International Jazz Day: What Did We Really Contribute?

So many questions, so few answers. Still.

The central concert of International Jazz Day 2013 took place at Hagia Eirene Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. (Monique Jaques/Getty Images)

Today is International Jazz Day. It’s been ten years since I went to Istanbul for 2013’s Jazz Day events.

Much of Jazz Day’s rhetoric sounded off-key to me in that setting. Speeches in Turkey celebrated jazz’s “message of dialogue and freedom” and assured Istanbul that it exemplified “the beauties of jazz.” Yet dialogue and freedom weren’t at the top the Turkish government’s agenda.

Though it involved criticizing a well-meaning event that included some dear friends, I had to speak up. It was, after all, my job to report and reflect on what I’d seen and heard there.

In 2018, Jazz Day was celebrated in St. Petersburg, where some of the same issues applied. Even now, the discourse around jazz as a tool of diplomacy remains much the same.

Here’s what I wrote in 2013, most of which is all too relevant today.

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It was the most ambitious global jazz event of 2013. It likely will be the most ambitious global jazz event of 2014. Yet if you aren’t part of the jazz world, you may not have even heard of International Jazz Day. And if you did hear about it, you may still be unsure what exactly it aims to do. 

In 2011, UNESCO designated April 30 International Jazz Day as a way to "highlight jazz and its diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe." UNESCO partners with the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz to produce the day’s festivities, which include events in hundreds of countries. A larger main celebration in a floating location—this year, Istanbul—involves performances, panels and workshops, culminating with a gala concert.  

Sounds great, right? But just a couple months after performing in Turkey, Esperanza Spalding expressed some ambivalence about Jazz Day in an interview for a Brazilian newspaper. 

"After I left Istanbul," she said, "I thought: 'Wow, that was wonderful, everything that everybody said and played was so beautiful. But what did we really give to the needy in Istanbul?' . . . So much money was spent on this event — so many lovely, powerful and creative people were there together — but what did we really contribute? Wherever the next International Jazz Day happens, I hope we will leave with better answers to those questions."

Jazz Day’s agenda was compelling enough for me to buy a plane ticket to Istanbul and check it out myself. Like Esperanza, I found beauty in the experience. At the gala concert in the 4th Century Hagia Eirene church, the dust of centuries sifted down from high ceilings, lending substance to the music. Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento and the legendary Wayne Shorter gave a rare performance together there. Guitarist John McLaughlin electrified the house with tabla player Zakir Hussain. Jazz Day's constellation of more than 30 musical luminaries, some of them my friends, made for great conviviality. I lost track of how many people I hugged there. And everywhere we went, the Turkish people gave us a warm and gracious reception.

Yet, like Esperanza, I left with questions about Jazz Day's value and impact. Eight months later, I'm still wondering if the event could have done more, especially considering what happened there after we left. Of course, back on April 30, none of us knew that only weeks later all hell would break loose over freedom of expression in Turkey; that peaceful protesters would be gassed and beaten and killed.

But if we couldn’t anticipate that Istanbul would become a site a bloody conflict, we did know that freedom of expression had long been under attack in the country. We knew Turkey had the highest number of jailed journalists in the world. We knew that, just before Jazz Day, world-renowned Turkish classical pianist Fazil Say had been handed a prison sentence for insulting Islam in Twitter posts. Jazz Day organizers didn’t address any of that. In advance of the event, when they were asked, “Why Istanbul?,” organizers emphasized the symbolic importance of the setting, particularly the geographical significance of Turkey bridging two continents. Wherever it lay on a map, I wondered how the country’s human-rights abuses could be reconciled with Jazz Day’s goals.

The Democratic Ideal

Jazz Day organizers say the music can achieve the loftiest of aims: make peace and save the world. No one expressed International Jazz Day’s goals to me quite as vividly as Russian saxophonist Igor Butman. “I play for a lot of different presidents,” Butman said. “For Vladimir Putin, for Yeltsin, for Bill Clinton, lots of other guys. I played for Chinese president Jiang Zemin. So when I play for them, if I play good, they can discuss and say, ‘I like this guy Igor, maybe we should drop some of the weapons—we like the same music, the same art, we have something in common.’”

Okay, so I’d caught Butman at a party after a few drinks. But his scenario of jazz as magic peacemaker was only a slight exaggeration of Jazz Day’s more official rhetoric. UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova launched the big day with these words:

“Jazz is more than music. Jazz embodies values. Jazz is a school of diversity, a school of dialogue and tolerance. Jazz has set the rhythm for struggles, for dignity, for equality, and civil rights. Our goal of UNESCO is to transfer these values to give voice to this message of dialogue and freedom.”

It’s worth stepping back to unpack this loaded rhetoric. The idea that jazz embodies values has growing currency in mainstream culture, where the music has become a popular model for everything from conducting a business meeting to crafting a sentence. More specifically, the diversity, dialogue and tolerance that Bokova finds in jazz are characteristically democratic values. 

