New book on State Dpt. jazz tours

[ghost of miles]

I've been thinking about doing a Night Lights program devoted to the 1950s and 60s jazz State Dpt. tours ever since last summer... now there's a book. Good timing, eh? I've scheduled the program for the beginning of April.

Satchmo Blows Up the World

According to history professor Von Eschen, at a time when the cultural contributions of black Americans were being derided, the U.S. State Department found it useful to send luminaries of jazz music into the world as ambassadors, preceding covert actions in Europe and Africa. In this exploration of the significance of jazz as a propaganda tool during the cold war era, Von Eschen looks at how this phenomenon was reflected in the domestic civil rights movement. Using Louis Armstrong, "Satchmo," as her focus, she recounts privately sponsored international tours that provoked tensions and debates within the State Department. Opponents saw blacks and their creations of jazz and gospel as culturally inferior, while proponents argued that jazz was representative of America at its best and the tours were useful in advancing domestic and overseas agendas. This book puts fresh light on jazz, Satchmo, and the civil rights era. Vernon Ford

Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Satchmo Blows Up the World provides the first comprehensive look at the 'jazz tours' sponsored by the U.S. government and literally follows them to the ends of the earth. Along the way, Von Eschen provides fascinating insights about them, the collisions of cultural politics and geopolitics, and the vicissitudes and upheavals of race in Cold War America. The history of U.S. diplomacy, jazz music and the civil rights era will never look quite the same after reading this wonderful book.

Product Description:

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.

[JSngry]

Maybe this will lead to RCA finally reissuing Goodman's Moscow album!

But probably not...

[Leeway]

GOM, you might take a look at the chapter in Dizzy Gillespie's memoir, "To Be Or Not To Bop," where he talk about his State Department sponsored tour. Dizzy had some interesting things to say about it, and some mixed feelings come through. Don't know if this is covered in the new book.

[ghost of miles]

GOM, you might take a look at the chapter in Dizzy Gillespie's memoir, "To Be Or Not To Bop," where he talk about his State Department sponsored tour. Dizzy had some interesting things to say about it, and some mixed feelings come through. Don't know if this is covered in the new book.

Will do, Leeway. I've got a copy of the book--thanks for the tip.

Jim, I'll have to look around and see if I can scare up (or more likely borrow) that Goodman LP. So far the music I have in mind includes Ellington's FAR EAST SUITE (inspired by Ellington's early-1960s tour) & some of the Armstrong and Gillespie concert recordings. Looking forward to reading the book and finding out about more acts that were caught on tape.

[JSngry]

I don't think that Duke actually toured the USSR proper until the early 1970s. Not sure about that though.

The Goodman visit was of no little human interest, because Goodman's parents were of Russian descent, plus I think he (or somebody) made sure to include several players in the band who had similar heritages.

As much of a mental strain as that tour apprently turned out to be, there were apparently some pretty poignant moments as well, if George Avakian's original liner essay is to be believed. The whole "return to the Mother Country" thing played itself out more than once, for band members and citizens alike.

[ghost of miles]

I don't think that Duke actually toured the USSR proper until the early 1970s. Not sure about that though.

No, but he did do a State Dpt. tour in the early 1960s of some Middle Eastern countries (it was aborted because of JFK's assassination), which is what led him & Strayhorn to write THE FAR EAST SUITE.

[jazzbo]

Goddambit NOT ANOTHER BOOK! I'm up to my eyballs in dese! @%$#

[Brad]

GOM,

Are you planning to include Dizzy in that program. There was 3 cds put out a few years ago (at different times) by a company called Consolidated Artists Production called Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour. I have volume 1 but never got around to picking up the other 2.

[ghost of miles]

GOM,

Are you planning to include Dizzy in that program. There was 3 cds put out a few years ago (at different times) by a company called Consolidated Artists Production called Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour. I have volume 1 but never got around to picking up the other 2.

Yes, we have two of those at the station. I also picked up a Verve LP for $4 which may or may not overlap w/the CDs you mention.

[Dan Gould]

GOM,

Are you planning to include Dizzy in that program.  There was 3 cds put out a few years ago (at different times) by a company called Consolidated Artists Production called Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour.  I have volume 1 but never got around to picking up the other 2.

Yes, we have two of those at the station. I also picked up a Verve LP for $4 which may or may not overlap w/the CDs you mention.

I'm pretty sure the Dizzy in South America discs were of unreleased material.

[JSngry]

I don't think that Duke actually toured the USSR proper until the early 1970s. Not sure about that though.

