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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.
from the September 6, 2007 edition
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But none of this bothers members of the Ari Roland Quartet, who consider themselves the greatest beneficiaries. "I didn't take jazz to Russia; jazz took me to Russia," says Chris Byars, the quartet's saxophonist. "I'm the one benefiting in this equation."
For Roland, the goal has always been simple: to share the universal elements of a musical style rooted in the African-American experience. In jazz, musicians improvise around a melody and then play around the improvisation without disrupting the group harmony.
"The idea of being able to have your own personality and being able to be who you are [while being] considerate of your community – people can relate to that when they see jazz," says Roland. The music marries Western emphasis on the individual with Eastern notions of community, he says.
"Our culture is a very diverse culture, and it's a culture that's based on all sorts of influences," says Romanowski. Inclusivity and tolerance are central to the message the US is trying to convey. To this end, the State Department encourages all Rhythm Road participants to speak their minds, even if their views don't jibe with official US foreign policy.
Roland confirms this approach. "Occasionally we'd get a question, 'What do you think about the war in Iraq?' " says Roland. "And we were pretty honest. The State Department told us to be honest."
Still, some see a contradiction: The US touts tolerance and diversity along the Silk Road, says Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University's Center on International Cooperation. But its primary interests in the region, he says, are access to military bases for the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns to counter Russian influence and eventually tapping abundant oil and natural gas resources. "If anyone tells you that the US has an interest in democracy in Central Asia, don't believe them," Dr. Rubin says.
"Cultural exchange is no substitute for an effective foreign policy," he adds. "Patting a kid on the head is no substitute for having a policy in the Middle East that Arabs can support."
Dour as he sounds, Rubin has only good things to say about sending jazz abroad. Future presidential candidates should nominate "a secretary of swing," he half jokes. "Swinging is a very important [political] philosophy. You make something beautiful by cooperating, without anyone telling you what to do."
Penny Von Eschen, a professor of history and American culture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and author of "Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War," says the jazz ambassadorship has been fraught with contradictions since its inception 50 years ago.
President Eisenhower sent African-American jazz musicians to emerging nations in Africa and Asia to both counter the "red menace" and, somewhat hypocritically in retrospect, to stymie international criticism of Jim Crow laws – what Professor Von Eschen calls the "Achilles' heel" of the US.
The efforts worked, says Von Eschen, "but not necessarily in the sense the State Department thinks they worked." Audiences, she says, didn't always identify with Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, and Duke Ellington, among others, as Americans. "What the jazz musicians shared with the audiences all over India, Africa, and Asia was an aspiration for freedom. That is subtly different than saying, 'This is the free expression of music in a free country.' "
Present-day spectators seem perfectly capable of differentiating between an individual, their culture, and their country's foreign policy, says Bektour Iskender, an online news site editor who met the Ari Roland Quartet in his native country, Kyrgyzstan.
"Each person is unique despite [his or her] homeland, or ethnicity, or whatever," he writes in an e-mail. "The fact that they [the quartet] are Americans was the last thing I was thinking of when talking to them."
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