“A blue note in a minor key—America has its secret sonic weapon—Jazz.”

That was the headline in 1955 when the United States sent its top musicians overseas to promote democracy. They called them the Jazz Ambassadors—Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Dave Brubeck.

Today, in honor of Dave Brubeck month (May 4 is Dave Brubeck day — that’s 5/4 named for the 5/4 time signature of take 5) the story of Dave Brubeck and the Jazz Ambassadors. In 1958, the Dave Brubeck Quartet embarked on a tour of Europe and Asia sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

And a special interview with Dave Brubeck’s sons, Dan and Chris Brubeck and what it was like growing up with their very unusual and genius father. Excellent musicians in their own right, the two share intimate memories of their father and his legendary contributions to modern jazz.

Featuring interviews with Keith Hatschek, Program Director for Music Management and Music Industry Studies at the University of Pacific; and Mike Wurtz, Assistant Professor and Head of Special Collections and Archives at the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of Pacific Library. The archival recording of Dave Brubeck is from his interview with Monk Rowe from the Fillius Jazz Archive at Hamilton College.

Produced by Brandi Howell for The Echo Chamber Podcast.

Dan Brubeck:  The more repressed a society is, the more they admire the freedom you can find in jazz. Jazz is America.  People behind the Iron Curtain started falling in love with jazz.

Chris Brubeck:  The idea was if we get jazz musicians to go out, that represents freedom.  People could express themselves in this kind of way out of that kind of democracy comes that kind of expression.

ARCHIVAL:  Louis Armstrong

Chris Brubeck:  You’re not going to get a repressed environment like communism. That seemed to be the idea. I mean, if you saw a Louis Armstrong back then you know, your heart opens up and you’re like, wow, this is great.  This guy is totally cool. He loves everyone and he’s expressing himself and he just made people happy all over the world. So that’s a way better defense against fighting communism than fighting might with might and all that, you know.  It’s like nowadays, maybe we would just bomb them or something.

Keith Hatschek:   It was a brilliant use of what we have come to term soft power.  Eisenhower realized that bullets and bombs ultimately would never decide the outcome of the future of this battle between the capitalist system and the socialist system. He very wisely invested in cultural exchanges. They were dubbed unofficially the “jazz ambassadors”, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie. The groups were chosen to go overseas and play their music.  This battle for the hearts and minds of all these territories around the world who were not directly linked to either the Western powers or the Soviet Union played out not so much in a military sense, but in a cultural sense.  Why not send a jazz quartet and have them go and do their thing in these various countries and territories?  I’m Keith Hatschek. I’m the author of “The Impact of American Jazz Diplomacy in Poland During the Cold War Era”. As far as my interest in the jazz ambassadors, I teach at the University of the Pacific and we are the place where the jazz musician Dave Brubeck and his wife Iola decided to bequeath their papers and all of their archival materials.  They both attended school here in the 1940s. Dave went on of course to become a world renowned jazz musician and composer and humanitarian. And one of the things that really struck him was that he was a GI during World War II. He was in the European theater of operations and he ended up leading a band called the Wolf Pack. And after the war, after hostilities had ceased. the band stayed on and they played both for GIs, but also refugees who were displaced over there. And it really gave him a look into what it was like in Europe in the aftermath of the devastation of World War Two. Later, when he became more popular in the 1950s, his music started to be broadcast over the Voice of America.

ARCHIVAL:  Voice of America Music USA #357-B, Interview with Dave Brubeck
(Listen to full VOA show at the University of North Texas Special Collections.

And one of their most popular shows was called The Jazz Hour. It was hosted by Willis Conover, a Washington DJ.  As a result Brubeck’s music got behind the Iron Curtain in a way that it couldn’t have otherwise gotten there because Western records and books and movies were not allowed to be had in communist control. So Brubeck’s music became pretty popular behind the Iron Curtain.

Archival Dave Brubeck:  The Voice of America was so appreciated. But there should have been far more of that type of thing. At the risk of death, people were listening. He came on every night out of Washington. And the average Russian, when he speaks English, sounds like Willis Conover.  They took those chances to secretly listen, and we’ve been to secret meetings in places like Poland. The last thing they said to me, just before we came home, 60 people in the jazz club, one fellow stood up and said he wanted to give a toast. And he said, when you go home, remember we want freedom as much as you do.

Keith Hatschek:   Jazz is a improvisitory media. The idea that the members of a jazz group are going to be having a conversation musically, they’re going to have give and take and dialogue. Many people felt that that was analogous to the democratic process. People in the Soviet Bloc saw jazz, not only as exciting and youthful and energetic and rhythmic, certainly that was a part of it.  But the idea that jazz musicians would venture out without a script, they would create art and music and share it. There was something about that that was very attractive to people who were living an incredibly ordered and regimented life.

At one point, the threat of jazz music and its great impression it was making on Soviet citizenry led Stalin to view any form of jazz music, whether it was listening to it, owning it, making it or forming it or composing it as being out of bounds.  At one point saxophones, which had been around since the late 19th century were confiscated and all musicians were told if you own a saxophone, you have to bring it to a certain office.  And if you were registered as a musician on saxophone, you had to turn in your card, the cards were destroyed and you were given an oboe or clarinet or a bassoon, and you had to change instruments. That’s one thing, musicians always resourceful.  Jerzy Matuszkiewicz who’s one of the most celebrated Polish jazz musicians of all time.  He said we were jamming a lot and the neighbors would complain.  The militia would come and the first thing they would do is they would threaten us and say, are you playing that decadent Western music? And of course we were, but we just said to them, Oh no, no, no, no. It’s a Polish folk song – just our version of it. The militia, many of them were so poorly educated that they didn’t know what Polish folk music actually was. So they got away with it.