Among political and cultural institutions, jazz has had a recurring role as an exemplar of democracy. (First Lady Michelle Obama introduced a 2009 White House jazz concert like this: “There’s probably no better example of democracy than a jazz ensemble: individual expression but with responsibility to the group.”) Just as democracy comes with both individual freedom and collective responsibility, a jazz musician is simultaneously a soloist and a part of the group, contributing a personal sound to the ensemble as a whole. Sometimes a bandleader’s directive leaves little room for democratic participation, but more often than not, a jazz band can be seen as democracy in action, with diversity and tolerance necessarily coming into play.  

Jazz diplomacy has a rich history in U.S. foreign diplomacy. In the 1950s, Willis Conover’s Voice of America radio program began broadcasting jazz to the world with a distinct political message. “This is Willis Conover’s Voice of America Jazz Hour,” he’d announce at the start of each week’s show. “The music of jazz parallels the freedom we have in America. Something that not every country has."

Willis Conover Jazz Hour clip

The U.S. State Department decided jazz’s democratic ideal and artistic sophistication made it the perfect cold war weapon, a worthy opponent of Russian ballet and classical music. In 1956, the State Department sent Dizzy Gillespie out to win hearts and minds in its first jazz tour, with stops in southern Europe, the Middle East and south Asia. Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington soon hit the road on behalf of the American government, too.  

Notably, while these musicians connected to the citizens of the world through music, they stepped out of their official roles to confront injustice when and where they saw it. On a State Department tour, Gillespie looked down from the stage at a privileged audience in Pakistan and demanded the “ragamuffin” children be let into the show before he’d continue playing.

University of Michigan historian Penny Von Eschen tells this story in her book about the State Department tours, Satchmo Blows Up The World. Von Eschen says the touring jazz musicians emphasized a dynamic and inclusive democracy. “The musicians brought to these tours a much more egalitarian sense of what democracy was than the state department had,” she told me. “The musicians themselves had experienced exclusion in this generation—they’d go into the back door of restaurants, back door of clubs they played in; they were refused service in many places. To go into a venue anywhere overseas where they saw that repeated was unbearable, and they challenged that on every count.”

Before the civil rights movement, black musicians lived with the deep contradiction of representing freedom for a country that hadn't yet extended all its freedoms to them. With their advocacy of the oppressed, mid-century jazz emissaries sent a message that humanity superseded nationality or any institutional agenda — even the State Department agenda they officially represented.

Planning To Cultivate An Interest

Now Jazz Day ambassadors come from all around the world. In Istanbul, the Americans were joined by Hugh Masekela from South Africa, Keiko Matsui from Japan, and Anat Cohen from Israel, just to name a few. Though jazz is still connected to American democracy, Jazz Day ambassadors officially represent UNESCO’s peace-building mission. And today’s emissaries would have to go well out of their way to mix with the proverbial man on the street. In Istanbul, Jazz Day musicians were whisked from rehearsals to their five-star hotel, from panel discussions to palace receptions, none of which exposed them to mass culture or politics. The main Jazz Day concert was invitation-only, with so many Turkish A-listers in attendance that a fusillade of flashing paparazzi greeted concertgoers at the venue’s entrance. But there was little chance of Dizzy’s “ragamuffin” children being spotted, let alone championed, by jazz ambassadors in Istanbul. The ragamuffins didn’t get close enough.

Especially revealing was a Jazz Day morning concert at Istanbul’s elite Galatasaray High School—and by elite, I mean Galatasaray’s graduates include two Prime Ministers, eight Foreign Affairs Ministers and a good part of Turkey’s diplomatic service. A few of the students greeted the concert with enthusiasm and even ecstasy. A majority of the young audience seemed to accept the performance as another boring but necessary element of a finer education. After the concert, when I asked how students liked the music, most answered with the polite tact of the diplomats their school is training them to become: No, they didn’t listen to jazz, they said, but planned to cultivate an interest. 

I’m not proposing that Jazz Day musicians toss their champagne flutes over the palace terrace and head downstairs to join in solidarity with disgruntled kitchen staff. But I would like to suggest that Jazz Day programming broaden its approach and reach. Considering jazz’s longtime beleaguered reputation, it’s encouraging to see the music getting some respect in select social milieus. Jazz Day’s focus on legitimacy would be fine if the event’s only goal were to make jazz the official soundtrack of diplomatic functions, but Jazz Day organizers say they also want to use the music as a school of dialogue and tolerance in the broader culture.

Jazz’s power to fulfill this role hinges on something it’s been lacking for a while: popularity. Back in the 1950s, when the state department jazz tours began, the music was still relatively popular in the U.S., and wildly popular in some parts of the world. A Jazz Day photo exhibit in Istanbul featured black-and-white images of Louis Armstrong being paraded on a throne in the Congo and Benny Goodman crowded by fans in Red Square. Today, hiphop is a more influential medium. At the morning concert, organizers might have conveyed a true message of cultural unity by holding a free outdoor concert in the street, and maybe inviting a Kurdish rap artist to perform with jazz musicians. For a less radical option, R&B-flavored jazz pianist Robert Glasper was in town; he might have moved the young crowd. Instead Jazz Day brought in the current class of Monk Institute musicians to perform a proficient but straitened jazz history lesson for the Galatasaray students.

