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    Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
    Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
    Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
    Audiobook10 hours

    Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War

    Written by Penny M. Von Eschen

    Narrated by Christina Delaine

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against Communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism.

    Penny Von Eschen escorts us across the globe, backstage and onstage, as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and other jazz luminaries spread their music and their ideas further than the State Department anticipated. Both in concert and after hours, through political statements and romantic liaisons, these musicians broke through the government's official narrative and gave their audiences an unprecedented vision of the black American experience. In the process, new collaborations developed between Americans and the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East-collaborations that fostered greater racial pride and solidarity.

    Though intended as a color-blind promotion of democracy, this unique Cold War strategy unintentionally demonstrated the essential role of African Americans in U.S. national culture. Through the tales of these tours, Von Eschen captures the fascinating interplay between the efforts of the State Department and the progressive agendas of the artists themselves, as all struggled to redefine a more inclusive and integrated American nation on the world stage.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 10, 2018
    ISBN9781977385413
    Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War

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    • 3/5
      Insightful but repetitive. Very little was actually about Louis Armstrong.
    • 5/5
      In Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Penny M. Von Eschen examines the U.S. State Department’s use of jazz to promote U.S. values and goals around the world. Von Eschen writes, “The primary contradiction of promoting African American artists as symbols of a racial equality yet to be achieved would fundamentally shape the organization and ideologies of the tours, as well as the ways in which the tours were contested by artists” (pg. 4). Furthermore, “Despite the government’s complacency on domestic race relations, even Eisenhower was profoundly affected by the widely shared sense that race was America’s Achilles heel internationally” (pg. 5). Promoting U.S. culture offered further contradictions in American policy. Von Eschen writes, “In promoting jazz and American consumer culture, U.S. officials appeared unwilling to abide by their own counsel to developing nations – namely, to trust in ‘people’s capitalism’” (pg. 15).Discussing issues in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, Von Eschen writes, “The tours were intimately linked to U.S. responses to such crises, and exposed a freewheeling, bold willingness on the part of policymakers to wield covert and overt military and diplomatic muscle to serve their immediate strategic and economic interests” (pg. 27). Of the artists, Von Eschen writes, “For those who had long been denied artistic recognition and fundamental rights as citizens, the tours represented a critical victory in civil rights” (pg. 29). Louis Armstrong’s tour served to force attention to certain issues in the U.S. According to Von Eschen, “If issues of civil rights had been relatively contained in the early jazz tours, Armstrong’s Ghana trip and his subsequent denunciation of Eisenhower during the 1957 Little Rock crisis dramatically illuminated the connections between the domestic and foreign policies underlying the tours” (pg. 65).Examining tours in the Soviet Union, Von Eschen writes, “The Soviets’ aversion to jazz rested, in part, on a racist recoiling at black American cultural expression even as they were relying on claims to racial equality within the Soviet Union and exposure of American racism as perhaps their most effective Cold war[sic] weapons” (pg. 96). This played out in nearly every tour. Von Eschen writes, “Amid an ongoing battle over the politics of representation of black people, [Duke] Ellington, like other black musicians and their allies, perceived the State Department jazz tours as a platform from which to promote the dignity of black people and their culture throughout the world in the era of Jim Crow” (pg. 125-126). Von Eschen sheds light on the contradictions in U.S. policy, writing, “Officials’ acknowledgement of the Afro-diasporic appeal of jazz clashed with the notion that it was a uniquely American form with a modernist aesthetic” (pg. 177). Furthermore, “The State Department’s embrace of a once marginalized music to reform and revitalize the image of America shows a misplaced reliance on African American culture to project vitality and optimism on the part of a country that was deep in crisis” (pg. 184).Looking to the last years of the program, Von Eschen writes, “For many in the State Department, the pinnacle of cultural exchange was reached with the jazz tours of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Unlike the earlier tours, they showed a striking convergence of interest between the State Department, the musicians, and the audiences” (pg. 191). In this way, “The cultural-presentations programs not only strove to maintain the support of strategic allies in Latin America and the oil-rich Middle East, win over potential dissidents in the Eastern bloc, and court new African nations. They also targeted elites in Southeast Asia” (pg. 218). Von Eschen writes, “The State Department missed no opportunity to promote jazz in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But by the mid 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam pullout, the Watergate crisis, and the energy crisis, some officials were calling for a more modest foreign policy” (pg. 241). This led to the U.S. Information Service taking over the cultural-promotion programs.Von Eschen concludes that jazz and the State Department “is the story of an America deeply implicated in the machinations and violence of global modernization: the slave trade that forced millions of Africans to the Americas; the U.S. involvement in coups, in countries ranging from Iran and Iraq to the Congo and Ghana; and the arming of such military states as Pakistan” (pg. 254). Finally, “If there is anything that can be learned from the tours, it is that audiences never confused or conflated their love of jazz and American popular culture with an acceptance of American foreign policy” (pg. 257).