No, but he did do a State Dpt. tour in the early 1960s of some Middle Eastern countries (it was aborted because of JFK's assassination), which is what led him & Strayhorn to write THE FAR EAST SUITE.

Of course.

DUH!

DOH!

For some reason I was thinging "USSR Only" in connection with the book, which makes no sense, what with Louis on the cover, right?

My BIG bad. Hell, I'm not even 50 yet...

[Leeway]

The whole "return to the Mother Country" thing played itself out more than once, for band members and citizens alike.

As opposed to Bill Evans, later, who despite Russian ancestry, cancelled his own tour claiming political reasons...

Perhaps that was the reason. OTOH, wonder if it might have been due to his drug addiction? It would have been hard to "score" in the USSR.

[Guest youmustbe]

On the contary...USSR was junkie heaven. He was probably more worried about being caught.

[kh1958]

GOM,

Are you planning to include Dizzy in that program.  There was 3 cds put out a few years ago (at different times) by a company called Consolidated Artists Production called Dizzy in South America Official U.S. State Department Tour.  I have volume 1 but never got around to picking up the other 2.

Yes, we have two of those at the station. I also picked up a Verve LP for $4 which may or may not overlap w/the CDs you mention.

I'm pretty sure the Dizzy in South America discs were of unreleased material.

Dizzy's playing on the version of Night in Tunisia on Volume 3 is unbelievable.

[Leeway]

On the contary...USSR was junkie heaven. He was probably more worried about being caught.

I agree with both parts of your statement, and the second part was what I was getting at. At the time he would have gone, there would be handlers from the State Department and from Intourist, and I'm sure the security services (of which Intourist was a part) would have been surveilling the musicians' activities. No doubt though that USSR had plenty of junkies and massive alcoholism.

[marcello]

You might try to find "Dizzy in Greece" and " "World Statesman"on Verve. It was not recorded in Greece, of course, but recorded when they returned to the States.

BIRKS WORKS: THE VERVE BIG BAND SESSIONS contains BIRKS WORKS, DIZZY IN GREECE & WORLD STATESMAN.

[AllenLowe]

Best stuff I've ever read on a state department tour was in Mike Zwerin's autobiography - he went with Earl Hines and Budd Johnson, I believe, and I think it was to Russia -

Edited January 25, 2005 by AllenLowe

[Jeffro]

I just started reading "Satchmo Blows Up the World" a day or two ago. Very intriguing ideas. I like how the beginning draws parallels and contrasts between Eisenhower's & Dizzy's southern origins, "transplantation" to the North, and their attitudes.

A couple folks mentioned the Dizzy in South America CDs. Any suggestions on where to get a good deal on these? They don't seem to have made it to most of the mainstream "record" stores, or when they have, they're none too cheap!

Edited February 9, 2005 by Jeffro

[ghost of miles]

Picked up this book yesterday and have read the first 20 pages or so... hope to read much more tomorrow when I'm off from work. Very good so far, outside of the occasional (and seemingly unstoppable) wont for academic wordplay.

BTW will be doing a Night Lights show on this topic, set to air April 16... will feature music from the Dizzy tours, Armstrong's AMBASSADOR SATCH, Ellington's FAR EAST SUITE, and Brubeck's THE REAL AMBASSADORS.

Edited March 26, 2005 by ghost of miles

[Fer Urbina]

Maybe this will lead to RCA finally reissuing Goodman's Moscow album!

But probably not...

Top of my head, and sorry if I'm too vague but I think I read somewhere (Avakian?, Bill Crow?) that some of the tapes from the concerts are much better than the "official" album itself. Releasing those might be another possibility.

This was also the famous tour where Phil Woods shouted "F*** you, King" in the balcony right above BG's, who heard him perfectly.

One other related album is "Jazz Mission to Moscow" (Colpix SCP 433) by men from the BG Orchestra (Jimmy Maxwell, Marky Markowitz, tp; Willie Dennis, tb; Phil Woods, cl,as; Jerry Dodgion, fl,as; Zoot Sims, ts; Gene Allen, bs; Bill Crow, b; Mel Lewis, d; Al Cohn, arr, cond), plus Eddie Costa on piano in his last official recording. This was planned by Jack Lewis (formerly with RCA) who was waiting for the men at the airport in order to release the record before RCA's.

Colpix seems to be currently owned by EMI...

F U

[ghost of miles]

Brian Morton's review in the new issue of The Nation.

