HALF a century ago, when America was having problems with its image during the cold war, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the United States representative from Harlem, had an idea. Stop sending symphony orchestras and ballet companies on international tours, he told the State Department. Let the world experience what he called “real Americana”: send out jazz bands instead.

A photography exhibition of those concert tours, titled “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” is on display at the Meridian International Center in Washington through July 13 and then moves to the Community Council for the Arts in Kinston, N.C. There are nearly 100 photos in the show, many excavated from obscure files in dozens of libraries, then digitally retouched and enlarged by James Hershorn, an archivist at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. There’s Dizzy Gillespie in 1956, charming a snake with his trumpet in Karachi, Pakistan. Louis Armstrong in ’61, surrounded by laughing children outside a hospital in Cairo. Benny Goodman in ’62, blowing his clarinet in Red Square. Duke Ellington in ’63, smoking a hookah at Ctesiphon in Iraq.

[...]

Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”

[...] WILLIS CONOVER (1921–1996), best known as the jazz commentator for Voice of America, published Science Fantasy Correspondent when he was fifteen.

Willis Conover (October 18, 1920 – May 17, 1996) was a jazz producer and broadcaster on the Voice of America for over forty years. He produced jazz concerts at the White House, the Newport Jazz Festival, and for movies and television. He created musical events where people of all races were welcome, thereby helping to break down the color barrier in the United States. Conover is credited with keeping interest in jazz alive in the countries of eastern Europe through his nightly broadcasts during the cold war, when jazz was banned by most of the communist governments. Conover was not well known in the United States, even among jazz aficionados, but his visits to eastern Europe and Russia brought huge crowds and star treatment for him.

Conover was a legend amongst jazz lovers primarily due to the hour-long program on the Voice of America called Voice of America Music USA. Known for his sonorous and baritone voice, many would argue that he was the most important presenter on Voice of America.

On a trip to Moscow a taxi driver recognized him by his distinctive deep-toned voice. He was a celebrity figure in the old Soviet Union, where jazz was very popular and the Voice of America was a prime source of information as well as music.

Many of the world’s best jazz musicians credit Conover with helping them learn more about jazz. This biography details his professional accomplishments in the world of jazz, including the profound impact he had on the Soviet Union and Eastern European Communist nations.

[...] A cartoon in a 1958 issue of The New Yorker showed some officials sitting around a table in Washington, one of them saying: “This is a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy. The question is, who’s the best man for it — John Foster Dulles or Satchmo?”

Powell arranged for Gillespie, his close friend, to make the State Department’s first goodwill jazz tour, starting out in March 1956 with an 18-piece band and traveling all over southern Europe, the Middle East and south Asia.

The band’s first stop was Athens, where students had recently stoned the local headquarters of the United States Information Service in protest of Washington’s support for Greece’s right-wing dictatorship. Yet many of those same students greeted Gillespie with cheers, lifting him on their shoulders, throwing their jackets in the air and shouting: “Dizzy! Dizzy!”

When Armstrong arrived in the Congo as part of a 1960 tour through Africa, drummers and dancers paraded him through the streets on a throne, a scene captured by a photograph in the exhibition. As late as 1971, when Ellington came to Moscow, an American diplomat wrote in his official report that crowds greeted the Duke as something akin to “a Second Coming.” One young Russian yelled, “We’ve been waiting for you for centuries!”

The stars were happy to play their parts in this pageant for hearts and minds, but not as puppets. After his Middle East tour Gillespie said with pride that it had been “powerfully effective against Red propaganda.” But when the State Department tried to brief him beforehand on how to answer questions about American race relations, he said: “I’ve got 300 years of briefing. I know what they’ve done to us, and I’m not going to make any excuses.”

Armstrong canceled a 1957 trip to Moscow after President Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to send federal troops to Little Rock, Ark., to enforce school-integration laws. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “It’s getting so bad, a colored man hasn’t got any country.”

Administration officials feared that this broadside, especially from someone so genial as “Ambassador Satchmo,” would trigger a diplomatic disaster. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told Attorney General Herbert Brownell that the situation in Arkansas was “ruining our foreign policy.” Two weeks later, facing pressure from many quarters, Eisenhower sent the National Guard to Arkansas. Armstrong praised the move and agreed to go on a concert tour of South America.

The jazzmen’s independence made some officials nervous. But the shrewder diplomats knew that on balance it helped the cause. The idea was to demonstrate the superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union, freedom over Communism, and here was evidence that an American — even a black man — could criticize his government and not be punished.

The photographs in the exhibition evoke this time when American culture and politics were so finely joined. Curtis Sandberg, the curator at Meridian International, said that during the three years it took to prepare the show his staff would frequently gaze at the photos and say, “Why aren’t we doing something like this now?”

