The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation by Keith Hatschek

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

“Documenting a largely untold history of Black and white jazz artists teaming up to challenge Jim Crow, with Cold War tensions and the emerging civil rights movement as a backdrop, the tale of The Real Ambassadors is a story within a story. … Understanding its complicated road to the stage against the backdrop of its underlying message can provide insight today, at a time when race relations are once again at the forefront of national discourse. 

“Dave and lola Brubeck and the cast of The Real Ambassadors collectively made a bold social and political statement at a time when many Americans were angry, confused, and in search of answers — lifting their voices to help bring about social change one song at a time. They can be seen as part of a wave of mid-twentieth-century American musicians, filmmakers, and artists who spoke out loudly against discrimination in direct response to their troubled times. This story illustrates the vital role that artists can play as ambassadors of the truth, speaking for equality and justice, both in their own time and through their art, for all times. It demonstrates the importance of keeping our eyes on the prize, even if we may never see that prize fully realized in our own lifetime.”

- Keith Hatschek, author

Frequent visitors to the blog may recall that the editorial staff at JazzProfiles has a special fondness for Dave and Iola Brubeck’s Jazz musical The Real Ambassadors featuring Louis Armstrong, Carmen McRae and Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan [Annie Ross performed on the studio recording made a year earlier] along with Pops’ All-Stars and Dave’s “classic” quartet which premiered at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival, sadly, it’s only performance with this group of musicians.

If you scroll down the blog’s sidebar [right hand column] under LABELS - The Real Ambassadors, you’ll find links to the nine previous posts on the subject.

Well, it would seem that we are not the only ones smitten by the significance of this moment-in-time performance as now, thanks to the auspices of the University of Mississippi Press as part of its “American Made Music Series”, comes a full book length treatment on the subject. 

In his well-written The Real Ambassadors: Dave and Iola Brubeck and Louis Armstrong Challenge Segregation, Keith Hatschek focuses on a not only on a comprehensive treatment of background of the Jazz musical but also brings forth a Jazz story which somehow is rarely emphasized in articles and chronicles about the music - cooperation rather than contention between white and Black musicians.

All too often, especially these days, the narrative focuses on how whites ripped off the Blacks who invented Jazz and went on to commercially benefit at their expense.

Thankfully, Keith Hatschek’s book sheds light on another important story about the Jazz World - how white and Black musicians came together to create entertaining and inspiring music.

And had it not been for the compact disc “revolution” of the 1980 and 1990, the general story of The Real Ambassadors might still be known only by members of the Jazz cognoscenti.  As the author explains:

“The Real Ambassadors remained largely forgotten, until the compact disc boom of the early 1990s. During that time, in a rush to capitalize on the new format, record labels dug through their vaults to reissue recordings for listeners eager to upgrade their music collections. Columbia Records hired producer John Snyder to put together a reissue of the 1962 Real Ambassadors soundtrack album. The 1994 compact disc release featured four additional cuts that were not on the original album, offering fans a complete set of all the songs recorded in the September-December 1961 sessions, including Armstrong's spoken-word rendition of "Lonesome." Satchmo's poignant reading of lola's text echoed that moment in December 1958 when he had performed the lyric for Brubeck. The recording demonstrates Armstrong's dramatic talents:

All of my life, I've been lonely.

I'll go way back in my past.

I’ll tell you about Lonesome,

How the winters last and last.

I know the loneliest autumns,

Watching the leaves slowly turn,

Sad as the tag end of summer,

When dreams with the leaves will burn.

I've stood alone in springtime,

High up on a hill,

Cried in the rain in springtime,

Cause no one's there to share the thrill.

There a certain glory in summer,

Quiet contagious joy.

There is a silent story in summer, 

That calls to the mind of a young boy. 

You fell in love in summer, 

Then grew up far too fast. 

Still he returns each summer, 

To visit in the past. 

The past. 

The past.

The recording is unlike anything else in Armstrong's massive catalog: he played the song's melody on trumpet, accompanied by Brubeck, then over-dubbed the lyrics as a recitation, rather than singing the melody.' One can hear the emotions developed over a lifetime by Satchmo as a touring Black artist who had experienced so many forms of discrimination yet still hung on to a joy for his life as a musician and optimist. Armstrong biographer Ricky Riccardi sums up the chilling effect:

Though "Summer Song" is about as melancholy as a song can be, "Lonesome" really has some deep, low notes. Perhaps Brubeck toyed with the idea of using his Quartet to back Pops on this one, but in the end, someone had the great idea of having Pops play the melody on the trumpet while overdubbing his monologue on top of it. The result is almost an Armstrong sensory overload ... he's coming at you from all angles! Having him just speak the words without alluding to anything that remotely resembles a melody gives the song a chilling quality... the words of "Lonesome" should be written down for it truly is much more a poem than a song.

