HOME FEATURES COLUMNS FILM LIT MUSIC BLOG CONTACT		Lit Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War by Penny M. Von Eschen Harvard University Press ISBN 0-674-01501-0 (Originally published in the Wire) The exportation of American culture abroad is often seen as a process propelled by purely commercial motives; Britney Spears offers little in the way of morality, but there is plenty of money to be made. But from 1956 through the late 1970s the United States government blanketed the far corners of the world with jazz, not in the service of the dollar, but in order to win the hearts and minds of the wrongly committed. Playful, disciplined and free-spirited, jazz was (and is still) one of the nation's finest products-it made sense to peddle stately, patriotic old sages like Ellington, Gillespie and Brubeck in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Sly, evasive, falsely obedient and freer than a liberal democracy could ever promise to be, jazz was also a product deeply ambivalent about touting the methods and means of its own production. Penny Von Eschen's fine study of "jam-bassadors" and the marooned hipsters who loved them pursues this tension down to its queerest details: Brubeck is told that he must be smuggled across the Brandenburg Gate in the trunk of a car; Gillespie and Ellington each gig mere miles away from armed insurrection; a fresh, excited Manthia Diawara and an old, suspicious Frantz Fanon stand at the margin of the picture, humming along. The broader picture isn't quite as vivid. As Von Eschen explains, jazz diplomacy began as part of the State Department's kitchen-sink approach to the problem of culture. It was an unrefined solution, managed and pushed forward by a knowing sliver of officials, critics and businessmen who "got" jazz. The image of jazz-as-democratic polyphony that they sold to the State Department was admirably nuanced, if a bit rosy, but it made for great hopes among both the musicians and the government officials. One returns to the snail's-eye-view, though, for reminders as to why jazz musicians may not have been the most desirable ambassadors. Personal vices aside-it would seem that every big band had at least one spirit governed by everyday (rather than democratic) thirsts-jazz musicians were not a wholly satisfied bunch. As the historian Thomas Borstelman has shown, the issue of race nagged at the promotion of American values abroad. The dispatching of African American and liberal white musicians abroad was a recipe for disillusionment, as many were forced to confront the fact that they were representing a way of life that had only recently insured voting rights for the nation's darker hues. This is the darker echo of Von Eschen's story, that of clumsily manipulated, profoundly misunderstood pawns representing a spate of confusing, ever-shifting policies. Once the administration decided that military interventionism was preferable to liberal internationalism, there was no longer a need to rely on jazz and its sticky, obtuse meanings. A question nags: What work did this jazz do? Were jazz fans abroad hip the furtive, democratic coding of jazz, or did they simply dig the exotic swing? At the level of the masses, the touring bands seemed to represent little more than spectacle. For those who managed to get up close and personal with the greats-not as difficult as it sounds, since most musicians fought to hold informal jam sessions with local musicians-the State Department tours were more effective as cultural, rather than political, exchanges. Ditto those who went on the tours. Ellington recorded some of his most interesting music under the sway of foreign rhythms, though nothing ever shook his political convictions as a patriotic Republican. The tours may have complicated everyone's notion of culture, but it could not wrestle ideology from those at the top. Von Eschen ends with a passing observation that offers insight into jazz's effects. It is of a man who grew up alongside the Cold War and civil rights; a man who played the saxophone but respected the craft enough to know that he would forever remain a novice. He is probably the most famous, if not influential, jazz fan of the past fifty years. Of course, it is Bill Clinton. Like the unshaped masses of Von Eschen's study, it is difficult to tell how much Clinton, Toni Morrison's "black President," got out of jazz. Like the unshaped masses of Von Eschen's study, jazz awarded Clinton a deeper, more profound respect of American culture and all its complexities, but never the grand ambition to recompose America in the image of a true and disciplined freedom.