The Real Ambassadors - Penny M. von Eschen

© Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

At present, the best overview of 'The Real Ambassadors is found in Penny M. Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 79-91. Much of this material also appeared in Penny M. Von Eschen, "The Real Ambassadors," in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, ed Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 189-103.

- Stephen A. Crist, Dave Brubeck’s Time Out [Oxford Studies in Recorded Jazz], footnote 69, chapter 10.

lola Brubeck, liner notes to The Real Ambassadors, Columbia LP (1962). The Real Ambassadors, book by lola Brubeck, music by Dave Brubeck, lyrics by lola and Dave Brubeck, premiered on September 23, 1962, at the Monterey Jazz Festival in Monterey, California, with the following cast: Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Carmen McRae, lola Brubeck. Trummy Young. Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, Yolande Bavan, Joe Morello, Eugene Wright, Joe Darensburg, Billy Kyle, Willy Kronk, and Danny Barcelona. Howard Brubeck was the Musical Coordinator. A folio of fifteen songs and related narration from The Real Ambassadors was printed in 1963 and published by Hansen Publications. That folio is no longer available. Twenty songs from The Real Ambassadors were recorded in September and December 1961 by Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Carmen McRae, Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, Annie Ross, and additional musicians, most of whom later pertonned at the 1962 premiere. Fifteen of those recorded songs were released by Columbia Records in 1962 on an LP entitled The Real Ambassadors (COL CL 5850). That LP is no longer available. In 1994 all twenty recorded songs were released by Sony Music Entertainment on the Columbia/Legacy label on a CD entitled The Real Ambassadors (CK 57663)

- Penny M. von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War [Harvard University Press, 2004], footnote 77, chapter 3

One of the many what-might-have-been moments from Jazz history that has always fascinated me was what it might have been like to see the pairing of Louis Armstrong and Dave Brubeck in the latter’s The Real Ambassadors staged as a Broadway musical.

Regrettably, Dave’s music and Iola Brubeck’s librettos and lyrics for what Pops’ claimed at the time to be “an opera that the Brubecks wrote for me” was performed by the original cast which included the Armstrong Sextet, the Brubeck Quartet, vocalist Carmen McRae and the vocal group of Lambert Hendricks and Bavan only once at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival.

Since both Pops and Dave were managed by the powerful and influential Joe Glaser of the Associated Booking Company, the Brubecks had hoped that he would use his clout and resources to bring The Real Ambassadors to the Broadway stage as a continuously running musical.

Instead, Glaser took a very dim view of this idea mainly because he thought that the fees from concert and club appearances by Armstrong and Brubeck would far exceed anything generated by a Jazz-themed Broadway play with political and diplomatic overtones. To add insult to injury, Glaser even barred TV crews from filming it!

But given my fascination with the obvious reverence and respect that the Brubeck’s had for Pops in bringing off The Real Ambassadors in the first place, including getting Columbia to record the full soundtrack in 1961, a year before it was performed, and issue the music as in LP in conjunction with the performance at the 1962 MJF, I am always on the lookout for more information on the subject.

Which brings me to this section on The Real Ambassadors contained in Penny M. von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War [Harvard University Press, 2004]. At the time of its publication, Dr. von Eschen was a Professor of History and American Culture at the University of Michigan.

The Real Ambassador

“A half-decade after the beginning of the jazz tours, the jury was still out as to their achievements and effects. In the words of the writer and lyricist tola Brubeck, "The entire jazz community was elated with the official recognition of jazz and its international implications." Yet jazz artists who had participated in the tours had experienced first hand the uneasy juxtaposition of the arts and less than transparent foreign-policy agendas. And as members of integrated bands, they were uniquely steeped in the ironies of the export of jazz ambassadors at a time when America was still a Jim Crow nation and civil rights activists were faced with violent resistance and the inaction of the federal government. 

Following their own tour through Eastern Europe and the Middle East in 1958, Dave and lola Brubeck addressed these ironies in the satirical musical The Real Ambassadors, a 1961-1962 collaboration between the Brubecks and Louis Armstrong. The bands of both leaders came together for the production, and many of the musicians — including drummer Joe Morello, trombonist and vocalist Trurnmy Young, and pianist Billy Kyle — had been on the State Department tours. A jazz musical revue performed to critical acclaim at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September 1962 — with Brubeck and Armstrong, joined by vocalists Carmen McRae and Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Yolande Bavan — The Real Ambassadors satirized State Department objectives, personnel, and protocol, and voiced a powerful and unequivocal indictment of Jim Crow America."