[...] And yet the State Department has a program in jazz diplomacy now. It’s called Rhythm Road, it’s run by Jazz at Lincoln Center (a three-year contract has just been renewed), and it sends 10 bands (mainly jazz, some hip-hop, all of which audition for the gig) to 56 countries in a year.

It’s scaled more modestly than the program of yore. For one thing, no jazz musicians — for that matter, few pop stars — are as famous as a Gillespie, Armstrong or Brubeck in his prime, and the jazz musicians in Rhythm Road are not well known even by today’s standards. The program’s goals are more modest too. There is no pretense of competing for geo-cultural primacy. But that is what gives this program its cogent post-cold-war spin.

The State Department doesn’t tell the musicians what to do, but some of them, either jointly or on their own, have decided to emphasize not their music’s peculiarly American quality but rather its resonance with the countries they’re visiting.

When the saxophonist Chris Byars took a band to Saudi Arabia this year, he played the music of Gigi Gryce, a jazz composer of the 1940s and ‘50s who converted to Islam and changed his name to Basheer Qusim. “When I announce that I’m going to play compositions by the American jazz musician Basheer Qusim, that gets their attention,” he said. “Afterward several people came up, very appreciative, saying very intensely, ‘Thank you for coming to our country.’ ”

Before the bass player Ari Roland went to Turkmenistan last year, he learned some Turkmen folk songs. His band played jazz improvisations of these songs with local musicians — the first time such mixing had been allowed — and a 15-minute news report about the concert ran on state television several times the next day.

“They saw Americans paying homage to their cultural traditions,” he said. “Several people at the concert came up and said, in effect, ‘Wow, you’re not all imperialists out to remake the world in your image.’ ”

1910: A TEENAGED TIME TRAVELER

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) was an enthusiastic letter-writer all throughout his life, sometimes writing to several people a day. Among his regular pen pals during the last year of his life was Willis Clark Conover Jr. (1920-1996) who was then a 15- year-old boy living in Cambridge, Maryland.

While writing his book Lovecraft At Last, decades after HPL's death, Conover stated, "There is a paradox I can't resolve. When our correspondence began, H.P. Lovecraft was forty-five. Today I am older than he ever was, yet he is forever the older man. He was three times my age when I knew him. I still know him, and he doesn't change."

"Little is left of the world I knew in 1936 and 1937. World War II has come and gone. Television, jets we take for granted. Men have walked on the moon. Men's and women's clothes have become interchangeable."

"Today I'm happily married. I live in Manhattan, and I love it. I commute about fifty thousand miles per year, and I no longer exist for the newest issues of Astounding Stories and Weird Tales; the magazines themselves, as such, are gone (This was the case in 1975, when Conover's book was written. Weird Tales, "the unique magazine," was revived in the 1990s--J.T.) Everything is different."

"I don't even recognize the teenage boy I was when I wrote to Lovecraft."

"HPL lives and speaks in his letters. I am newly affected--and as much as ever--when I read them again now, from the beginning of our correspondence to its inescapable end."

"I don't recognize the boy any more. I do recognize the way he felt about H.P. Lovecraft because I feel the same way today."

"It was the boy who disappeared, not HPL."

Conover had a dream. He wanted to create a non- profit "fan magazine" (now called fanzine) devoted to the science fiction of the period.

"My father was an Army officer," Conover recalled,

"He expected me to become one, too. In due time I was to attend The Citadel--the Military College of South Carolina. But I had lived on enough Army posts and seen enough regimentation to know it wasn't for me."

"Early in life, therefore, I retreated into myself. I dreamed day and night. I sketched with pencil or pen and ink, listened to music, went to movies, read books and magazines."

"I could read almost as soon as I could talk...As a child I lived in Oz, Barsoom and Pellucidar. Beginning in the 1930s, when I found Amazing Stories and Weird Tales at newstands, I travelled to the moon, to Mars and Venus, to the past and the future, to the fourth dimension, and into crypts and castles and haunted houses."

"One day I received a letter from a science fiction fan in a Midwestern state. He had read one of my letters in a magazine, and he wanted to correspond. Soon I was exchanging letters with a half a dozen youngsters I'd never met. The sweetest music I heard was the morning clank of the gate in front of our house in Cambridge, Maryland, when the postman arrived and I prepared for new conversations with my unseen friends."

"The teenager's impulse to form a club or join a movement proved irresistible."