Toward A True Cultural Exchange

So I grew ever more curious about Jazz Day’s strategy. At a press conference in Istanbul, I asked a panel of musicians to talk about their modern vision of jazz diplomacy. Could jazz still win the hearts and minds of young people? Could it offer a message of peace and unity to, say, moderate young Muslims in Syria or Iran?

By way of reply, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Herbie Hancock invoked technology, mentioning the Jazz Day concert webcast. Trumpeter Terence Blanchard answered my question more directly. “The liberation that happens when people get involved with this music is extremely powerful,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time before people of all these other countries like Syria and these other places—Iran—can pick up this music and be liberated by this music, and we’ll be the beneficiaries of their efforts.”

Playing jazz is no doubt a powerfully liberating experience for musicians. But Jazz Day comments often equated the experience of playing jazz with its impact on the world. They espoused a belief that the music itself can somehow correct injustice and ease political conflict.

It was this sort of idealism that 1950s jazz ambassador Dave Brubeck took on in a biting musical satire called “The Real Ambassadors.” The musical was recorded in 1961 with Louis Armstrong in a leading role. A few sample lines:

“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 we call cultural exchange.

No commodity is quite so strange

As this thing called cultural exchange . . . ”

“Cultural Exchange,” Dave Brubeck, Louis Armstrong, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross

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If Armstrong's sarcasm doesn’t come through in the printed lyrics, it sure does on the recording, where his voice doesn't just drip but overflows with it. Armstrong and Brubeck had some fun with the notion that music could be a panacea for international conflict. 

Yet this seems to be Jazz Day’s very strategy: play jazz and peace will come. Organizers seem to believe they can avoid addressing conflict because music does that work for them. But of course jazz is not necessarily political or peacemaking on its own. Out of the dozen or so Jazz Day musicians I interviewed, Esperanza Spalding was the only one who emphasized this distinction to me. “There’s a lot of potential within the music for it be used, because it’s so potent,” she said. “It can move people’s hearts and minds . . . can manifest in symbolic ways those ideals of democracy. I guess it’s just important to note that it won’t do those things by itself."

Interviewing Esperanza Spalding at a Jazz Day afterparty in Istanbul. (Monique Jaques/Getty Images)

In Istanbul we saw why it’s important to make that distinction. If an international cultural event subscribes to a jumble of artistic and political idealism, and wraps that idealism in the smooth, flattering language of diplomacy, organizers might say stuff they don't mean—and even condone something problematic, like a restrictive, censoring government. At Jazz Day, successive speeches celebrated jazz’s “message of dialogue and freedom” and assured Istanbul that it “exemplifies the beauties of jazz.” Dialogue and freedom aren’t at the top the Turkish government’s agenda, as the crackdown on protesters just weeks later made all too clear.  

Overconfidence in jazz’s natural peace-making ability also obscures some trenchant realities of the music. For a jazz band, every night on stage is an exercise in conflict negotiation—and it’s not all friendly. There can be serious drama in that give and take between self and collective, individual and group; there might be ruthless prodding from a drummer or a mean tempo from a pianist. Yet jazz players manage to lay down paths of meaningful expression through musical war zones every night. At Jazz Day I’d love to hear a panel of Miles Davis band alumni discuss some of the darker tensions on the bandstand, and how exactly they resolved them, both inside and outside of music. If jazz is going to be a model for dialogue and tolerance, group conflict as well as resolution needs to be considered—and thoughtfully explained, since again, music doesn’t do the work of diplomacy on its own.  

Jazz Day provides a rare opportunity to share some valuable messages, even if it’s only with the relatively limited audience that jazz claims today. UNESCO’s imprimatur and the Monk Institute’s organizational expertise make for the closest thing the jazz world has ever had to a superpower. So now is the time to demand the event come a little closer to doing what it says it wants to do.  

Any future host city is likely to have some of Dizzy’s “ragamuffin” children. Let’s make room for them at the official Jazz Day events. Let’s make sure the invited musicians, our jazz ambassadors, are briefed on the host country’s politics and culture. Let’s study the history of jazz diplomacy, looking at what made it effective in the past. The modern world is vastly different, but we can take some tips from the jazz ambassadors of old, who stood with people more than with institutions, who connected through music but pointed out injustice where they saw it, who treated artistic freedom and democratic struggle as matters of vital interest. 

I sure don’t have all the answers. So let’s start a conversation now about how to make next year’s Jazz Day better. Have you seen modern events of musical diplomacy that genuinely worked to bridge cultural divisions? How did they work, exactly? 

Like Michelle Obama and so many others, I believe jazz can be a thriving example of democratic values. I’d like to see International Jazz Day become a true reflection of the music’s many strengths.