Jazz Autobiography and the Cold War

Abstract

This article explores several key autobiographies by jazz musicians and the ways in which they represent the use of jazz by the United States on the cultural front of the Cold War. It examines varying approaches to writing about the involvement of the autobiographical subject with the cultural diplomacy (or cultural containment) policies of the United States and investigates the historical effort made by the United States to feature jazz as an important element of its cultural propaganda mission. Moreover, it assesses how this effort relates to jazz autobiography, for which it helped to create a market by being one of the forces driving (and being driven by) the memorialization and institutionalization of jazz. The musician-autobiographers were keenly aware of the positions in which they were placed by participating in the US State Department's tours. Autobiographies by Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Teddy Wilson, George Wein, and Hampton Hawes reveal a strategy of tempering the reservations and cynicism about the state's endorsement of jazz by choosing to center on personal-scale interaction, in which opportunities for taking responsibility for another person are found. That is to say, one theme running through major jazz autobiographies regarding how to handle the ethical and political considerations created by the use of jazz in the cultural diplomacy of the United States has been to ground personal participation in an impersonal global strategy within personal exchange, by deflecting political ambivalence and questions of political commodification of art by focusing on gestures of friendship and civility within the situations created by the state's global strategy.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Paul Devlin

Paul Devlin earned his doctorate in English from Stony Brook University in December 2014 and teaches at St. John's University in New York. He is the editor of Rifftide: The Life and Opinions of Papa Jo Jones (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and is currently editing a volume of Albert Murray's unpublished and uncollected essays and interviews on music, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.