This is Part 2 of a diary marking the centennial of Dave Brubeck’s birth on 12/6/1920, spotlighting his role as America’s foremost jazz diplomat.
Part 1 focused on Brubeck’s first State Department-sponsored tour in 1958 when his quartet became the first American jazz band to perform behind the Iron Curtain (in Poland) and went on to Turkey, the Middle East and South Asia. That tour inspired Brubeck to record the album “Jazz Impressions of Eurasia,” which blended musical elements from the countries he visited with jazz, as well as his classic composition “Blue Rondo a la Turk,” the opening track on his groundbreaking “Time Out” album.
If you missed it, you can link here to Part 1 which was published Sunday morning:
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With the Cold War raging, the U.S. was trying to win hearts and minds in the newly independent states emerging in Africa and Asia as well as non-aligned countries. Soviet propaganda was scoring points in the war of ideas by spotlighting the racial discrimination so prevalent in the U.S.
The State Department created its Jazz Ambassadors program in 1956 to show a different side of America. sending trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s integrated 18-piece band on a 10-week tour through Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, Yugoslavia and Greece as well as South America.
But the musicians had an increasingly hard time reconciling their role as ambassadors when back home the civil rights movement was intensifying as the Rev, Martin Luther King Jr. rose to national prominence. (Anyone interested in reading more about the jazz ambassadors should check out the book “Satchmo Blows Up the World” by Penny M. Von Eschen.)
In 1960, Brubeck’s quartet was the most popular jazz group in the U.S. thanks to the best-selling album “Time Out,” particularly on college campuses. Brubeck was booked to make a college tour of the South.
But 22 of the 25 colleges on the tour refused to allow his interracial quartet to perform. Brubeck refused to replace his black bassist Eugene Wright with a white musician and canceled the tour, causing a loss of more than $30,000.
All of this gave Brubeck cause to reflect on the hypocrisy of the State Department using jazz musicians as ambassadors representing the U.S. abroad when they faced discrimination at home.
Brubeck and his wife Iola decided to write a musical that would highlight these disparities and he sought out fellow jazz ambassador Louis Armstrong.
In 1957, Armstrong had canceled what would have been a historic tour of the Soviet Union because he was infuriated by the Eisenhower administration’s refusal to enforce court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas.
In an interview with a young reporter before a concert in Grand Forks, North Dakota, Armstrong, who hadn’t been outspoken about the civil rights movement, declared, “It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country.”
He admitted having second thoughts about touring the Soviet Union for the State Department: “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” Armstrong said. The story was picked up by The Associated Press. A week later, Eisenhower sent federal troops to Little Rock.
In late 1960 and early 1961, Armstrong and his multi-racial All Stars went on a State Department tour of Africa, playing to audiences estimated at half a million. Satchmo was carried through the streets of the capital of the Republic of the Congo on a throne accompanied by drummers and dancers. Rival factions in a civil war in Katanga Province called a day-long truce so both sides could hear Armstrong perform.
Upon Armstrong’s return, the Brubecks began working with him on “The Real Ambassadors,” a musical with a powerful message that satirized the politics of the State Department tours. The Armstrong and Brubeck bands — joined by singer Carmen McRae and the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks and Ross — came together to record an album. The Brubecks had hoped to bring the musical to Broadway, but the only public performance came at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival.
“I was deeply impressed by Louis’ sincerity, his musicianship and his ability to carry off his role,” Brubeck recalled in an interview with this writer. “He had to learn a lot of new music, not all of it in his style.”
The musical opens with a song called “Cultural Exchange.” Iola Brubeck’s witty lyrics to the song included: “The State Department has discovered jazz. It reaches folks like nothing ever has. … And when our neighbors call us vermin. We sent out Woody Herman.”
Armstrong plays a musician who is persuaded to begin a State Department tour even though he privately thinks to himself “what we need is a goodwill tour of Mississippi.”
The hero is sent to the newest African nation of Talgalla where the Americans and Russians are competing for influence. When the hero arrives he is mistaken for the officially appointed U.S. ambassador. The arrival of the official ambassador a few days later leads to considerable confusion over who is actually “the real ambassador.”
Iola Brubeck observed in an interview for the Brubeck Institute that Armstrong put his own stamp on the material. After years of being dismissed as an entertainer — despite his early groundbreaking contributions in the ‘20s and ‘30s with his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens — Armstrong finally had the opportunity to deal in a serious and sensitive way with many of the racial issues he had struggled with throughout his life.
She recalled one particularly poignant moment in the song “They Say I Look Like God.” Lambert, Hendricks and Ross sing: “God created man in His image and likeness.” Then Armstrong comes in singing the blues: “They say I look like God. Could God be black, my God? If all are made in the image of Thee, could Thou per chance a zebra be.”
She said the line was supposed to make people laugh, but Armstrong choked up while singing it at Monterey, and tears were coming down his face.
The musical also contains a lovely ballad written by the Brubecks, “Summer Song.” The magical combination of Armstrong’s singing and Brubeck’s sublime piano accompaniment make this every bit as moving as the more well known “What a Wonderful World.”
Brubeck would eventually travel to more than 40 countries around the world both on State Department and commercial tours, interacting with and learning from local musicians wherever he went. He would release such albums as ”Jazz Impressions of Japan,” including one of his classic compositions “Koto Song,” and “Bravo Brubeck,” with jazz arrangements of traditional Mexican folk music.
And in 1988, Brubeck engaged in Summit Diplomacy when he was invited by both sides to perform at a reception at the U.S. ambassador’s residence when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev were meeting in Moscow.
Three days of diplomatic talks had left both sides at an impasse and the mood was grim before Brubeck took the stage. Brubeck had brought bassist Eugene Wright along to honor him for “everything he’d gone through in segregated situations in the U.S.” Brubeck recalled in an interview with this writer that he and Wright played a duet together “just to make a statement about integration.”
By the time, his quartet played their final number, “Take Five,” people noticed that even Gorbachev was drumming his fingers in time with the music.
Brubeck said: “Pretty quick that whole place was swinging. And one of our top officials said. `Dave, that’s the first time that summit came together as a group that was understanding each other.”
The diplomatic impasse was soon resolved and both sides reached a landmark agreement to dismantle part of their nuclear arsenals.
Brubeck’s longtime manager and producer Russell Gloyd told Washington Post writer Matt Schudel that the next day U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz gave the pianist a big hug and said, “Dave, you made the summit. No one was talking after three days. You made the breakthrough.”
In that same 2008 Washington Post story, Dana Gioia, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts said: “There is no American alive who has done more extensive and effective cultural diplomacy than Dave Brubeck. Dave is not only one of the greatest living American artists, he’s also one of the greatest living American diplomats.”
Brubeck died on Dec. 5, 2012, a day before his 92nd birthday.
My last interview with Brubeck was in late 2010 just before he celebrated his 90th birthday. He had undergone heart surgery to install a pacemaker, but a month after being discharged from the hospital his love of the music gave him the motivation to perform with his quartet at the Blue Note jazz club in New York.
Brubeck had converted to Catholicism in 1980 after composing a Mass. I asked him how he envisioned the afterlife.
“I’d love to see my parents, my brothers and all these fine musicians like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, and Art Tatum -- all the great pianists.
“If there’s a heaven, let it be a good place for all of us to jam together and have a wonderful, wonderful musical experience,” Brubeck said. “We had so many great musicians that contributed so much, and they were all my friends, and that’s why I’d like to see them again.”