[ghost of miles]

A review of this and another book about Armstrong from Terry Teachout:

Satchmo and the Scholars

by Terry Teachout

Commentary, March 2006

The trumpeter Louis Armstrong was universally recognized in his own

lifetime as the key figure in the history of jazz. Though his

reputation with the general public went into a partial eclipse after

his death in 1971, the filmmaker Ken Burns rehabilitated him 29

years later with "Jazz," a widely viewed (if controversial) 10-part

PBS documentary in which Armstrong's pivotal contribution was

extensively discussed. Virtually all of his commercial recordings

have been transferred to CD, and his New York City home has been

restored to its original condition and opened to the public as a

museum. [1]

Despite his unquestioned preeminence, however, there has been

surprisingly little serious academic research into Armstrong's life

and work. Moreover, the only primary-source biography, Laurence

Bergreen's "Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life" (1997), is so full

of errors and misinterpretations that it cannot be considered a

reliable source. [2] And while Armstrong gave hundreds of interviews

and published numerous essays and articles (many of them written

without editorial assistance of any kind), few have been collected.

Of his surviving correspondence, only a small portion has been

published in book form.

The publication of two new studies of Armstrong is thus especially

worthy of note, not least because they appear at first glance to be

very dissimilar undertakings. Penny M. Von Eschen's "Satchmo Blows

Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War," a study of the

world tours conducted by Armstrong and other musicians under the

auspices of the U.S. State Department starting in the 50's, is

essentially non-musical in its approach. [3] Thomas Brothers's

"Louis Armstrong's New Orleans," by contrast, is a detailed account

of the trumpeter's early life (he lived in New Orleans from 1901,

the year of his birth, until 1922, when he moved to Chicago) in

which close and scrupulous attention is paid to the details of his

musical development. [4]

Yet for all their differences, "Satchmo Blows Up the World" and

"Louis Armstrong's New Orleans" have two important things in common.

Both authors are out to prove a point -- and the points they seek to

prove, while arguable, are not so self-evident as they think.

The involvement of the U.S. State Department with jazz is an obscure

but fascinating chapter in the history of the cold war. It is not

primarily a musical story -- which is fortunate, since Von Eschen,

who teaches history and African-American studies at the University

of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is not a musician and knows little about

jazz. She is, however, an assiduous researcher and skilled

interviewer, and "Satchmo Blows Up the World" fills in many of the

gaps in our knowledge of the program that sent Armstrong, Dave

Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, and other

noted American musicians abroad to represent the United States

between 1956 and 1978.

As has often been remarked, jazz was widely perceived throughout the

postwar world as a musical epitome of democratic values. This was

one of the reasons why the State Department underwrote foreign tours

by jazz musicians and broadcast their recordings behind the Iron

Curtain on the Voice of America. Although similar claims were made

for abstract expressionist painting, the fact that so many jazz

musicians were black was seen as another point in its favor -- for

jazz, as Von Eschen observes, could "speak to America's Achilles

heel of racism in [a] way that a painting by Mark Rothko or Jackson

Pollock could not."

Von Eschen is keenly aware -- as well she should be -- of the cruel

irony inherent in the fact that the tours were meant to burnish the

reputation of the U.S., especially in the new nations of Asia and

Africa, at a time when many of the musicians serving as informal

"ambassadors" were still being treated as second-class citizens in

large parts of their own country. She points to this contradiction,

however, not as part of a balanced assessment of a complex reality

but in support of her wholesale condemnation of "the magnitude and

hubris of the multifaceted American projects of global expansion in

the post-World War II world."

Revealingly, Von Eschen also dismisses as mere "post-cold-war

triumphalism" the now common claim that jazz musicians played a part

in winning the cold war, a notion that in her view serves only to

obscure the myriad evils of "an America deeply implicated in the

machinations and violence of global modernization." Even more

revealingly, she refers to "the boisterous one-upmanship" and

"masculinist adventurism" of the cold war as if U.S. opposition to

Soviet Communism were nothing more than a rivalry between two

sexually unsure teenage boys.

This, of course, is the way the cold war is now often portrayed in

the American academy. Still, it is both jarring and exasperating

when an otherwise useful piece of scholarship is disfigured by such

strident excursions into hard-Left politics. One can scarcely help

feeling that Von Eschen is "using" jazz in no less cynical a manner

than did, allegedly, the State Department officials whose good

intentions she impugns in "Satchmo Blows Up the World."

