Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
By Penny M. Von Eschen
Harvard University Press, 2004
329 pages, $60 (hb)
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
Louis Armstrong was one of dozens of US jazz musicians sponsored by the US State Department who blew their horn for US foreign policy on overseas tours during the Cold War. Or so State Department officials hoped. What Armstrong and his jazz peers actually delivered, however, subverted the State Department script more often than not.
Penny Von Eschen's book charts the jazz ambassadors' itinerary, which for two decades from 1956 followed the overseas trail of Washington-sponsored coups, assassinations, political destabilisation and military invasion. The jazz tours, says Von Eschen, were intended to reinforce the "strategic and economic interests" of US foreign policy.
Jazz was chosen because of the prominence of its black artists, who, it was hoped, would counter foreign criticism of US racism. This racism was the Achilles heel of official US claims that it was a democratic wonderland and was merely exporting its freedom and democracy to the rest of the world. The jazz ambassadors were intended as "goodwill symbols of American democracy", but the contradiction of promoting black artists as symbols of a racial equality yet to be achieved undermined the whole premise of the tours.
The list of State Department-sponsored artists is impressive. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Earl Hines, Ornette Coleman, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis and Oscar Petersen were among the major black jazz artists. B.B. King and Muddy Waters represented the blues, and Mahalia Jackson gospel. Even pop and rock got a look in with The Fifth Dimension and Blood, Sweat and Tears. For many jazz musicians, with large bands to support and threatened by rock and roll, the tours were "highly prized gigs", financially and for the official artistic recognition for jazz, which racist conservatives had disparaged as disreputable and linked to drugs, crime and sexual depravity.
Dizzy Gillespie made the first State Department tour, but the ride was bumpy from the start. Gillespie, an outspoken campaigner for world peace, disarmament and black civil rights, refused to attend State Department briefings, saying he "wasn't going to apologise for the racist policies of America", and adding (with reference to the US's history of slavery, segregation, discrimination and white violence), "I've got three hundred years of briefing".
Gillespie also began the jazz artists' tradition of rejecting State Department policy of only playing to foreign elites. The US government was courting the privileged post-colonial elites for a neo-colonial future subservient to the US. As the US ambassador to Burma said, the jazz tours were "of central importance to our mission", because they permitted communication with "a significant priority group, the university students as well as with the young community leaders and emergent political figures" who could be favourably disposed to US political and business interests.
Gillespie disagreed, throwing open the gates of his concerts in Turkey and Pakistan to the poor, whilst in Brazil he was more interested in jamming with the local musicians than attending official functions. State Department minders frequently found occasion to complain that Gillespie, and their other charges, "misunderstood the word 'people'".
The State Department's use of black jazz ambassadors elicited the ire of southern racists and a musically and politically safer option was chosen for the next tour, with Benny Goodman's vintage '30s big band swing. Goodman was the first white band leader to hire black musicians, but he could not see past his own integrated band to a still segregationist south and discriminatory north. Goodman was also the pick for the first State Department tour of the Soviet Union in 1962, but in his tours, Goodman's passe music alienated many young jazz fans, whilst his authoritarian band leadership cast shadows on the "happy, democratic family" image his band was meant to portray. In the Soviet Union, pay disputes and strike threats by band members also reflected a truer US reality than the State Department wanted to display to the Soviet people.
Louis Armstrong's tour of Africa in 1961 was a welcome coup for the State Department. Armstrong had refused a State Department tour in 1957 in protest at President Eisenhower's inactivity over the Arkansas governor's decision to call out the National Guard to prevent black children entering the recently desegregated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. "The way they are treating my people in the south", said an angry Armstong in publicly knocking back the tour offer, "the government can go to hell".
Armstrong relented only after the government sent in federal troops to override the Arkansas state government and, after a "decent" interval to officially erase his earlier transgression, the State Department signed Armstong up in 1961. Armstrong's tour was co-sponsored by Pepsi-Cola, whose advertising may have been unsubtle ("You like Satchmo. Pepsi brings you Satchmo. Therefore you like Pepsi"), but which shared the more covert but no less similar logic of the State Department for its sponsorship of jazz tours.
Whilst in Africa, Armstrong was unaware of Eisenhower-ordered CIA plots to assassinate the left-wing President of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. When Armstrong later found out, he gave vent to his feelings in his collaboration with Dave Brubeck, The Real Ambassadors, a musical satire on the State Department's export of black jazz ambassadors as symbols of the triumph of US "democracy" at a time when the US was still violently racist. "Look here, what we need is a goodwill tour of Mississippi" was an Armstrong line in the show.
If the State Department hoped for trouble-free propaganda with Duke Ellington's tours, it was again disappointed. A rare Republican among black jazz musicians, the middle class "model gentleman and statesman" Ellington toured the Middle East, while at home, Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor's attack dogs and hoses were set on protesting black children. Ellington, however, failed to be the dapper diplomat, telling the foreign press that he was appalled at state and vigilante racist violence in the US.
The State Department was given no rest by its musical ambassadors even in Eastern Europe, where Stalinism had put an idealised US in good odour among dissidents and youth. It seemed to work — the US ambassador in Yugoslavia wired Washington that the tours "have made our job much easier". Yet still the State Department's loose cultural cannons went off against the "wrong" targets with, for example, the militantly political and rebellious Charles Mingus making public his opposition to US racism and the US war in Vietnam through the song titles he listed on his 1975 tour playbills.
Not all jazz musicians shared the political scepticism of Mingus, many accepting the Cold War liberal assumption that the US was a force for freedom against "communism", but the slaughter in Vietnam, conducted in the name of anti-communism, eventually exposed the bankruptcy of liberalism and pulled the rug out from under the jazz tours' philosophy.
Watergate and the exposure of CIA crimes also made overt State Department cultural sponsorship untenable, and, with much reduced funding, the program slipped quietly to its new home in the United States Information Agency in 1978. It has since returned, however, to the State Department, after 9/11 allowed the cynical re-badging of Washington-sponsored cultural exports with "brand USA".
Jazz, to the US State Department, was only ever a Cold War weapon, a camouflage for, as Von Eschen puts it, US imperialism's violent "domination of markets and raw materials" of former European colonies and Stalinist-locked Eastern Europe. Jazz fans, fortunately, saw through the ruse and their love of American jazz did not translate to acceptance of US foreign policy.
Dave Brubeck observed that "sending a jazz combo abroad costs a great deal less than the tip of a fighter plane's wing". This sort of thinking made the jazz musicians very poor State Department ambassadors, but wonderful people ambassadors for a radically different set of vibes to the corporate plunder, B-52s and CIA agents that the US State Department served up.
From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.