Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  Hancock was one of two artistic directors on the concert in Havana. The other was Chucho Valdés, another heralded piano virtuoso, and perhaps the most distinguished jazz musician in Cuba. Half a century earlier, Valdés had been a founding member of the Orquesta Cubana de Música Moderna, a pioneering big band made up of musicians with conservatory training and what was then regarded as a subversive interest in jazz. Out of the Orquesta’s ranks came Irakere, an explosive fusion group that enjoyed globetrotting success, beginning in the late 1970s.

  One indication of the complicated geopolitics of jazz in Cuba was made manifest in Irakere’s shadow legacy at the All-Star Global Concert. The lineup featured a handful of prominent alumni of the band: not just Chucho but also Oscar Valdés, on his Batá drums, and Orlando “Maraca” Valle, on flute. But there were also conspicuous omissions—like trumpeter Arturo Sandoval and multireedist Paquito D’Rivera, who worked together in Irakere’s most spectacular front line and later both became defectors and outspoken critics of the Castro regime. They wouldn’t have taken part in an International Jazz Day convocation in Cuba even if such an outcome were politically feasible.

  Similarly, discretion had led to the exclusion of a whole cadre of important Cuban jazz artists in the United States—expatriate musicians like the saxophonists Yosvany Terry and Román Filiú; drummers Dafnis Prieto and Ignacio Berroa; percussionists Román Díaz and Pedrito Martínez; and pianists Arturo O’Farrill, Elio Villafranca, David Virelles, Aruán Ortiz, Fabian Almazan, Manuel Valera, and Alfredo Rodríguez. Each of these artists (and quite a few others) had established a strong identity in jazz scenes outside their homeland, articulating a vision for Afro-Cuban jazz that tilted toward global cosmopolitanism even as it often reinforced folkloric root systems.

  That conscientious yet unforced brand of hybridism echoes a widespread development in jazz in the last few decades, not only among Cuban jazz musicians but also for those who trace their heritage to India, Pakistan, Israel, China, and Iraq (and beyond). The music made by these artists has naturally ranged in scope and tone, but on the whole it speaks to a matter-of-fact polyglot ideal on the ground. Rather than creating the equivalent of a jazz buffet punched up with exotic flavors—à la the well-intentioned Dave Brubeck album Jazz Impressions of Eurasia, from 1958—these artists have sought to reconcile their various cultural traditions with jazz practice at the highest levels. It would be reductive to put the result into a kind of subcategory, like “global jazz.” Increasingly this syncretic, conversant blend of dialects and syntax describes the very state of the art: jazz itself.

  In a tangible sense, jazz had been a polyglot proposition even in its earliest stages, informed not only by the musics of Africa and the Caribbean but also by the pluralism of places where such traditions commingle. (Havana had a formative influence on the music, along with cities like New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.)

  “Perhaps no other music is called upon to represent diaspora as often as jazz,” the ethnomusicologists Philip V. Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino observe in their useful collection Jazz Worlds/World Jazz. “The world charted musically by diaspora, the exile and return of African or South Asian and Rom musicians, appears as an alternative to that mapped by political boundaries. And yet, jazz practices adhere to political boundaries as cultural practice, for example, at the edge of empire or in the musical echoes that resonate between continents.”2

  A state-sanctioned endeavor like International Jazz Day would seem to underscore those political boundaries, if only by adopting the rhetoric of cultural diplomacy. But through the guiding input of Hancock, the event has also advanced the prospect of jazz as a universal, endlessly adaptable art form. Asked to reflect on the concert in Havana while still basking in its glow, Hancock focused less on the precarious advances in Cuban-American relations and more on utopian generalities, hailing its outcome as “a kind of solidarity of the planet that doesn’t really happen very often.”3 As in every previous iteration of the concert, the grand finale had been a full-dress version of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” delivered in the round-robin fashion of a charity pop single.

  The song, with its aspirational vision of a world devoid of national borders and rigid doctrines, had become a central facet of Hancock’s humanitarian brand. Of course that notion of transcendent unity could easily be disparaged as an earnest oversimplification—especially on the ground in Havana, during the early phase of a United States presidential administration bent on reinforcing every kind of national, ethnic, and demographic division.

