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| Turkmenbashy: A master Bakhshi, a player of a lute-like instrument, plays for Ari Roland of the Ari Roland Quartet. Courtesy of Chris Byars |
US sends a jazzy message overseas
Jazz artists are the latest to act as ambassadors of American culture.
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the September 6, 2007 edition
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New York - Like many a musician, bassist Ari Roland has long dreamt of changing the world with music. Now, as a State Department-funded "jazz ambassador," that dream has come true.
A native New Yorker, Mr. Roland and his group, the Ari Roland Quartet, are charged with taking jazz, that quintessentially American musical form, to foreign audiences. The band recently toured countries along the ancient Silk Road in Central Asia – Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. And on an August evening at New York's JFK airport, Roland was about to depart on an "All-Stars" tour through Mali, India, and China. In his bag, he carried the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, several copies of the Economist, a book on the history of Chinese poetry, and an iPod.
"I'm less interested in telling people, 'This is what's great about America; jazz represents democracy,' " says Roland. Rather, "I'm interested in hitting on some of the very basic human themes that exist in jazz."
Yet, as a State Department-funded musician, his purpose is to at least show audiences how diverse, gloriously cacophonous, and ultimately cool the United States really is.
Roland's effort is part of "The Rhythm Road: American Music Abroad" program administered by Jazz at the Lincoln Center, a not-for-profit arts organization in New York City. The program has a few musical groups working abroad at any given time. A panel of judges, including trumpeter and Pulitzer Prize winner Wynton Marsalis, chooses the groups based on their talent, ruggedness (Roland's quartet averaged 1.5 flights daily), and "ease" and "eloquence" in conversations, says Susan John, director of touring at Jazz at Lincoln Center. This year, the program averages some 260 days of touring.
The Rhythm Road targets underserved groups, in terms of access to American culture, primarily Muslim audiences around the world, says Alina Romanowski, deputy assistant secretary for professional and cultural affairs in the State Department's Bureau of Cultural Affairs.
"We want to make sure that people understand what the United States is all about and what we represent," she says. "Cultural diplomacy is one way of doing it."
But some say that American culture delivered to foreign audiences is no substitute for policies acceptable to these same audiences. (State says these efforts were never meant as a substitute.) And yet, even critics of the Bush administration support sending jazz and other American art forms – as well as artists – abroad. Indeed, government-funded cultural exchanges have a long and storied history.
President Dwight Eisenhower began sending jazz musicians abroad during the cold war as an answer to the Soviet cultural institutions like the Bolshoi Ballet. The government also broadcast American music on Radio Free Europe.
But after the Soviet Union collapsed, funding for cultural diplomacy dwindled until, by 2000, it had reached a nadir. In retrospect, that was a mistake, says Ms. Romanowski, and especially since Sept. 11, "we've recognized that again, we want to engage as broad an audience as possible.... There's a lot of support for it on the Hill."
Since 2000, funding for public diplomacy programs has more than doubled to $465.6 million for 2007. (The Rhythm Road gets $1 million annually.)
The renewed effort has gotten off to a rocky start, however. Two heads have resigned – Charlotte Beers and Patricia Harrison – and Karen Hughes, the current undersecretary of State for public diplomacy, has drawn criticism for cultural insensitivity during a 2005 listening tour of the Middle East. The federal government's own website, expectmore.gov, rates these diplomacy efforts simply as "adequate."