It's a completely straight-faced performance, though he manages a slight chuckle after mentioning the "young boy," His voice goes way down for the final repetitions of "the past." He sounds tired and scared, but it's just the true sign of Armstrong's acting ability. He was marvelous at conveying drama and "Lonesome" is one of his finest moments.1

Reflecting on this performance, one can imagine the dimension Armstrong would have brought to a fully realized musical theater production of The Real Ambassadors.

The reissue also included Carmen McRae's alternate reading of "Summer Song," an abbreviated version clocking in at nearly a minute less than Armstrong's performance, in which he repeats the bridge and a verse. McRae's reading is more delicate and understated, and it showcases how she could infuse lyrics with extra meaning through her gift for phrasing and inflection. The other previously unreleased tracks included the 45-rpm version of "Nomad," whose lyrics depict Dave Brubeck's experience while staying in Kabul, Afghanistan, on his 1958 State Department-sponsored tour. He heard the muffled beat of drums and a lone flute as nomadic shepherds drove their herds through the city on their way to the mountains. Brubeck described it as the "weirdest sound I ever heard."3 Joe Morello lays down a Latin-style beat using his toms, and clarinetist Joe Darensbourg conjures up visuals of a snake charmer with his harmonic minor introduction, leading into Armstrong's bouncy interpretation. An instrumental version of the song had appeared on the quartet's 1958 release, Jazz Impressions of Eurasia.

The fourth and final addition on the 1994 reissue was "You Swing, Baby," a duet featuring McRae and Armstrong set to the melody of Brubeck's well-known standard "The Duke." The timing and playful exchange between the two singers show off their natural chemistry. Satchmo takes two verses on trumpet, staying close to the melody while adding a few flourishes. The song concludes with the following passage:

Pops: When you send me, I stay gone. People ask me "what I'm on." Rhonda: To quote a phrase from ol' Satchmo, if ya gotta ask, then you'll never know! Pops: [ad lib—"I'm in love"] 

Pops: You swing, baby, you swing for me. I vote you soul mate of the

century.

Rhonda: Alone I sing a melody ... 

Pops: But it takes two for harmony. 

Together: Singing, swinging, our lives complete... as long as you're in

rhythm with the consummate beat. Living, loving, the human race

... this makes this crazy, mixed up world a swinging place.

In this lyric, lola cleverly included Armstrong's oft-cited rejoinder to the question he had often been asked: "What is jazz?" His famous answer was always, "If you gotta ask, then you'll never know." The fun Carmen and Louis were having on this recording is palpable, so it was a loss that the song never made it into the Monterey performance.

While the addition of these four numbers to the Brubeck catalog was noteworthy, it was of greater import that the CD reissue brought the musical back into the consciousness of the jazz community. A new generation of jazz musicians too young to know about its historic 1958 performance recognized that the work was truly groundbreaking, and its message of tolerance and

equality still resounded more than a half century after its creation. Writing about the CD reissue for AllMusic.com, critic Scott Yanow awarded it a four-star rating and characterized the work as "a largely upbeat play full of anti-racism songs that celebrated human understanding." He cautions listeners who are familiar with the cast members not to come to the disc with too many expectations, as "Paul Desmond is nowhere to be found, Louis Armstrong does not play that much trumpet here, and Lambert Hendricks and Ross essentially function as background singers." He does praise the duets between McRae and Armstrong as making a potent team, concluding by offering that the disc reveals "many touching and surprising moments"4 

The CD sold a total of 5,189 copies in the two-year period following its 1994 rerelease, nearly as many as the original album, and reported a negligible fifty-nine copies returned to Columbia for credit, only i percent of albums shipped.5

If you are not familiar with the background of the original performance of The Real Ambassadors, author Hatschek offers the following description of its evolution in the Prologue of his well-researched and richly detailed work:

“On the evening of September 23,1962, as civil rights momentum was escalating to a fervor, a cast of thirteen talented artists came together at the Monterey Jazz Festival to perform The Real Ambassadors, a jazz musical challenging racial inequality. The culmination of five years' work, the musical was written by well-known jazz musician Dave Brubeck and his wife, lola, expressly to feature the most celebrated jazz musician in the world, Louis Armstrong. That night, they performed a slimmed-down one-hour "concert version" of what was envisioned as a three-act Broadway show, and their hope was that this premiere would help make that full production dream a reality. Supporting players included Carmen McRae, the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Bavan, and Armstrong's All-Star band, along with Dave Brubeck, Eugene Wright, and Joe Morello.1 lola Brubeck, who wrote the book and co wrote the lyrics for her husband's songs, provided narration from a separate temporary stage to frame the musical numbers and explain the show's themes.