Thomas Brothers is a scholar of an altogether different sort. A

professor of music at Duke University, he is the editor of "Louis

Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings" (1999), a collection

of letters and autobiographical writings many of which had been

previously unpublished and all of which were presented here for the

first time in authoritative texts. Now, in "Louis Armstrong's New

Orleans," he has turned his attention to the largely untapped body

of oral-history depositions and first-person memoirs left behind by

Armstrong and the other New Orleans musicians who took part in the

creation and early development of jazz.

Brothers's purpose is not merely to provide the first factually

reliable account of Armstrong's early years but to describe in

detail the complicated and poorly understood culture into which the

trumpeter was born. As he explains in his introduction: "Armstrong's

image has often been tied up with stereotypes of noble-savage

primitivism and God-given talent that is born and not made, but it

is more interesting to discover how he was shaped by the musical and

social complexities of New Orleans.... Armstrong lived a childhood

of poverty, on the margins of society, and this position put him

right in the middle of the vernacular traditions that were fueling

the new music of which he would eventually become one of the world's

greatest masters."

In all this, Brothers has succeeded beyond even the most fervent

expectations of those who have eagerly awaited the publication of

this book. Having read virtually the whole of the existing Armstrong

literature, I can say unequivocally that "Louis Armstrong's New

Orleans" is the best book ever produced about Louis Armstrong by

anyone other than the man himself. Whoever writes about the musician

from now on -- myself included -- will draw on it heavily and

gratefully.

Central to Brothers's understanding of Armstrong's artistic

development is the chaotic world of the young artist-to-be, which he

sketches with clarity. The child of a fifteen-year-old part-time

prostitute who lived in the roughest quarter of New Orleans,

Armstrong was deserted by his natural father and later sentenced at

the age of eleven to the Colored Waif's Home, an orphanage-like

reform school, for the crime of firing a pistol loaded with blanks

on New Year's Eve. "Many of the people who nurtured him," Brothers

writes, "were impoverished, illiterate, and from broken homes."

That Armstrong should have surmounted such overwhelming

disadvantages to become one of the world's most famous musicians is

quite incredible. Yet for all of his success, he remained loyal to

the New Orleans of his youth (about which he had no illusions), and

unlike the self-conscious members of what the black sociologist E.

Franklin Frazier famously dubbed the "black bourgeoisie," he never

made any attempt as an adult to acquire the social polish of the

middle class. In Brothers's words: "[H]e showed no interest at all

in assimilating to white culture. He understood the advantages of

seeing the best in people, but he despised those who 'put on airs.'

His sharpest criticisms were directed at Negroes who were 'dicty' --

African-American slang for someone who pretentiously imitates

whites."

Even at the height of his fame, Armstrong remained unpretentious and

unassuming, and his worldview would always be that of a successful

working-class black man who believed devoutly in the pedestrian

virtues of hard work and persistence. "I think I had a beautiful

life," he said not long before his death in 1971. "I didn't wish for

anything I couldn't get, and I got pretty near everything I wanted

because I worked for it." Accordingly, he had no patience with

blacks who were unwilling to do as he had done, regarding them not

with sympathy but contempt. "The Negroes always wanted pity," he

recalled in a 1969 reminiscence of New Orleans life. "They did that

in place of going to work."

Brothers rightly stresses Armstrong's close identification with "the

common laborers, domestics, hustlers, and prostitutes who found

themselves confined by the color line to the economic bottom of

society." He was, after all, one of them, and his musical style, as

Brothers eloquently observes, reflected the tastes of "those people

who loved to move their bodies in time with rhythmically exciting

music, who spoke in musical ways, who admired instrumentally

inflected singing and vocally inflected instruments, who regarded

blue notes as the strongest notes you could play... who admired

musicians with professional skills but could also appreciate music

played by an amateur, as long as he showed willingness and heart."

Where Brothers goes astray, however, is in claiming that the origins

of Armstrong's style were entirely vernacular, and that his lack of

interest in "assimilating to white culture" extended to a similar

lack of interest in Western music. It is true that Armstrong was

shaped by the black popular music he heard as a boy, as well as by

the "sanctified" gospel music he heard in church. Even so, he had an

irresistibly curious ear, and from an early age it led him in

unexpected directions. Late in life, for instance, he recalled

buying his first record player, a windup Victrola, as a teenager.

"Most of my records," he remembered, "were the Original Dixieland

Jazz Band.... I had [Enrico] Caruso, too, and Henry Burr, [Amelita]

Galli-Curci, [Luisa] Tetrazzini -- they were all my favorites. Then

there was the Irish tenor, [John] McCormack -- beautiful phrasing."

