Jam SessionHS.fi (Helsingin Sanomat)Helsinki, FinlandJuly 12, 2008

Jam SessionHS.fi (Helsingin Sanomat)Helsinki, FinlandJuly 12, 2008Page 2

Jam SessionHS.fi (Helsingin Sanomat)Helsinki, FinlandJuly 12, 2008Page 3

Abridged Translation

Jazz was America’s weapon in Cold War diplomacy

Helsingin Sanomat July 12, 2008By: Markku SaksaTranslated by Helen Gästrin

An exhibit consisting of a hundred rare photographs of the jazz diplomacy used by the US during the Cold War, Jam Session, will tour the US.

During the 20 years the US sent hundreds of American jazz musician to Africa, the Middle-East, Eastern European countries, the Soviet Union, Asia and Latin America.

The exhibit is based on the rare pictures by both professional and non-professional photographers. Pictures of Dizzy Gillespie enchanting a cobra in Pakistan, Louis Armstrong and his All Stars band playing to half a million people in soon-to-be-independent Ghana and Benny Goodman on the Red Square.

The idea of jazz diplomacy came in 1955 from Congressman Adam Clayton Powell from Harlem, New York.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration promoted jazz to challenge the international excitement raised, especially among cultural circles, by the Soviet ballet and symphony orchestra.

Jazz players got some general guidelines from government officials, but they were at liberty to speak as they wished. Their candor and sincerity actually worked in their sponsors’ favor, as Exhibit Curator Curtis Sandberg points out.

When base player Charles Mingus, who grew up in the ghettos of Los Angeles, spoke out against the American establishment in Portugal, his audience was impressed by a country that lets its citizens criticize their own government so freely. The Portuguese could not even dream of it under the dictatorship of Antonio Salazar.