The musical was inspired in part by the US State Department and its cultural ambassadors program, which had been sending American jazz musicians abroad beginning with Dizzy Gillespie's 1956 tour. These jazz ambassadors toured overseas as a form of cultural diplomacy, promoting jazz as a uniquely American art form and touting it as a product of a free society. The Brubecks' Real Ambassadors offered a nuanced portrait of these jazz ambassadors, drawing heavily on the experiences the couple had during their own State Department-sponsored global tour in 1958. Selling the notions of freedom and equality abroad was intended to present a contrast to the opposing totalitarian model offered by the Soviet Union. Ironically, however, while America's Black jazz ambassadors were treated as royalty abroad, they still suffered racial prejudice at home on a daily basis.

The Real Ambassadors told the story of this irony, chronicling the hard road traveled by jazz musicians on tour for Uncle Sam in the 1950s. Led by a charismatic trumpeter and vocalist, "Pops," and his love interest, the band's

vivacious female singer “Rhonda," the show's lyrics and dialogue made plain the Brubecks' belief that segregation must be overturned and that artists should take a stand to work toward social justice. The Real Ambassadors tackled controversial themes head-on, and some of its concepts could be considered blasphemous at the time — for example, posing the question "Could God be Black?" in one of the musical's most memorable songs, and dreaming aloud of a time when integrated music groups might be able to perform in Mississippi. Historian Penny Von Eschen argued that bringing the show to the stage at the height of the civil rights movement was not without risk. She stated:

“From our present day perspective, these types of statements defending civil rights and egalitarianism seem relatively mild, but when this was produced, America was at the height of the violent civil rights movement, and the federal government had not yet begun to take a stand to defend civil rights advocacy on a formal level. It was a very bold, controversial act at that moment in time."1

In evidence reconstructing the musical's rocky path to the stage, we see that music industry power players such as Columbia Records president Goddard Lieberson warned the Brubecks to avoid such controversy if Dave and lola wanted to see the musical realized.

In the early 1960s, the battle over civil rights in the United States was front and center on nightly newscasts, and the musical and its message were perfectly attuned to the national debate. At the time, powerful governmental, economic, fraternal, and institutional groups in the US were aligned to prevent the end of racial segregation by working actively to sustain the centuries-old practices of Jim Crow, ingrained practices that restricted the civil and societal rights of Black Americans and relegated them to second-class status. Even though the landmark 1954 decision reached in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed school segregation, local leaders scoffed at the law and maintained strict segregation throughout society, most prominently in the South. Powerful leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Dr. Ralph Abernathy, and organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), had raised their voices and were taking action to demand an end to segregation. Nonviolent actions including marches, boycotts, sit-ins, and teach-ins led by ministers, students, and activists were reported regularly in the media — especially when such peaceful acts caused violent responses from those strongly opposed to breaking the grip of Jim Crow. The nation was undergoing a crisis of unprecedented scope.

Within twelve months of the show's debut, the tragic evidence of a nation divided would be apparent to the whole world. Only a few days after the show's 1962 premiere, James Meredith enrolled to attend the University of Mississippi, the first African American student to do so. This led to riots that left three persons dead, six policemen shot, and dozens injured on the campus. A few months later, in May 1963, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference rallied students of all ages to march peacefully in protest to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, where the notorious commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor, ordered fire hoses used on the children, knocking many off their feet and shredding their clothes. This inhumanity was documented everywhere, from major networks' nightly newscasts to the front page of the New York Times, where on May 4th, an iconic photo spread showed a Black high school student, Walter Gadsden, being attacked by Connor's police dogs. Four months later, on Sunday, September 15,1963, the murder of four young girls in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing further stunned the nation. News coverage of the protests dominated every form of media, and every day, Americans were reminded of the sacrifices being made by citizens of color.

