Diplomacy with a Beat

...Reviewed by James Critchlow Author, "Radio Hole-in-theHead/Radio Liberty: An Insider's Story of Cold War Broadcasting" IN 1952, a road company of the George Gershwin opera Porgy and Bess began touring abroad with a large cast of American blacks...

...For all its tensions, the Cold War forced Americans to be concerned about their image abroad...

...Even the excesses of McCarthyism did not dent most people's patriotism...

...part scholarship, with pages of endnotes...

...If there is a grain of truth in some of these assertions, it is obscured by the intemperance of the language...

...Moreover, Von Eschen serves up her mix with a goodly measure of an ideology that zealously paints the U.S...

...Predictably, the CIA has a place in Von Eschen's demonology...

...Many Congressmen were reluctant to appropriate funds for what they considered cultural frills...

...Many of the musicians were apolitical...

...For all the inviting breeziness of its title, Satchmo Blows Up the World is not light reading...

...public diplomacy during the Cold War, mentions neither Angelou nor Capote but credits the production with giving President Dwight D. Eisenhower the idea of sending jazz musicians, most of them black, to foreign countries as goodwill ambassadors...

...The VOA music programs backfired in one case: The author notes that by the time Benny Goodman got to the USSR, many fans—thanks largely to VOA broadcasts—were sufficiently hip to view his traditional jazz as retrograde...

...involvement in coups, in countries ranging from Iran and Iraq to the Congo and Ghana...

...gave an interview to the anti-Communist Radio Liberty, perhaps without realizing it was then funded by the CIA...

...State Department escort officers went along to help smooth the way, as well as to try to preserve decorum...

...She finds irony here because in her view Eisenhower's Southern upbringing conditioned him to feel "uneasy in the presence ofblack people 'in any but subordinate positions.'" Her first chapter, entitled "Ike Gets Dizzy," recounts how he used his "President's Emergency Fund" to sponsor a jazz tour of the Middle East by bebop trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie...

...Alvin Alley's black dance troupe was recruited too...

...The poet Maya Angelou, who was one of the singers, described the reaction at La Scala in Milan: "Time and again, the audiences came to their feet, yelling and applauding...

...The book has lively descriptions of the musicians' interaction with foreign hosts...

...The Cold War forced people to choose...

...Their desire to mingle among ordinary people and jam with local groups caused difficulties for their handlers...

...The spirit of the anti-imperialist guru Frantz Fanon flits through Von Eschen's pages, although he is directly cited only twice...

...In Satchmo Blows Up the World, Penny M. Von Eschen, documenting the role of jazz in U.S...

...Von Eschen stresses the anomaly of blacks who were still subject to Jim Crow laws in their own land willingly appearing before audiences abroad on behalf of the United States...

...The story of jazz and the State Department," she asserts, "is not the story of a nation standing apart from and unsullied by the exercise of imperial power...

...And more than a hint of bias is evident in the fact that this trained historian brings up Eisenhower's alleged racism on page two, but waits two chapters to point out his deployment of U.S...

...However, she writes, "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...

...Judging from my experience with State Department cultural affairs officers, they would have raised quiet hell at the least hint of CIA encroachment on their turf...

...the U.S...

...Her line of argument is demeaning to the players, whose success with foreign audiences was a triumph of artistry that was related only tangentially to race...

...Truman Capote was along, reporting for the New Yorker...

...troops to protect black schoolchildren in Little Rock...

...As successive administrations continued the policy, growing competition from rock made jazz practitioners eager to book gigs wherever they could...

...Drug abuse, "habitual tardiness" and their "keeping company with 'unmarried women'" were chronic worries...

...Paradoxically, Conover could walk down Pennsylvania Avenue without being recognized, but when he traveled he would be mobbed by fans...

...and the arming of such military states as Pakistan...

...Still, Von Eschen's overall assessment ofthejazzplayers'achievement is grudgingly positive: "Audiences throughout the world fell in love with the jazz ambassadors for their brilliant creativity, their irreverence, and their wit, and for...

...For example, she writes that "the story of the tours disrupts a bipolar view of the Cold War and takes us into a far more tangled, and far more violent, jockeying for power and control of global resources than that glimpsed through the focus of the U.S.-Soviet conflict...

...Many of the State Department officials involved in the cultural project clearly loved jazz and relished the opportunity to associate with top exponents like Gillespie, Armstrong or Ellington and help them share their art with the rest of the world...

...She tells us that the relationship between music and diplomacy "reveals a Janus-faced power" with "gargantuan ambitions...

...Within a few decades, such stars as Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, B.B...

...But she does not directly accuse the CIA of involvement in the jazz program...

...Given Eisenhower and [Secretary of State John Foster] Dulles' preference for covert action over conventional warfare," she says, "it is not surprising that many of the jazz tours appear to have moved in tandem with CIA operations...

...Stripped of its political claptrap, this story of the jazz tours contains valuable lessons for the present...

...At least one, Duke Ellington, was a Republican...

...officials would simultaneously insist on the racetranscending quality of jazz while depending on the blackness of musicians to legitimize America's global agendas was an abiding paradox of the tours...

...his account became a book, The Muses Are Heard, that resonated with the American public...

...Martin Luther King Jr...

...part political diatribe...

...Besides, plenty of them—Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Woody Herman—were white...

...Von Eschen, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, has produced a hybrid: part narrative...

...became known more for McDonald's, Baywatch and Britney Spears than for programs in the public interest...

...Yet even here Von Eschen introduces a jarring note: "That U.S...

...as archimperialist...

...The American labor movement was at the forefront of anti-Communist resistance...

...Internationally, the U.S...

...King, Oscar Peterson (actually a Canadian), Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and Duke Ellington had played overseas under government auspices...

...There were also troubles back home...

...their affinities with peoples struggling for freedom in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe...

...She makes little effort to explain that at the time revelations of Soviet atrocities, domestic (the Gulag) and foreign (especially in Eastern Europe), inspired even the severest critics of injustice here to support their government against the perceived Communist threat...

...Senator Allen J. Eilender of Louisiana went further, complaining that as a result of our sending performers like Gillespie abroad, "people will really believe we are barbarians...

...Mindful that American tax dollars were behind the trips, they tried to have them appear before influential, elite audiences and make them spend time at official receptions...

...In 1955, the company played in the Soviet Union and won the acclaim of cheering audiences...

...Later on, gospel and rhythm-andblues singers were included...

...Von Eschen does her own riff on the Cold War: The real purpose of thejazz tours was not to one-up the Soviets, it was Washington's desire to lock up the natural resources of newly independent former colonies in Africa and Asia...

...That led to generous funding of public diplomacy: travel by performing arts groups, exchange visits, publishing and radio broadcasts, American libraries and information centers overseas...

...The writing is usually straightforward in narrative passages, but often convoluted in discussions of politics and art...

...With the unlamented disappearance of the Soviet enemy, public diplomacy activities were dismantled or cutback...

...Back in Washington, diskjockey Willis Conover's Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts played an important role in stimulating interest in jazz around the world...

...One weary official noted that "jazz musicians live at night and sleep through the day...

...Rather, she insists, "it 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...

...Since 9/11 Washington has fumblingly scrambled to restore them, but much of the expertise acquired in earlier decades has been lost...