Volume 38, Issue 2, 15 March 2015, Pages 140-159
Jazz autobiography and the cold war (Article)
St. John's University in New York, United States
Abstract
This article explores
several key autobiographies by jazz musicians and the ways in which
they represent the use of jazz by the United States on the cultural
front of the Cold War. It examines varying approaches to writing about
the involvement of the autobiographical subject with the cultural
diplomacy (or cultural containment) policies of the United States and
investigates the historical effort made by the United States to feature
jazz as an important element of its cultural propaganda mission.
Moreover, it assesses how this effort relates to jazz autobiography, for
which it helped to create a market by being one of the forces driving
(and being driven by) the memorialization and institutionalization of
jazz. The musician-autobiographers were keenly aware of the positions in
which they were placed by participating in the US State Department's
tours. Autobiographies by Dizzy Gillespie,
Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, George Wein, and Hampton Hawes reveal a
strategy of tempering the reservations and cynicism about the state's
endorsement of jazz by choosing to center on personal-scale interaction,
in which opportunities for taking responsibility for another person are
found. That is to say, one theme running through major jazz
autobiographies regarding how to handle the ethical and political
considerations created by the use of jazz in the cultural diplomacy of
the United States has been to ground personal participation in an
impersonal global strategy within personal exchange, by deflecting
political ambivalence and questions of political commodification of art
by focusing on gestures of friendship and civility within the situations
created by the state's global strategy. © 2015 Taylor & Francis.
ISSN: 03007766Source Type: Journal
Original language: English
DOI: 10.1080/03007766.2014.994319Document Type: Article
Publisher: Routledge