Given this context, it is no surprise that The Real Ambassadors' road to the stage was neither straightforward nor simple, spanning five years of the lives of Dave and lola Brubeck, the creators and evangelists who were determined to bring the show to life. As Dave Brubeck's own music career blossomed, he made his position on civil rights a cornerstone of his identity, both as an artist and an American. He was quoted frequently in interviews with a courageous mantra: that society would benefit from becoming color-blind. His ideals had come from observing how his father, Pete Brubeck, managed the large ranch in California's Central Valley where the family lived in the 1930s. His father treated everyone with respect, hiring ranch hands who were white, Mexican, and Native American. The young Brubeck worked summers and after school as a ranch hand, side by side with these men, while attending the local public school in lone, California, where he had a number of friends who were Native American. The pianist's humanistic values advanced through his subsequent experiences as a young GI leading what was likely the first integrated US Army band, the Wolfpack, during World War II.3 After the war, Brubeck hired African American bassist Wyatt "Bull" Ruther as a member of the Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951-52.4 

In 1958, another Black bassist, Eugene Wright, became a mainstay of the quartet. Due to Jim Crow restrictions on integrated bands performing in the South, the Dave Brubeck Quartet had to cancel twenty-two dates of a 1960 Southern college campus tour. Brubeck refused to replace Wright with a white bassist, losing an estimated $40,000 in income. Having witnessed firsthand the sting of discrimination through his many musical friends and colleagues, Brubeck and his wife developed a deep-seated commitment to equal rights for all.

The Brubecks used their wits and resources to enlist the aid of every like-minded show business contact they had in order to make The Real Ambassadors a reality. Still, the performance itself was nearly torpedoed in the weeks leading up to the festival by Armstrong's manager, Joe Glaser, a powerful man who saw much to lose and little to gain from such an endeavor. Likewise, Armstrong's own wife, Lucille, feared that tackling difficult new songs might have been beyond her husband's reach at that time, as he had suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1959 while on the road in Italy and was weakened by forty years of non stop touring.

The night of the premiere belonged to the cast. At its conclusion one critic noted that "the performers were rewarded with a standing ovation by 5,000 fans. Everyone applauded, some wept."5 Critics unanimously praised the work as a bold statement supporting equal rights, telling the story of African American musicians with dignity and sensitivity in a way that deserved national attention. With these endorsements ringing in their ears, the Brubecks' five-year effort to bring the full production to Broadway or television felt within reach. But the growing success of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, which came to be the most popular small jazz ensemble in the world, eclipsed The Real Ambassadors, until it reemerged in the 1990s as a vital, if overlooked piece of Brubecks and Armstrong's careers. In the twenty-first century, it has enjoyed three revivals, which have proven that the timeless messages in it still ring true today.

Documenting a largely untold history of Black and white jazz artists teaming up to challenge Jim Crow, with Cold War tensions and the emerging civil rights movement as a backdrop, the tale of The Real Ambassadors is a story within a story. Wrapped around the production's fictional plot was a very real account of struggle in the civil rights era, as Louis Armstrong and Dave and lola Brubeck fought to present a musical designed to foment social change. Understanding its complicated road to the stage against the backdrop of its underlying message can provide insight today, at a time when race relations are once again at the forefront of national discourse. 

These talented artists demonstrated that challenging racism, xenophobia, gender bias, and other hate-based creeds requires logic, compassion, wit, and above all, dogged persistence—and that the reward may come in unexpected forms and on unexpected timelines. Dave and lola Brubeck and the cast of The Real Ambassadors collectively made a bold social and political statement at a time when many Americans were angry, confused, and in search of answers — lifting their voices to help bring about social change one song at a time. They can be seen as part of a wave of mid-twentieth-century American musicians, filmmakers, and artists who spoke out loudly against discrimination in direct response to their troubled times. This story illustrates the vital role that artists can play as ambassadors of the truth, speaking for equality and justice, both in their own time and through their art, for all times. It demonstrates the importance of keeping our eyes on the prize, even if we may never see that prize fully realized in our own lifetime.

Here’s an idea: get yourself a CD of The Real Ambassadors and a copy of Mr. Hatschek’s book and listen to the former while reading the latter. Add a couple of scoops of your favorite ice cream in a bowl and I guarantee you're in store for a memorable experience. [You may want to keep more ice cream at hand.]

For order information on Mr. Hatschek's book go here.