Duke Ellington As Cold War Jazz Emissary Is Topic Of Talk At Ithaca College

Dave Maley, 3/30/2009

ITHACA, NY — “Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad:  Rethinking Power After 1945” is the title of a talk being given at Ithaca College on Thursday, April 16. The presentation by Penny M. Von Eschen is scheduled for 7 p.m. in room 111 of the Park Center for Business and Sustainable Enterprise. It is free and open to the public.

During the 1960s and ’70s, the U.S. State Department sent hundreds of jazz musicians on tours of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Asia and Latin America. Renowned composer, pianist and bandleader Duke Ellington toured for the State Department more than any other artist. Beginning with a three-month swing through the Middle East and Asia in 1963 and ending with performances in Eastern Europe, Ethiopia and Zambia a decade later, Ellington and his band improvised with musicians from different musical traditions, promoted civil rights and experienced the flashpoints of  U.S. Cold War diplomacy.

Von Eschen’s talk will use Ellington’s November 1963 Baghdad concerts — which took place amidst a coup attempt — as a jumping off point for a discussion of U.S. government diplomacy efforts since the end of World War II.

A professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan, Von Eschen is the author of “Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War” and “Race Against Empire:  Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957.”  She has been awarded the Stuart L. Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations as well as the 2008 Dave Brubeck Institute Award for Distinguished Achievement.

The talk is part of the Marjorie Fortunoff Mayrock Lecture Series in History, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary. The series is funded by Elliot Mayrock ’73 in memory of his mother. For more information, contact Vivian Bruce Conger, associate professor of history, at vconger@ithaca.edu.