The Real Ambassadors received much praise in the music world for its swinging juxtaposition of disparate musical styles. As Leonard Feather described it: "Often witty, sometimes poignant words fare] eloquently matched with melodies that are simple, totally suited to the artists, and generally of unusual melodic charm." But it was also an important work of cultural and social criticism and a provocative political intervention, lauded by critics for its powerful "social message" that avoided propaganda and pretension." The Real Ambassadors brilliantly captured the often complex (and contradictory) politics of the State Department tours at the intersections of the Cold War, African and Asian nation building, and the U.S. civil rights struggle. On the one hand, the Brubecks saw many of the State Department personnel with whom they had worked as their allies in the promotion of the arts. For these government cultural workers, like the musicians, the State Department tours offered a unique opportunity to follow in the best traditions of countries (such as France) that made culture, and not simply defense, a fundamental part of their foreign relations. In satirizing the tours, lola Brubeck guessed that "we were saying things a lot of the cultural personnel would probably have liked to say themselves."

On the other hand, as in Gillespie's tour of the Middle East, not all U.S. foreign-service personnel were as enlightened as those encountered by the Brubecks. Despite the overarching State Department strategy of supporting civil rights, individual officials abroad often mirrored the racial views of President Eisenhower and his segregationist allies, who were profoundly uncomfortable with the presence of African Americans. Thus, honoring the perspectives of the musicians, the Brubecks allude to the ways in which the tours, like world events, could sometimes spin out of the control of the State Department.

Set in a mythical African country named Talgalla, The Real Ambassadors opens with the narrator explaining how the hero, modeled on and played by Armstrong, had "spoken to millions of the world's people" with his horn. He and other musicians had "inadvertently served a national purpose, which officials recognized and eventually sanctioned with a program called cultural exchange." We are reminded that the tours were fundamentally a product of Cold War foreign policy. The foreign policy of the tours, as well as the ironic background of racial unrest in the United States, is captured in the song "Cultural Exchange" (lyrics by tola Brubeck):

Yeah! I remember when Diz was in Greece back in '56.

He did such a good job, we started sending jazz all over the world.

The State Department has discovered jazz. It reaches folks like nothing ever has. Like when they feel that jazzy rhythm, They know we're really with 'em; That's what they call cultural exchange.

No commodity is quite so strange

As this thing called cultural exchange.

Say that our prestige needs a tonic,

Export the Philharmonic,

That's what we call cultural exchange!

. . . And when our neighbors call us vermin,

We sent out Woody Herman,

Note the telling observation that "no commodity is quite so strange / as this thing called cultural exchange." Indeed, in the tours by Armstrong and the Brubecks, cultural exchange was a commodity that closely paralleled the quintessential Cold War commodities, oil and uranium. An appreciation of the musicians' critique of State Department notions of cultural exchange must begin with the fact that both artists had participated in the tours. They had deliberately been sent into the front lines of major foreign-policy crises.

lola Brubeck's lyrics indicate that the scope of these programs involved many realms of the performing arts, yet emphasize that jazz was the pet project of the State Department. That U.S. officials could claim jazz as a uniquely American art form gave it more diplomatic cachet than classical music, theater, or ballet. And the inferiority complex of government officials and supporters of the arts toward the classical music and ballet of Europeans and the Soviet Union could be used as an argument to fund the arts, and thus could be turned to the advantage of the American arts.

In The Real Ambassadors the Brubecks addressed the glaring contradiction in a U.S. strategy that promoted black musicians as symbols of the triumph of American democracy when America was still a Jim Crow nation. Brubeck was concerned that Armstrong's contribution to the civil rights cause was being largely overlooked even though official attempts to showcase Armstrong as a symbol of racial progress had imploded when Armstrong denounced President Eisenhower during the desegregation crisis in Little Rock in 1957. Despite Armstrong's outspokenness, as the struggle for equality accelerated he was widely criticized by civil rights activists as an Uncle Tom, and compared unfavorably with a younger, more militant group of jazz musicians. 

