:: NEA JAZZ IN THE SCHOOLS

Willis Conover, host of Voice of America's "Music USA." Courtesy of the Office of Public Affairs,International Broadcasting Bureau.

While the 1950s were a time of bold experimentation and unprecedented freedom in the world of jazz, these were also the early years of the Cold War, an era marked by political conservatism and anti-Communist paranoia. And yet, paradoxically, the Cold War became a catalyst for the spread of jazz on an unprecedented scale. As the United States began competing with the Soviet Union for influence over nonaligned and developing nations in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere, the medium of radio became an indispensable propaganda tool. In 1954, the Voice of America, an overseas radio broadcasting unit of the United States government, hired a young jazz fan, Willis Conover, to host a program that was broadcast for two hours a night, six nights a week to listeners all over the world. Conover played all forms of jazz, even the early avant-gardists, like the Sun Ra Arkestra, that commercial radio stations in the U.S. would not put on the air. Jazz, as Conover used to say, was "the music of freedom," and the people of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seemed to agree: At the peak of the Cold War, approximately 30 million of them regularly tuned in to Conover's show. As many as 70 million more did so in other countries around the world. At a time in which some older forms of jazz were starting to be written off in the U.S. as "easy listening," Conover's show was a reminder that jazz was still an exciting and sometimes radical force for change.

Conover's success on the air encouraged the State Department to send jazz musicians abroad as goodwill ambassadors. The propaganda value of sending African-American musicians overseas as representatives of democracy just as the world was watching blacks struggle for their own freedom at home may have been questionable, but the enthusiasm of the foreign audiences was not. Beginning in 1956, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and other jazz greats made a number of successful tours, all of them drawing large crowds in places where jazz musicians had seldom if ever been seen before. Armstrong once said, "I couldn't count the Russians that came through the Iron Curtain to hear "˜Our Louis.' ... Anybody who says that the Russians don't love good jazz, you send them to me." Though jazz in the 1950s was already starting to lose American fans to rhythm and blues and early rock and roll, the tours made clear that the music still had a powerful impact abroad.