  Without question, the aims of International Jazz Day had been more in tune with political and diplomatic realities back in 2016, when the All-Star Global Concert had been held on the South Lawn of the White House. One highlight of that concert was a performance featuring Paquito D’Rivera and Chucho Valdés—old confreres, isolated for decades by geopolitics and opinion, but goaded by ceremony to finally (if fleetingly) make music together again.

  In his welcoming remarks that evening in 2016, President Barack Obama reiterated the conventional view of jazz as a proud American invention, “perhaps the most honest reflection of who we are as a nation.” But where he went next with his address was less predictable, at least for an American head of state. Acknowledging that jazz had long ago reached a global audience, making adaptations in every corner of the world, he offered the assessment that “it speaks to something universal about our humanity—the restlessness that stirs in every soul, the desire to create with no boundaries.”4

  In my humble way, I’m the U.S.A.

  —LOUIS ARMSTRONG, in The Real Ambassadors

  Jazz and the US State Department had a more goal-oriented relationship in the twentieth century—especially from the mid-1950s through the late seventies, when the federal government routinely sent musicians abroad, often to hotspots where the hand of diplomacy was badly needed. In those years, jazz was charged not with “the desire to create without boundaries” but rather the aim of personifying America’s democratic principles and, not infrequently, softening its flaws. This official deployment might amount to a trivial piece of jazz history, if not for its direct effect on jazz’s development abroad. In some respects it laid a groundwork for generations of musicians and audiences, while helping to map out a global infrastructure for the art form.

  The seeds for jazz’s strategic diplomatic use were sown early in 1955, when Willis Conover’s radio show Music USA debuted on the Voice of America. In its first year, the program reached some thirty million people in eighty countries. (Conover kept it going, broadcasting six nights a week, until shortly before his death in 1996.) Music USA was most enthusiastically received in places that restricted freedom of expression, notably the Soviet Union and other countries behind the Iron Curtain, like Czechoslovakia and Poland. To listeners in these locales, the program was seen as a beacon of freedom, and Conover—with his plummy announcer’s voice and careful, instructive elocution—as its benevolent emissary. Jazz, as a model of improvised accord, mirrored the expression of individuals in a free society. And while Conover largely refrained from editorializing on the air, his own judgment on the matter was clear: he characterized jazz as “structurally parallel to the American political system.”

  At the same time that the Voice of America was establishing a new pipeline for jazz in Europe, Louis Armstrong traveled there on a major concert tour. As chronicled on a live album released just afterward, Armstrong and His All-Stars met with wild enthusiasm. A foreign correspondent for The New York Times, taking in the clamor around the tour, issued a declaration: “America’s secret weapon is a blue note in a minor key. Right now its most effective ambassador is Louis (Satchmo) Armstrong.”5 (This remarkable statement probably had at least something to do with the title of that live album, Ambassador Satch.)

  The definitive text on this curious turn in American foreign diplomacy is Penny M. Von Eschen’s 2004 book Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Pl
ay the Cold War. Among other things, it illuminates a concerted effort to send musicians to some of the most contested and strategic places abroad. So the first official cultural program had Dizzy Gillespie and his band arriving in Abadan, Iran, to what alto saxophonist Phil Woods later recalled as “the smell of crude oil and the sound of gunfire from nearby Iraq.”6 Von Eschen points out that Iraqi coups broke out during tours by the Dave Brubeck Quartet (in 1958) and the Duke Ellington Orchestra (in 1963). She also observes that Armstrong’s tour of the Congo in 1960 occurred during the covert American-backed detainment and torture of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