Written as a tribute to Armstrong, The Real Ambassadors recovered his submerged militancy and paid homage to him as a political actor. It also expressed Brubeck's own commitment to desegregation. Throughout the 1950s, Brubeck had refused to play before segregated audiences in the South or to accede to segregationist demands that he replace his African American bassist, Eugene Wright."*

The musical opens with a suggestion of the militancy concealed behind Armstrong's mask, countering the perception that Armstrong hewed to whites' stereotypes of black cheerfulness and docility. The narrators claim that the hero possesses the "ability to keep his opinions to himself," is challenged when a voice (Armstrong) declares, "Lady, if you could read my mind, your head would bust wide open." Moreover, the audience learns precisely what was on the hero's mind: "Look here, what we need is a goodwill tour of Mississippi." And in a sharp reminder of Armstrong's denunciation of Eisenhower: "Forget Moscow — when do we play in New Orleans!"

Nevertheless, the hero is persuaded to begin yet another tour. "The morning of their departure, members of the President's Committee . . . for Cultural Exchange appeared to give the musicians a last minute 'briefing.'. . . When you travel in a far-off-land / Remember, you're more than just a band. / You represent the USA / So watch what you think and do and say." Here, as well as in the song "Remember Who You Are," the Brubecks evoked and evaluated the briefing they received before embarking on their tours:

[Armstrong]: Remember who you are and what you represent.

Always be a credit to your government.

No matter what you say or what you do,

The eyes of the world are watching you.

Remember who you are and what you represent. . . . 

[Trummy Young]: Remember who you are and what you represent.

Never face a problem, always circumvent.

Stay away from issues.

Be discreet — when controversy enters, you retreat.

As we have seen with Quincy Jones's scathing indictment of the Gillespie Band's briefing, musicians were often quite taken aback by the directives they received. But if Gillespie was able to dodge his, briefings were an inescapable part of the tour, providing, in the words of Brubeck, "a long list of how we should act." With briefings so focused on the prevention of potentially embarrassing behavior, the Brubeck Quartet had had no warning about the turbulent politics they encountered. Moreover, like the Gillespie band, the musicians sometimes encountered unsympathetic cultural personnel, and in those circumstances they could be overwhelmed by the politics of the tours. Expressing a frustration with the emphasis on elite audiences, trumpeter Clark Terry, who toured India and Pakistan in 1978, explained that they "coined a phrase to describe the official receptions musicians were expected to attend: 'time for us to go to the grinner.'" Terry added that "our escort officer was very uptight, very strict about time, appearance, and behavior. . . . 'If these guys blow it, it's my neck.”

Indeed, the last stanza of "Remember Who You Are" alludes to the musicians' allegiance to something other than the American government —

namely, jazz and the history that gave birth to the music. Armstrong sings:

Remember who you are and what you represent. 

Jelly Roll and Basie helped us to invent 

A weapon like no other nation has; 

Especially the Russians can't claim jazz. . . .

Here, the artist's burden of representation is to remember Jelly Roll and Basie and to represent jazz, even as the lyrics celebrate the gift of that music to America and proclaim pride in the music's status as a unique Cold War weapon.

As the tour, free of political drama (no wars, no political assassinations), comes to a close in The Real Ambassadors, the hero's story has just begun. In his travels throughout Africa, the hero had heard stories of Talgalla, "the newest of new African nations." Talgalla's portrayal in the musical satirizes the political motives for the African tours. "It had been unknown and unrecognized as a nation until the two great superpowers simultaneously discovered its existence. Suddenly Talgalla was a nation to be reckoned with." The Russians had built roads; "U.S. equipment had cleared the airfield."

On the one hand, Talgalla is imagined as a product of super-power rivalries. Its mythic status as a repository of "tradition" and Utopian dreams displaces actual African politics, just as the revue's subplot, a love story, displaces the story of U.S. interests in Africa and other formerly colonized areas (Armstrong's actual trip through Africa as well as Brubeck's actual trip through the Middle East). Yet Talgalla is also a place where a new social order can be ushered in — a symbol of democratic and Utopian aspirations. The hero has been drawn to Talgalla by tales of an annual ceremony in which the social order in this "tiny tribal monarchy" is "turned upside down" for a week. Thus, as they approach Talgalla, the hero dreams of being "King for a Day.