So was born the Science-Fantasy Correspondent, with Willis as the editor and "a boy in New Jersey as the publisher." He wrote to Weird Tales, got HPL's address in Providence, R.I. and contacted him directly. Not only did HPL agree to an interview, he supplied Willis with out-of- print poems and short stories and put him in touch with other sci-fi [note from Gary: this is a complete anachronism, as "sci-fi" wasn't coined until 1949, and wasn't used at all by anyone else until Forry Ackerman started using it in 1954, and certainly wasn't used by anyone else in the field until the 1980s and later, other than mockingly] and fantasy writers of "the Lovecraft Circle."
[...]

In November 1936, Willis wrote, "A few feet above the sidewalk across the street from my own house, there was a warp in space--the focal point of where the four ends of space meet. It resembled the navel of a seedless orange, but it was almost perfectly transparent: I could barely see it. On the sidewalk, my younger brother was walking-- backwards--toward the space-warp. I realized it was a passage into another dimension or another time. In a moment my brother would fall right through it. He would disappear into another dimension. And I would follow him."

"My mother ran out of our house and into the street, to stop my brother. 'What is he doing?' she yelled. I explained that we were going into a different time- dimension--adding that we had often taken long trips in space-time, through another passageway hidden in our attic."

"Now I had gone--without my brother--through the space-warp above the sidewalk, and I was walking down High Street" in Cambridge, Maryland "in the early 1900s. I came to some sort of small restaurant or grille out over the (Choptank River's) edge on stilts or pilings, the entrance level with the street and touching it but some ten or fifteen feet above the water."

Willis shared this dream with HPL, who wanted to hear it all. So Willis followed up with more:

Approaching the shoreside restaurant, Willis wrote, "I asked the white-jacketed cook if he could tell me where I might find 'young Lovecraft.' He said Lovecraft was out on the river in his leaky rowboat, and pointed. Sure enough, there was the H.P. Lovecraft of about 1910, rowing toward a ladder hanging from the side of the restaurant down to the water's surface. The cook told me to stick around for a moment, he'd soon have the young fellow here."

Climbing the ladder, the 20-year-old, dark-haired, brown-eyed HPL encountered the strangely-dressed boy of 15. A boy with oddly-shaped glasses, dark hair parted on the left, a blunt nose and bright, intelligent eyes.

Willis wrote, "Young Lovecraft, a somewhat frail lad of nineteen or twenty (a pretty accurate description of HPL at that age, considering that Willis never met Lovecraft--J.T.), walked up High Street with me. We chatted quite pleasantly, despite a certain reserve on his part. He seemed astonished when I told him I had come from the future to see him, that I knew the H.P. Lovecraft of nearly thirty years ahead..."

At that, Willis woke up, only to find himself lying in his own bedroom in 1936.

What to make of such a strange dream? he wondered. And what about the alien "space-warp" floating above the sidewalk? Where had the inspiration for that come from?

(Editor's Note: Bopping around in hyperspace was the forte of Salem witch Keziah Mason and her alien sidekick, Brown Jenkin, in HPL's short story The Dreams in the Witch House, published in Weird Tales in 1932.)

Intrigued by the boy's letter, Lovecraft wrote back: "Your recent dreams surely seem up to the usual standard-- that one about the hidden room and the not wholly alive sleeper being a winner! You ought to make a story of that!"

Then came HPL's astounding revelation: "I feel greatly complimented by my inclusion in the time-juggling dream, and am glad of the data on my 1910 whereabouts. I was very ill (with a bad case of the prosaic malady measles-- HPL) early in 1910, and have only a hazy recollection of things for some time during that year. Now I know where I was! Undoubtedly I had gone down to the Eastern Shore (of Maryland--J.T.) to recuperate...With this memory-jogging I distinctly recall that prepossessing visitor from the future--although I'll admit I didn't believe that time- travelling stuff. I thought you were just spoofing. Indeed, I never thought I'd be alive as far into the fabulous future as 1936."

"Pray accept my belated apologies for the skepticism of 1910! Incidentally, I used to do a little rowing here (on Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island--J.T.) as well as in Maryland."

Apparently, HPL's mother, Sarah Susan Phillips Lovecraft, brought her ailing son to her brother Elliott Phillips' house in Maryland, to get away from New England's cold weather.

[...]

Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937 at the age of 46. Willis Conover grew up and attended the State Teacher's College at Salisbury, Md and became a radio announcer for WTBO in Cumberland, Md. He gradually found his way back into music and had a long career promoting jazz on the U.S. Information Agency's Voice of America program, supporting and organizing jazz concerts and events. He wrote the book about his friendship with HPL in 1975. Retiring from VOA in 1993, he passed away three years later.

His "Lovecraft dream" remains unexplained. (See the book Lovecraft At Last by H.P. Lovecraft and Willis Conover, Cooper Square Press, New York, N.Y., 2002, pages 130 to 136, 274 and 275.)