http://DaveJazzHound.stumbleupon.com/review/23261309/

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:41:42 -0700

Compliments to tapwaterj

Music

When Ambassadors Had Rhythm

The New York Times, Fred Kaplan

"Half a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world experience what he called "real Americana": send out jazz bands instead.

Jazz was the country's "Secret Sonic Weapon" (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants 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. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people "love jazz because they love freedom."

Benny Goodman in Moscow in 1962.

Count Basie in what was then Rangoon, Burma, 1971.

Dizzy Gillespie in 1956 in Zagreb, in what was then Yugoslavia.

Dave Brubeck in Baghdad, 1958.

Jazz Ambassadors Slide Show

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http://DaveJazzHound.stumbleupon.com/review/20786189/

Sat, 03 May 2008 10:31:20 -0700

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