Despite the hero's superficial aspiration to be king, the song "King for a Day" unfolds as a satire on authority and a critique of political (civil rights) gradualism; the hero affirms a revolution in social relations against a voice that tells him, "You're expecting too much too soon." The opening passage illuminates the inspiration for the collaboration between the Brubecks and Armstrong and the fact that the Brubecks wrote the revue specifically for Armstrong. Constantly rewriting the libretto over a period of nearly five years to keep it topical, and writing with Armstrong in mind, the Brubecks incorporated Armstrong's playful statements before embarking on his six-month African tour in 1960. Armstrong was quoted in Down Beat commenting on the chance that the trip might extend behind the Iron Curtain: "Yeah, I'd like to slip under the Curtain. Let all them foreign ministers have their summit conferences—Satch just might get somewhere with them cats in a basement session.”

[Armstrong]: Man! If they would just let me run things my way, this

world would be a swingin' place! 

[Trummy Young]: Yeah, Pops! What would you do? 

[Armstrong: The first thing I'd do is call a basement session. 

[Trummy Young]: Uh, Pops, you mean summit conference. 

[Armstrong]: Man, I don't mean a UN kind of session. I mean a

jam session.

Presenting jazz as a model for democracy, the lyrics move deftly between civil rights themes and international relations:

[Armstrong]: I'd go and form a swinging band

With all the leaders from every land. 

[Young]: Can't you hear that messed up beat?

I'll tell you now you'll meet defeat. 

[Armstrong]: Why they will fall right in a swinging groove

And all the isms gonna move.

Relationships is bound to improve.

As the debate between the hero and the skeptic continues, it alludes to symbols of monarchy and authority. In the playful discussion of the oppositional black politics of self-naming, lola Brubeck is referencing bassist Eugene Wright's sobriquet "Senator," a nickname that stuck from the time of their 1958 tour, as well as riffing on an Armstrong interview where he explained his attitude toward the title of "Ambassador."' During his 1960 Africa tour, Armstrong told New York Times Magazine reporter Gilbert Millstein: "We used to call one another that when we was broke and hungry. That's where the Duke got his name, Duke Ellington. And the Count — Count Basie."

[Trummy Young]: Pops, you got eyes to wear a crown? 

[Armstrong]: I might enjoy being king.

After all, Buddy Bolden was king. 

[Trummy Young]: And there's King Oliver. 

[Armstrong]: There's Count Basie. 

[Young]: And Duke Ellington. 

[Armstrong]: And Earl "Fatha"Hines. 

[Young]: Man, quit jiving me! You know that cat ain 't no Earl.

That's his first name! 

[Armstrong]: No? Man, he had me fooled all these years!

The United States has recognized the importance of Talgalla by appointing an ambassador, due to arrive momentarily. When the hero arrives — trumpet in hand — he blows his horn as a sign of greeting. Mistaking Armstrong for the officially appointed American ambassador, the Talgallans ask, "You are the American Ambassador aren't you?" The hero replies: That's what they call me, Ambassador Satch." The Talgallans are thrilled that "out of all the Americans such a wondrous man should be chosen as their Ambassador." Everyone is happy for several days, but the arrival of the U.S. ambassador sparks a flurry of confusion: Who's the real ambassador?

In the studio performance of the number "Who's the Real Ambassador?" the singers Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks, and Annie Ross make appropriately stiff and sanctimonious State Department personnel, with the lyrics repeated a second time at breakneck tempo, parodying the uptight frenzy perceived by many musicians.

It is evident we represent American society, 

noted for its etiquette, its manners and sobriety. 

We have followed protocol with absolute propriety. 

We 're Yankees to the core. 

We're the real Ambassadors, 

Though we may appear as bores. 

We are diplomats in our proper hats.

Fortunately, Armstrong steps in and clears up the confusion. But in doing so, he challenges the legitimacy of government policy and asserts his authority, grounded in something deeper than mere state sanction.

I’m the real Ambassador!

It is evident I wasn't sent by government to take your place.

All I do is play the blues and meet the people face to face.

I'll explain and make it plain I represent the human race and don't

pretend no more. 

Who's the real Ambassador? 

Certain facts we can't ignore. 

In my humble way—I'm the USA. 

Though I represent the government, 

The government don't represent some policies I'm for. 

Oh, we've learned to be concerned about the Constitutionality. 

In our nation segregation isn't a legality. 

