Broadcasting Jazz into the Eastern Bloc—Cold War Weapon or Cultural Exchange? The Example of Willis Conover

Abstract

For jazz lovers worldwide, and particularly for listeners in Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War, Willis Conover's Voice of America show, Music USA (“The Jazz Hour” segment) provided the main source of knowledge for this music, and it was largely through the filter of his broadcast that each of the tens of millions of listeners crafted his or her understanding of “America.” Conover's popularity in Cold War-era Eastern Europe would be hard to overstate.Mainstream assessments of jazz posited—and continue to posit—equivalence between “jazz” and the “American way of life;” during the Warsaw Pact era, jazz functioned as a kind of “window to the West.” From such a viewpoint, Conover's wild popularity seems to anoint him as a victorious Cold War warrior for the West, but such equivalences and their conclusions are misleading, even mythical. Rather, the reception of Conover's radio program can be seen as part of a general mobilization of a whole generation. “The Jazz Hour” both reflected and added impetus to a modernization process in the Eastern Bloc—a process which began with the advent of the Cold War and continued over several decades. However, this modernization was both responsive to, and at the same time independent of, jazz's associations with the United States.With the beginning of Conover's jazz broadcast, both US-dominated NATO and Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact factions used jazz for their own purposes. The US administration and Conover himself regarded his penetration into Soviet Bloc radio as an important victory in the Cold War over their ideological enemy. But, as jazz gained a foothold in Soviet countries, both Conover's Music USA and the state-affiliated radio stations began to broadcast local or regional versions of jazz (labelled “own” jazz). The State socialist governments could thus claim victories of their own, now that listeners of their countries could turn to state radio stations for jazz, as opposed to American ones. The US administration intended to use jazz's popularity to weaken the loyalty of Eastern Bloc inhabitants to their governments, while the Soviet regime sought to establish a local, “own” jazz sensibility as a way of undermining the United States' strategy.Both strategies failed. Eastern Bloc inhabitants did not rise against their regimes, but implemented jazz within their own cultures. Eastern Bloc rulers managed a degree of control over the dissemination of jazz, but they failed also, because they could not stop the spread of an American orientation in jazz, despite of the strategy to promote their “own” jazz.Conover was an instrument for both sides. For the US government, he advertised US music and US values; for Eastern Bloc regimes, his broadcasts' inclusion of Eastern Bloc jazzmen promoted local and regional pride in the emerging “own” jazz styles played within the Eastern Bloc, and now transmitted internationally. If Conover really helped to destabilize anything, then he destabilized both systems, creating a worldwide listening community which proceeded to act beyond bloc boundaries.