equal in quality.
00:36:28
Speaker
The Brown case originated in 1951 when the public school system in Topeka, Kansas refused to enroll local black resident Oliver Brown's daughter at the school closest to her home, instead requiring her to ride a bus to a segregated black school further away. The Browns and 12 other local families in similar situations filed a class action lawsuit in the US federal court against the Topeka Board of Education, alleging that its segregation policy was unconstitutional.
00:36:57
Speaker
A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas heard the case and ruled against the Browns, relying on the decision in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The Browns, represented by NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall, then appealed the ruling directly to the Supreme Court and were successful in doing so.
00:37:17
Speaker
The Case of Brown represented a convergence of the interests of civil rights activists and foreign policy elites. A similar convergence underpinned the US State Department tours with the interests of US government officials, eager to demonstrate minority progress, aligned with that of black jazz musicians who sought to expand the reach of jazz music and celebrate the artistic achievements of black American artists on the global stage.
00:37:40
Speaker
The State Department tours also enabled black artists to promote their own racial and political cultural agendas, particularly in relation to how they were able to make representations on behalf of the African diaspora.
00:37:51
Speaker
On his 1956 visit to Accra in Ghana, or a crowd of 10,000 people greeted him on arrival, Louis Armstrong attributed the crowd's enthusiasm to a recognition that his ancestors had come from that place. In his words, I still have African blood in me. The emergence of independent post-colonial African nations during the 1960s
00:38:11
Speaker
The celebration of Pan-Africanism by cultural theorists and black nationalists during that time had a profound effect on many American jazz musicians, something we plan to discuss in greater detail over the next few episodes. The African continent was an especially important destination for many of the African-American jazz musicians who played on the USDA department tours. Louis Armstrong's visit to the Congo took place shortly after it gained independence from Belgium in June 1960.
00:38:37
Speaker
Randy Weston toured Africa in 1960 and Duke Ellington's tour in April 1966, coincided with the first World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. The symbolic value of performances by African-American musicians in counteracting the United States' well-deserved reputation for racism
00:38:55
Speaker
was particularly strong for US embassies in Africa. When Louis Armstrong and his wife Lucille arrived in Accra, Ghana in May 1956, they were greeted by a crowd of 10,000 people at the airport, with a high life band playing all for you Louis and their runner.
00:39:10
Speaker
The Armstrongs were whisked away for lunch with Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, who within one year would become independent Ghana's first president. Nkrumah had studied at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent summers in Harlem, New York City, where he maintained a constant level of student political activism.
00:39:27
Speaker
He played a major role in the Pan-African Conference held in New York in 1944, which urged the United States at the end of the Second World War to help ensure Africa became developed and free. And he appeared in the cover of Time magazine in 1953. Freedom for African countries and for members of the African diaspora would become a central theme for American jazz musicians in the 1960s.
00:39:50
Speaker
At the time of the Armstrong's visit, in Crema's political party, the Convention People's Party were eager to champion a message of national unity and modernity. Aloan Crema was intent on playing down the tribal differences within the country. He seemed to have no concern about the spectacular demonstration of 70 tribal chiefs with drummers and dancers in tow performing for the Armstrongs at Achaemotah College, nicknamed Motan, during their visit
00:40:17
Speaker
Armstrong was vocal about how his visit to Ghana developed his sense of membership with the African diaspora. Conversely, jazz gave many African audiences a sense of the possibilities of urban modernity, even if the State Department's geopolitical self-interest underpinned the cultural presentations program. And even putting aside that Louis Armstrong's music was considered something of an anachronism by younger people in the United States, who were about to open themselves up to the more robust hard-bop style that would dominate jazz discourse well into the 60s.
00:40:47
Speaker
After the CPP's victory in the July 1956 elections, Ghana's independence from Britain was officially scheduled for the 6th of March 1957. This event was hugely significant in marking time for the wider dismantling of the colonial system in sub-Saharan Africa. In December 1956, Anta's music advisory panel were made aware that the State Department wanted a jazz band to attend the Independence Day ceremonies.
