![]() It was no coincidence however, that this ambassadorial program had taken off during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. The irony of sending black musicians to countries where they experienced greater equality than in their home nation was not lost on Satchmo. ![]() Satchmo once toured for 160 days straight, and Dave Brubeck for 120. The State Department would often cancel the artists’ commercial tours back home without their approval, in order to extend their international tours. ![]() His 1960 tour was so rigorous and demanding that accompanying singer, Velma Middleton, suffered a stroke in Sierra Leone where she passed away one month later at the age of 43. Afterwards, Louis became the most active ambassador, on both official and unofficial tours. Several hundred thousand people turned up as Armstrong trumpeted his way across the country. Louis Armstrong, nicknamed “Satchmo”, followed in Dizzy Gillespie’s footsteps with an unofficial trip to the British Gold Coast colony (which became an independent Ghana one year later). Louis Armstrong being interviewed in the Voice of America Studio © University of North Texas Ironically, Dizzy was a personal and favourite friend of Langston Hughes, the pioneer of jazz poetry, who in the early 1950s, had been grilled by Washington alongside other creatives in secret testimonies for their “communist-like” ideals. This was only a few after the Greece’s ruinous civil war between communists and republicans that had left the country’s numerous communist supporters on the losing side. Dizzy Gillespie’s group off-duty sightseeing in Greece © Rutgers University Here he is pictured riding around the streets of Zagreb, Croatia during an official government tour with a Yugoslav composer, Nikica Kaogjera in tow. Dizzy’s introductory “mission” began in 1956 when he was sent to Athens, Greece, a country the US believed was among those at risk of falling to communism “like dominoes”. The State Department’s first official jazz ambassador was Dizzie Gillespie. Dizzy Gillespie and his band in the Dominican Republic, 1956, a decade before the US would invade the country to prevent it from becoming a Communist dictatorship Benny Goodman “King of Swing” on his tour of the Far East in 1956 © Yale University © Rutgers University Left, a satirical cartoon of the”King of Swing”, Benny Goodman, in the USSR © Bill Mauldin. Nevertheless, government officials recruited the most popular jazz names of the day and enlisted their talents to use in service of their country. They were sent to all corners of the globe, even behind the Iron Curtain and wherever the US government felt it was necessary to spread America’s “democratic culture” in the face of communism. During the height of the Civil Rights movement, this attempted ruse didn’t always go down too well, particularly with the African American musicians serving as goodwill ambassadors. In a Cold War “Jazz Ambassador” initiative, they sent famed artists such as Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Galespie, and Duke Ellington, among others, to share “their Western music” and to hopefully, introduce some American political ideals. Part of this initiative was also an attempt to make people believe that America was treating other races well at home. This is the story of that time the United States decided to influence countries “at-risk” of falling to communism … by introducing them to jazz.
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