Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (review)

"No commodity is quite so strange, / As this thing called cultural exchange," wrote Dave Brubeck and Iola Brubeck in their musical The Real Ambassadors, which riffed on pianist Dave's experience as a State Department-sponsored jazz musician who was sent on a tour of Poland, India, and the Middle East in 1958. Jazz diplomacy—which Lisa Davenport traces in its heyday from the mid-1950s to the late-1960s—was indeed a strange commodity in the Cold War, and Davenport draws out one facet of its strangeness: that the same jazz musicians who were treated as second-class citizens by the government-sanctioned regime of Jim Crow were trotted out to Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and Eastern Europe as examples of American democratic culture at its finest. Jazz diplomacy was a practice anticipated by Henry Luce's famed "American Century" essay (1941), in which Luce argued that "American jazz" was part of a new global lingua franca emanating from U.S. popular culture, a lingua franca that the United States should integrate into its foreign policy. But as jazz diplomacy unfolded in the context of momentous events—the Civil Rights movement, the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and the cultural and political rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union—it took on a charge that Luce could not have anticipated. What, indeed, would be the terms of "cultural exchange" when Dizzy Gillespie brought his band in 1956, under State Department auspices, to Athens, where students had just stoned the U.S. Information Office to protest U.S. support of the current Greek political regime?Was Dizzy an antidote to American power or its representative?

Jazz Diplomacy faces the challenge of having been conceived alongside, but published after, Penny Von Eschen's Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), which took a more prismatic view of the project of jazz diplomacy. Von Eschen's book considers at greater length the perspective of jazz musicians themselves, who were enlivened by their contacts abroad even as they were frustrated by the terms of State Department sponsorship; the impact of the tours on resistance movements within the countries visited; the strategic interests that drove jazz diplomacy (e.g., the targeting of buffer states such as Turkey and oil-rich states such as Iran); and the coincidence of jazz diplomacy with other forms of persuasion and influence, running the gamut from tie-ins with American-based multinationals such as Pepsi-Cola to coups and even assassinations. What Davenport offers, by contrast, is an account heavily weighted by her admirable research into State Department and other government files. She surpasses Von Eschen, perhaps, in her account of the condescension that suffused the attitudes of State Department attachés posted in West Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, who often looked down on the perceived vulgarity of jazz, of the populations they aimed to draw into the American orbit, or both. "I am a little afraid of [jazz] myself " (p. 76), one New Delhi-based consul declared not atypically.)

Unfortunately, Davenport's credibility is eroded by regular errors of fact, especially when she steps outside the precincts of the State Department. She misidentifies the white Dixieland musician Red Nichols as the black bebop pianist-composer Herbie Nichols (p. 79)—a mistake that, in jazz circles, would be tantamount to confusing Harry S. Truman with Truman Capote. She misnames Charles Mingus's landmark protest composition "Fables of Faubus" as "Foibles of Faubus" (p. 63); she calls jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd a "folk artist" (p. 92); she repeatedly misspells the great Chicago jazz trombonist-singer Jack Teagarden's last name (counterintuitively, as "Teagardan"; pp. 78, 120); she misnames The Real Ambassadors as The Real Ambassador (p. 44); she calls Woody Herman the leader of a "New Orleans-style jazz orchestra" (p. 110) when he was a leading figure in big band swing; and so on. Such...