Soon our only differences will be in personality. 

That's what I stand for. 

Who's the real Ambassador? Yeah, The real Ambassador.

With the central political tension of the drama resolved, the narrative turns to a romantic subplot, yet continually revisits the animating theme of civil rights. The poignant number "They Say I Look Like God," singled out by the Saturday Review as "moving and daring" and by critic Ralph Gleason as "one of the most moving moments in Monterey's history," opens with the lines:

They say I Look like God. 

Could God he black? My God! 

If all are made in the image ofThee, 

Could thou perchance a zebra be?

Brubeck praised Armstrong for his ability to transform some of the more trivial lyrics — those written for a laugh — into pathos or political commentary. The Brubecks had written the lines for a laugh, "to show how ridiculous" a religious conception of racial hierarchy was. But, Brubeck continued: "Louis had tears in his eyes. He didn't go for a laugh, and the audience followed him away from our original intentions. And all through the night, he took those lines that were supposed to get a laugh and went the other way with it. And at the record session he cried. You can hear it at the end, when he says 'Really free' for the last time. He broke down a little.” 

After years of demeaning roles, the collaboration in The Real Ambassadors offered Armstrong material that was closer to his own sensibility and outlook. And while Armstrong had often managed to rise above racist material by the sheer force of his artistry, the production allowed him a chance to make a statement about a life-long struggle for control over his own representation — a struggle that had hardly ended with the Little Rock incident. For Armstrong, freedom remained an aspiration, not an achievement. And the power of The Real Ambassadors, which was performed during the most turbulent years of the civil rights movement, lay in its articulation of that yearning, as well as in its satirical wit and musical accomplishments.

After the Monterey Jazz Festival, The Real Ambassadors was never again performed. (The studio production, released on LP and reissued on CD, was recorded before the festival.) At Monterey, Joe Glaser, Armstrong's longtime manager, prevented the TV crews from filming it. Attempts to get it produced, including plans for a Broadway production, failed; it was consistently viewed, at the height of violent resistance to the civil rights movement, as too political and controversial." In the Utopian finale, "Swing Bells, Blow Satchmo" — rich with Old Testament biblical imagery of black Christianity — the hero's horn ("Joshua had just a horn") has announced a new world:

Ring out the news! The world can laugh again. 

This day — we're free! We're equal in every way. . . . 

Lift up thy voice like a trumpet

And show thy people their transgressions and their sins. . . . 

Let the oppressed go free. . . . Blow Satchmo! Blow Satchmo! 

Can it really be, that you set all people free?

That day had certainly not yet arrived in 1962 — a year marked in the United States by the deaths and casualties inflicted by those protesting James Meredith's registration at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and in the Belgian Congo by the start of many decades of U.S. -backed dictatorships. And it would appear no closer in the following year, when dogs and hoses were turned on demonstrators in the campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in Birmingham, Alabama, and when four children were murdered in the bombing of that city's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Even as the U.S. government recognized the power of jazz and African American culture and tried to harness it to Cold War foreign policy by projecting abroad an image of racial progress, the State Department jazz tours also provided a global platform from which to celebrate the subversive wit of jazz, and to announce to the world: "Been waitin’ so long for ... the day we'll be free." 

The international power and appeal of jazz did not lie in the fact that it represented the music of a free country, as the State Department would have it. Rather, as brilliantly and forcefully articulated in The Real Ambassadors, it was conveyed through the instruments and voices of the jazz ambassadors. The epitome of these, Louis Armstrong, expressed his aspirations for freedom in a world where he, like so many of the people for whom he played, was still awaiting the day when he would be "really free."”

Postscript:

Forty years later, in 2002, The Real Ambassadors returned to the Monterey Jazz Festival, this time featuring the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Lizz Wright, Roy Hargrove, and Christian McBride. Archival footage of this performance is available through the Monterey Jazz Festival Collection at Stanford University. The first revival of the musical was presented at the 2013 Detroit Jazz Festival with Bill Meyer using the same format of a concert performance with narrator as the Brubecks had staged at Monterey. It was next performed in New York City for the first time, in 2014, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, featuring original vocalist who performed at the Monterey premiere, Yolande Bavan, this time in the role of Narrator. Connecticut jazz vocalist Dianne Mower has been making efforts to bring about a Broadway revival of the show.