Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (review)

By the mid-1950s, the U.S. foreign policy establishment arrived at the conclusion that the “race problem” in the United States had so tarnished America’s image abroad that international objectives were being impeded. In response, the State Department began to sponsor tours of integrated jazz ensembles—purveyors of a music then considered primitive and degenerate by many American elites—to strategically important foreign locales. Many white and black jazz musicians responded enthusiastically to the opportunity, even though they were sent to endorse a “color-blind” America tainted by Jim Crow, lynching, and discrimination in voting, housing, and employment. Penny Von Eschen’s book provides an overview of these tours, revealing why this seemingly incompatible bureaucracy-musician relationship managed to survive and even thrive for more than two decades before collapsing under the weight of its inherent contradictions.

Despite U.S. officials’ misgivings about jazz, they believed that the music could serve important propaganda functions. Many of the leading jazz players were African-American, suggesting that talent and hard work, rather than skin color, determined individual success in the United States. The complexity and artistry of jazz (acknowledged around the globe though still contested at home) belied Soviet claims that a market-driven society could produce neither original nor great culture; the jazz ensemble, which encouraged individual expression within the parameters established by the group and which often included performers of different racial identities, rendered the music an apt, if somewhat optimistic, metaphor for liberal democracy itself. Jazz musicians, too, found much benefit in state-sponsored tours. Many simply needed the work in an era of increased competition from rhythm-and-blues and rock-and-roll. Moreover, they viewed the government’s endorsement of their music as a belated but welcome recognition of black capability and achievement. Participating musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Randy Weston also spoke fondly of the opportunity to travel to Africa in order to forge musical and social contacts with local inhabitants.

As Von Eschen makes clear, the agendas of the State Department and the performers did not always sit well together. Musicians championed jazz as a model of racial equity that they aspired to achieve, not as a faithful reflection of the freedom and equality offered by U.S. society. Government officials spoke of the music’s universalism and its broadly American roots, whereas African American artists insisted that the particularisms of the black experience had created jazz. Although the State Department sought to engender pro-American sympathies among the ruling elites of a given region, musicians frequently democratized the tours, playing impromptu gigs for ordinary citizens and jamming with local musicians. Likewise, tour participants often articulated ideas more attuned to pan-African and broadly Third World concerns than to those of U.S. leaders. This inability to maintain a tight focus on national identities and priorities points to one of the reasons for the termination of the program in 1978. Though always a hybridized art form, jazz by that date had become so thoroughly internationalized, both influencing and adopting styles from around the globe, that it could no longer be clearly identified with one country. That State Department sponsorship had done much to abet this very process—that the department had, in Von Eschen’s words, “facilitated the music’s transnational routes of innovation and improvisation” (p. 250)—adds another irony to a thoroughly paradoxical relationship.

Scholars familiar with Von Eschen’s previous work on the subject, first sketched out in her 1997 monograph, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Cornell University Press), and developed more fully in essays she has contributed to anthologies on Cold War culture, will find a great deal that is familiar here. As in her earlier efforts, she makes perhaps too much of the State Department’s apparent astonishment over musicians’ penchant for straying from the authorized script. Officials “never dreamed,” she writes, “that the musicians would...