In citing an all-white jazz band and four of the most celebrated

opera singers of the day (the now-forgotten Henry Burr was a

Canadian concert singer who recorded hundreds of ballads and popular

songs between 1902 and 1929), Armstrong left no doubt of his

willingness to learn from whatever caught his ear, including the

harmonically sophisticated show and pop tunes by songwriters like

Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael and Noël Coward that he played with

relish from the late 20's on. Later on, he would astonish

interviewers by declaring with utter sincerity that Guy Lombardo was

his favorite bandleader, and when he made his debut in 1956 with

Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, he told the

conductor that "his most honored ambition" had been fulfilled.

None of this means that Armstrong's main influences were other than

vernacular. Nor, to be fair, does Brothers claim that the trumpeter

was altogether devoid of interest in other kinds of music. Still, it

seems to me that "Louis Armstrong's New Orleans" protests too much

in portraying Armstrong as a quasi-folk artist whose musical

development "would not have been one bit different had he never

heard an Italian aria or a French folk song."

Why, indeed, should so fine a scholar insist on so exclusionary a

view of so protean a musician? The answer may be found in the

preface to "Louis Armstrong's New Orleans," where Brothers remarks

in passing that he sees jazz as "part of African-American history."

This remark deserves closer consideration.

Of course jazz is very much a part of black history, and its

emergence and growth cannot be understood without reference to the

black experience in America, any more than can the life of Louis

Armstrong. But jazz was not created in racial isolation. As I have

written before, its roots were partly in Africa and partly in the

West, and it is best seen as a form of African-influenced Western

music, created by blacks, to whose century-long development both

black and white musicians have made major contributions. [5]

To claim otherwise, as some critics and commentators have done, is

to distort the history of jazz beyond recognition. Brothers does not

make that mistake, but he does commit the lesser error of

superimposing a political framework on the fruits of his research in

something of the same way that Von Eschen insists on viewing the

postwar history of U.S. foreign relations through the distorting

prism of left-wing ideology.

It would be palpably nonsensical to contend that racial politics has

had no effect on the development of jazz. But just as it is

important to place Louis Armstrong within the context of the black

experience that shaped his art, it is no less important to recognize

that he was a universal artist, a man to whom nothing was alien, who

transcended the particularity of his background, and who thereby

embraced the world. That, as is the case with all truly great

artists, is why he matters to us today.

____________________________

[1] The website of the Armstrong house is http://www.satchmo.net/

"Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: 1923-1934" (Sony 57176, three

CD's), "The Ultimate Collection" (Polygram 54369, three CD's),

and "Sugar: The Best of the Complete RCA Victor Recordings" (RCA

Bluebird 63851) contain digitally remastered versions of most of

Armstrong's major recordings. ("Portrait of an Artist" also contains

an exceptionally fine biographical essay by the noted jazz critic

Dan Morgenstern.) The best single-disc Armstrong anthology is "Ken

Burns Jazz: The Definitive Louis Armstrong" (Sony 61440), a 25-track

collection released in conjunction with the original telecast

of "Jazz."

[2] The best short treatment of Armstrong's life is Gary Giddins's

"Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong," originally published in

1988 as an illustrated coffee-table book and reissued in 2001 as a

text-only paperback. In addition, Armstrong published two memoirs,

the largely ghost-written "Swing That Music" (1936) and "Satchmo: My

Life in New Orleans" (1954), an astonishingly vivid account of his

youth that he wrote himself.

[3] Harvard University Press, 329 pp., $29.95.

[4] W.W. Norton, 336 pp., $26.95.

[5] "The Color of Jazz," Commentary, September 1995, collected in "A

Terry Teachout Reader."

[Lazaro Vega]

"As I have written before, [Jazz's] roots were partly in Africa and partly in the

West, and it is best seen as a form of African-influenced Western

music, created by blacks, to whose century-long development both

black and white musicians have made major contributions. [5]"

Or a Western influenced African music? Art Blakey didn't think so.

[Ken Dryden]

There was a funny story told by Phil Woods as several members of Dizzy's state department-sponsored big band were enjoying some hashish. Gillespie walked in on them unexpectedly and thundered "What's going on here?" Then he smiled and asked "Was it some good shit?"

I think this appeared in one of Woods' Phil in the Gap columns for the Al Cohn Memorial Newsletter.