19 September 2007
Jazz, America’s “Best Ambassador,” Breaks Down Barriers
Fest honors artists Ellington, Gillespie, jazz broadcaster Willis Conover
Washington -- Crowds lined up around the block in Moscow in 1989 to meet the great American jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who had just played a sold-out concert. But many people also wanted to hear about the man whose broadcasts on Voice of America had introduced them to American jazz: Willis Conover.
“When we were in Moscow people were lined up after the concert,” said Charles Fishman, Gillespie’s former manager, “and I would say a majority -- maybe three out of five -- would say to us in one way or another, ‘How is Willis Conover? Willis Conover and the Voice of America jazz was our lifeline to hope that one day we would be free, we would be able to express ourselves.’
“Then we went to Prague and Berlin, and it was more or less the same thing,” added Fishman, who now produces the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival in Washington.
This year, the Washington festival included events honoring Gillespie and Conover as well as Ellington. The final program was a concert September 17 in tribute to Conover, who hosted VOA’s American jazz and popular music programs from 1955 until shortly before his death in 1996. The concert headliner was another jazz great, Cuban-born musician and composer Paquito D’Rivera.
Over the years, Conover interviewed hundreds of musicians, including Ellington, Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Irving Berlin and Louis Armstrong. According to John Stevenson, director of VOA’s central programs division, Conover was especially popular in countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. “He was the most famous American they knew,” Stevenson said.
For Conover, “jazz and America mean the same thing: freedom,” Stevenson added during a September 17 panel discussion at George Washington University on jazz and public diplomacy. “But his comments were not politicized. He believed that the music alone carried America’s message.” (See “Jazz, Originally American, Now Celebrated Around the World.”)
Jazz has been part of America’s message to the world and a symbol of its ideals for at least 50 years, not only in Conover’s programming but also in State Department-sponsored overseas tours by Ellington, Gillespie, Armstrong and others.
Fishman, who accompanied Gillespie on numerous private and government-sponsored tours, said Gillespie always insisted that the opening act be a local group, and he also mingled with local musicians. It was not just the music audiences responded to, said Fishman during the panel discussion, it was also “the human connection.”
George Moose, former U.S. ambassador to Benin and Senegal, agreed. He recalled how students at the University of Dakar in Senegal “responded with enormous enthusiasm” to Gillespie in 1989 -- not just to his music, but to his “spirit of participation.”
Gillespie “was there not only to share his music, but to take in the culture he found there. It was far more effective than all the diplomatic language that we in the embassy were trying to use,” Moose said. “We reached more people in that week of concerts than we could have in a year’s worth of other activities.”
“Jazz is the best ambassador for the United States,” said Bulgarian-born jazz pianist Milcho Leviev. “This is music that is played all over the world; it breaks all the barriers between people.” (See "America Savors Its Music During Jazz Appreciation Month.")
Leviev was part of the multiethnic quintet that played the tribute concert for Willis Conover, along with D’Rivera on alto saxophone and clarinet, George Mraz (Czech Republic) on bass, Valery Ponomarev (Russia) on trumpet, and Horacio Hernandez (Cuba) on drums.
After the concert, Leviev told America.gov that he first heard jazz on Conover’s program in 1955, when he was 17, “and until my defection from Bulgaria, which was in 1970, I barely missed a night. … That was our academy of jazz.”
Karen Hughes, under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, noted that “although he was not as well known in America, Willis Conover had a huge impact for America.” He had a huge following overseas, she noted, and “his story is an example of how art and culture can communicate across borders and stir the human spirit.”
D’Rivera recalled that the Cuban government tried, not always successfully, to jam VOA broadcasts. “I would never have imagined that when I was listening to Willis Conover in Havana, Valery Ponomarev was listening to the same show in Russia, and the same thing with Milcho Leviev in Bulgaria,” he told the concert audience. He called jazz “the most beautiful music on the planet.”
The concert, held in the VOA auditorium, began with “Take the A Train,” the signature tune of Duke Ellington’s band, which became the theme song of Conover’s Voice of America Jazz Hour. About 70 minutes later it ended with Dizzy Gillespie’s “Con Alma” and a standing ovation.
In an interview afterward, D’Rivera said that in addition to the great jazz artists, other musicians and composers, such as Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin, drew on elements of jazz. “That is why it is so important -- it’s not only the jazz people, it’s the people that have been influenced by jazz,” he said.
“I don’t think I have enough words to describe how valuable is the treasure that we have in jazz.”
For more information, see VOA’s special Web pages on Willis Conover and the tribute concert, which include audio and video clips.
Also see “Radio Producer Discusses Jazz with Internet Audience” and The Arts.
Willis Conover Tribute Concert (Courtesy of VOA)
American Jazz artists Paquito D'Rivera and Milcho Leviev