00:41:11
Speaker
They were intent on capitalising on the success of Louis Armstrong's previous visit. With Louis Armstrong touring elsewhere, Wilbur de Paris was booked to attend the ceremonies and immediately afterwards to embark on a three month tour of Africa. This is the Wilbur de Paris track in a Persian market from 1958.
00:41:49
Speaker
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00:42:00
Speaker
Lucille Armstrong did make sure to attend the official ceremony, and she was in the company of other notable American figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and various dignitaries from the United Nations. Mrs. Armstrong even taught the Ghanaian president how to dance the foxtrot in preparation for his pre-range dance with the Duchess of Kent in attendance to represent Britain in its exit from colonial power in Ghana.
00:42:24
Speaker
President Nkrumah's relationship with the US would become strained. He was eventually deposed by a military coup in 1966, another coup backed by the United States government and assisted by the CIA.
00:42:36
Speaker
Before being deposed, he openly criticized the voice of America broadcasts in Africa, operated by the U.S. Information Agency as the chief executor of U.S. psychological warfare, which glorified the U.S. while at the same time attempting to discredit independent countries such as Ghana with an independent foreign policy. He criticized the USIA for its close ties to the CIA, something the USA wasted no energy in even denying.
00:43:02
Speaker
The status afforded to black artists on the State Department tours enabled them to speak out on the reality of continued discrimination and brutality for many black Americans back in the US. After a 1956 tour of West Africa, Louis Armstrong spoke out on civil rights upon negotiating a federal tour of Russia. On 19th September 1956, after a concert in North Dakota, Armstrong learned that Governor Orville Faubus had barred African American children from entering the Central High School at Little Rock, Arkansas.
00:43:31
Speaker
Armstrong threatened to cancel the tour, telling reporters the government can go to hell for the way black people were being treated in the southern states. The planned tour eventually fell through. Recorded in 1961 and performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival that year, the real ambassadors written by Dave and Iola Bruback, together with Louis Armstrong, was a jazz musical that addressed the civil rights movement and America's place in the world during the Cold War.
00:43:57
Speaker
Its central character was based on Armstrong and his time as a Jazz Ambassador on the State Department Tours. The witty lyrics from the track The Real Ambassador reference the disparity between the respect that black musicians were held in as part of the State Department Tours and the discrimination they encountered at home where segregated venues remained common during the 1950s. By the early 60s, the State Department Tours and Voice of America programming appeared to many emerging musicians as dual symbols of their country's hypocrisy.
00:44:27
Speaker
We are diplomats in our proper hats Our regard becomes habitual Along with all the ritual The diplomatic corps Has been analyzed and criticized By NBC and CBS Senators and congressmen are so concerned They can't reset the state department stands And all your coup d'etat has met success And caused this great uproar Who's the real ambassador? Oh yeah, the real ambassador
00:44:57
Speaker
During the 1950s, US TV network policies opposed integrated mixed-race groups playing a network television. Only certain heavyweight broadcasters, Hugh Hefner a playboy among them, carried enough clout to host integrated bands. In 1951, television executives replaced Charles Mingus with a white bassist during Red Norvo's appearance on The Mel Torme Show.
00:45:18
Speaker
Bell Telephone representatives kept Ella Fitzgerald's white guitarist out of camera range after the singer refused to drop him for a 1959 appearance. In 1960, Dave Brubeck cancelled a series of concerts at Southern colleges when organizers insisted that he replace black bassist Eugene Wright with a white musician.
00:45:37
Speaker
Nervousness about the issue of racial discrimination and often genuine concern led many music critics, producers, promoters and record labels to champion the notion of progressive integration in jazz music. However, adherence to a politically correct colourblind approach in the creation and promotion of the music introduced new problems to the discourse. Many black artists reeled against the emphasis on colour blindness as being a stealth method of diminishing the recognition of black musicians and formulating modern jazz.
00:46:06
Speaker
and the emergence of the tougher hard bop style in the late 1950s and the free jazz movement of the 1960s with its emphasis on individual improvisation at the expense of structured composition were taken up by many artists as a means of reclaiming territory that had been ceded by black musicians. The dissonant and confrontational nature of this free music chimed with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement and the radicalism of black nationalism during that most tumultuous decade
00:46:37
Speaker
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