Forty-nine years ago the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower unleashed an unlikely weapon against the Soviet Union — jazz. The State Department signed up some of America's finest jazz musicians as cultural ambassadors. It despatched them on tours to some of the most dangerous places in the world. Their mission was to win hearts and minds.
Phil Woods, A Jazz Life
Willis Conover: "Time for Jazz, Willis Conover in Washington DC with the Voice Of America Jazz Hour."

Willis Conover's VOA radio show paved the way for the jazz ambassadors. Music USA first went on air in 1955. 100 million people in eighty countries would eventually tune in to hear Conover and his famous guests. Later, Conover himself reminisced about one of his favorites. (The Willis Conover Collection)

Willis Conover: "At one time the VOA used Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean between its program and so I got my friend Louis Armstrong to play it briefly on trumpet and then to sing something that I made up and demonstrated to him and here's what those sounded like."

It didn't take long for the State Department to realize that jazz had diplomatic potential. In 1956 it snapped up its first ambassador. His name was Dizzy Gillespie.

Phil Woods toured with Gillespie in the Middle East. It was as unstable then as it is today. In Iraq there were violent protests against the country's unpopular king. Woods remembers arriving in neighboring Iran. He heard gunfire coming from the Iraqi side of the border.

Phil Woods: "We could still hear shooting across the river. We knew it wasn't hunting. I think there was some internal strife still going on. The food was a little rough and the hotels were a little rough but it was a real treat because we were well treated by the State Department guys."

Penny Von Eschen: "It's not accidental that the very first tour began in the Middle East and began in Abadan, Iran."

Penny Von Eschen is the author of a new book about the State Department tours called, Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. She says the tours, featuring Satchmo (Louis Armstrong), were political from the start.

Penny Von Eschen: "The United States was trying to deflect criticisms of its foreign policy, and the tours very much circled its foreign policy interest and its major interest in oil and uranium so it many times circled diplomatic hotspots and at times brought the musicians in to very difficult situations."

Louis Satchmo Armstrong walked in to one of those very difficult situations during a tour of Africa. In 1960, he was deployed to the troubled Katanga Province in the Belgian Congo. Von Eschen says behind the scenes the CIA was working to remove the country's new prime minister.

Louis Armstrong, The Katanga ConcertPenny Von Eschen: "None of this was clear to Armstrong, but it was clear that the band was walking in to a civil war and Armstrong was so enthusiastically received that there was a literally a truce called for a day so Armstrong could perform.

This is one of the fairly rare instances where these early concerts are recorded so we have a Katanga concert from Armstrong and you can hear at the beginning of many songs, such as La Vie En Rose, the very enthusiastic reception of the crowd."

Penny Von Eschen believes government officials had another reason for deploying black musicians such as Louis Armstrong.

They wanted to stop critics abroad who kept calling the United States a racist country, but Armstrong wouldn't play that game. He'd already cancelled a trip to the Soviet Union. That was when President Eisenhower refused to support desegregation in the South. "The way they are treating my people," Armstrong said, "the Government can go to hell." Later he satirized the tours in a musical called, The Real Ambassadors.

Louis Armstrong wasn't the only musician who refused to tow the State Department line. Pianist Randy Weston toured parts of Africa for the government. He says he didn't think of himself as an ambassador.

Randy Weston, African Cookbook
Randy Weston: "I don't know, I never thought about the word really. I never looked it up. What does an ambassador mean? I never looked it up in a dictionary. I don't even know what an ambassador really means, and I'm not saying that to be joking - I don't mean that at all. I mean that for us it was an opportunity for us to take our music to our people and to let them know how much they have contributed to world civilization through music."

For Randy Weston and the rest of the jazz ambassadors, the tours were always about the music. Winning the Cold War would remain a job for State Department diplomats.

Written and Produced by Elizabeth Ross