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LET'S RESURRECT DIZZY

This week's Economist has a story about Rhythm Road, a programme that basically sends musicians on diplomatic missions around the world, run by the State Department and Jazz at Lincoln Centre.

"When you have musical intelligence, that crosses boundaries," explains Maya Azucena, a participating singer, on Jazz.com. The best part of The Economist's piece is this point about jazz being particularly well-suited to diplomacy:

It is collaborative, allowing individuals both to harmonise and play solo—much like a democracy, says Ari Roland, who plays bass for a band that left New York to tour the Middle East on March 31st. Jazz is also a reminder of music’s power. It helped break down racial barriers, as enthusiasts of all colours gathered to listen to jazz when segregation was still the law of the land.

Jazz is also so distinctively American (the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon”, as a 1955 headline in the New York Times put it). Dizzy Gillespie was the first musician America considered fit to woo foreigners. With his trumpet and his profound cheeks ("Just try to hate America," those cheeks said; "Just try to overlook this wondrous physiological gift ...or just try not to laugh"), he was sent on a State Department-funded world tour in 1956, seducing potential pinkos with his improvisations. Soft power, indeed. It marked a turning point in official American cultural outreach:

During the first leg of the 1956 tour, the U.S. State Department received word that Cypriot students stoned the U.S. Embassy in Athens. The State Department's musical band-aid was not far away -- performing in Ankara, Turkey -- when the call came. "'Send the Gillespie band,'" mimicked [Quincy] Jones.

In Athens, students stormed the stage. The band members weren't sure what to think, recalled Jones, until they put Gillespie on their shoulders and chanted "Dizzy, Dizzy, Dizzy."

And to think he would only have to wait eight more years for Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Unfortunately a great photography show of America's jazz musicians on tour, called “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World”, has just closed at New York's Lincoln Centre. But this slideshow at the New York Times is nicely evocative. And check out this short film of a Gillespie performance (which slightly predates the tour), and tell me we shouldn't resurrect the guy and catapult him over to Iraq.

~ EMILY BOBROW

Picture credit: Dizzy Gillespie in 1956 in Zagreb, Marshall Stearns Collection, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University