ARCHIVAL DAVE BRUBECK:  The idea of freedom, if there’s a dictator, the first thing they’re going to stop is jazz. Absolutely. Hitler’s stopped it immediately. Stalin stopped it.  It just gives the people of a country too much idea of what it would be like to be free.  People just don’t realize how little freedom there was. Some people weren’t allowed to speak. But they would sing maybe or hum – some way they’ll get through.

Keith Hatschek:  There was a music committee of academics and critics that was convened. They made recommendations to the State Department. At the same time groups that were popular – Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie. Those were groups that were going to be more popular and a bigger draw out on these jazz ambassador tours. So they happened to be ones that in the early years of the touring program were ones that were invited to go and perform. In 1957, discussions between the State Department and Brubeck’s booking agent ensued and it was agreed that he would go on a European and Asian tour. And part of it would be underwritten by the State Department. Well, everything moves slowly igovernment circles. There are some correspondence from the late 1957 time period discussing the tour.  How long it would go for, where it would go, what countries would be covered. The reality was it worked on two levels for Dave Brubeck and his group, his music had become more popular through its broadcast over the Voice of America.

ARCHIVAL VOA:  Music USA coming to you on 72 35, 9,515 to 10 kilo cycles. Let’s hear more of the recordings of Dave Brubeck in the next half hour of the Voice of America jazz program.

Keith Hatschek:   So the hope was more people would come to hear the group and their music and more people would eventually, especially in the countries such as India and Ceylon and Iran and Iraq, where there were record stores and bookstores that it would actually spur some sales of Brubeck’s recordings. But on the other hand, Brubeck knew that some of the places they were going, for instance, Afghanistan – it’s fascinating.  They played in Kabul and Brubeck commented that when he looked out in the audience, most of the audience was made up of serving Soviet officers who were there on their version of foreign exchange. They were building roads. They were building runways. They were building bridges, but they too, through the Voice of America, knew of Brubeck and his music, and they gave him a standing ovation.  They loved the performance.

ARCHIVAL DAVE BRUBECK:  President Eisenhower sent us behind the Iron Curtain. 1958. We went first to Poland, then to Turkey Afghanistan, the periphery of Russia, Iran, Iraq, East and West Pakistan, India and Ceylon. And on my mind is we’ve got to get together.

Keith Hatschek:  Music had a way of breaking down the ideology.  When the tour was finally all coming together, they ended up visiting nine countries on behalf of the U.S. State Department as jazz ambassadors, and in every country they visited, people were ecstatic.  For many of them, they really believed that it was giving them a key to what they want to do with their own life. One of the countries was Poland. And of course, Poland at this time was a satellite country of the Soviet Union.  And so the group spent two weeks in 1958 in Poland. They played 13 concerts.  That fascinated me because there was a letter in the archives, Dave and Iola Brubeck saved a lot of their fan mail. So this was a letter from a musician who had gone to seven of the concerts in Poland. And he wrote with such passion about how much he learned about himself as a musician by attending these concerts and listening to the music and observing the way the musicians interacted. It struck me as being kind of a life-changing experience. And so I thought, I wonder if this guy is still alive. So that led me to the idea of a research trip to Poland, which I was fortunate enough to do in 2007.  And I got to interview over a dozen musicians who met and were influenced by Dave Brubeck and his quartet in that historic 1958 tour.

I hired a student research assistant from the University of Warsaw. He mentioned that his grandmother had quite a collection of jazz albums that she had accumulated over the years from the gray market. And I said, Oh, that’s interesting. He said, and I think she really did like Dave Brubeck and I said, Oh, that’s great.  And then the next day he said, well, I talked to my grandmother and she’s very happy that you’re here. She was in her eighties at that point, I said, great. And I thought for a minute, I went away, which he liked to speak about that. He goes, I don’t think so, but I’ll ask her.  So later in the same day, he sent me a text message and said, my grandmother would like to speak with you. Helena Zaworska. She was a woman of letters and had been an editor of the leading intellectual language journal for many, many, many years in Poland. She was a huge jazz fan as a college student and for the rest of her life, a woman of great intellect and great creative imagination. And so the fact that she was not able to get access to much of the great literature of history.  And that until she became a doctoral student and she was finally allowed to go for a year and a half and study at the Sorbonne, she had never left Poland. She knew that she only had a very limited view of what life and world could offer. So jazz music became her lens. It became her way to travel. She would close her eyes and listen to the wonderful jazz music that was on the Voice of America each evening, as well as she and some of her friends began to collect black market jazz records.

She would travel on Sundays by train 13 hours round trip from Warsaw to Krakov where a friend of hers had a much larger jazz record collection and they would spend the whole afternoon early evening just luxuriating and listening to jazz music of their choice. She talked about what that meant to her at the time, how jazz and particularly Dave Brubeck and his music played an important role in her own life.

She said, Jazz and particularly Brubeck, took on the status of myth to us. What it represented was bigger than the music itself.  By immersing ourselves in jazz recordings, we became independent during that hour, which was the only way to truly feel freedom at that time – through the music.  There was really no hope of ever being able to travel.  Jazz allowed us to dream, to retain some sense of idealism because we thought the limits on our freedoms might last forever.