Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. By Penny M. Von Eschen. pp. x + 329. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004, £19.95. ISBN 0-674-01501-0.)

Abstract

Although jazz had been celebrated, enjoyed, and appreciated across the globe for decades as one of the most important and influential cultural exports to have emerged from the United States, it was as late as 1987 that the US Congress openly declared the music to be a national treasure. The formal Resolution on that occasion stated in flamboyant terms that jazz had brought ‘to this country and the world a uniquely American musical synthesis and culture through the African-American experience’, that it is ‘an outstanding artistic model of individual expression and democratic cooperation within the creative process’, a ‘unifying force’ bridging numerous social gaps, ‘a true music of the people’ with ‘a historic, pervasive, and continuing influence on other genres of music’, and ‘a true international language adopted by musicians around the world as a music best able to express contemporary realities from a personal perspective’. The point of this public encomium was the singular fact that, even in the late 1980s, its country of origin lamented that a ‘great American musical art form has not yet been properly recognized nor accorded the institutional status commensurate with its value and importance’. (The full text of House Congressional Resolution 57 is reproduced in Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz (Chicago and London, 1994), App. A, p. 759, and Robert Walser (ed.), Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York and Oxford, 1999), 332–3.) Incredible as it may seem, the debate in the House of Representatives had been tarnished by the negative views of certain members opposed to the motion.