  Race is a crucial subtext in the history of the Jazz Ambassadors program, which US officials brandished as a shield against global criticism of segregationist policies at home. “The glaring contradiction in this strategy,” Von Eschen notes, “was that the U.S. promoted black artists as goodwill ambassadors—symbols of the triumph of American democracy—when America was still a Jim Crow nation.”7 Armstrong, Gillespie, Ellington, and many of the other musicians on the tours negotiated this enormous irony with characteristic poise, speaking candidly about their nation’s problems and insisting, wherever they played, on reaching “the people.” Brubeck and his wife, Iola, later went so far as to lampoon the situation in song: The Real Ambassadors, a satirical musical featuring Armstrong, Carmen McRae, and Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. It premiered at the 1962 Monterey Jazz Festival, and was later released as a studio album. Unabashed in its critique, it accurately portrays Armstrong as a public figure grudgingly shrugging off some moral ambivalence. As he puts it, singing Iola Brubeck’s lyrics: “Though I represent the government / The government don’t represent / Some policies I’m for.”

  Still, it’s no slight to The Real Ambassadors to suggest that the best musical by-product of the tours came from extracurricular forays into local scenes. Gillespie first met Lalo Schifrin, a composer, arranger, and future collaborator, after hours at a club in Buenos Aires. (In Rio de Janeiro, he left a strong impression on João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim.) Brubeck played in Bombay with sitar master Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan, sparking ideas that would later surface on Jazz Impressions of Eurasia. Ellington and Billy Strayhorn absorbed the sounds and experiences of one 1963 tour and created their landmark Far East Suite. Pianist Randy Weston took a momentous trip to Africa under the auspices of a State Department tour in 1967—sharpening his affinity for Morocco, where he subsequently lived for a time, studying the music of the Gwawa people, which he would later help bring into wider circulation worldwide.8

  The Jazz Ambassadors tours also exerted a profound influence, direct and diffuse, on innumerable local scenes. Where exposure to the music was scarce, a small but concentrated dose could go a long way. And as proponents of the Hancock Doctrine might put it, jazz’s most basic imperative—finding common purpose together, through improvisation—was a process that could be adapted to almost any local custom or inflection.

  Tomasz Stańko, the most celebrated jazz trumpeter to emerge from Poland, remembers first seeing Brubeck on a State Department tour in 1958, when he was a teenager and already a regular listener of Conover’s show. “As a Polish who was living in a Communist country,” Stańko recalled, “jazz was a synonym of Western culture, of freedom, of this different style of life.”9

  Through his own career, which started in a tumultuous free-jazz vein and went on to accommodate all manner of whispery poignancies and postbop flair, Stańko became a leading jazz artist in Europe, an exemplar and a mentor. For a good stretch of the early 2000s, he had a superb Polish band whose rhythm section—led by the pianist Marcin Wasilewski, and previously known as the Simple Acoustic Trio—exemplified the high level of curiosity, refinement, and rapport among a younger generation of jazz musicians in Europe.

  There’s no way to quantify the effect that official US channels had on Stańko’s musical development, except to trust his word that it was profound. And just as a generation of expatriate African-American musicians, in places like Paris and Copenhagen, influenced the development of the music abroad in the 1950s and ’60s, the rise of homegrown players like Stańko had a reverberative effect on the larger scene.

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  Still, even in the twenty-first century there are highly cosmopolitan places where jazz is very much a developing story. Tracking that story can produce valuable insights, shedding light on how the music finds traction in between the cracks—lacking much in the way of a support network, an informed constituency, or any institutional resources.

  One afternoon in the fall of 2016, I sat at a table in a cavernous, handsomely appointed nightclub as Chick Corea was addressing a group of Chinese investors. We were on the eastern edge of Tiananmen Square, in the basement of a building constructed as part of the American Legation in 1903. Corea had been flown out for the opening of the Blue Note Beijing, a gleaming addition to a global network of branded entertainment venues. This new Blue Note club, renovated to the tune of $7 million, was the first of several planned for China, joining a flagship location in New York; prominent outposts in Japan and Italy; and more recent franchises in Napa Valley and Honolulu. (It preceded by a year the organization’s further expansion into Brazil.)

  The club’s opening, in the posh Legation Quarter, was also a reminder of the uptick of wealth and spending power in Beijing—though that phenomenon has had more of an impact on the city skyline (and its luxury retail) than on its creative jazz scene. In 2015, Beijing’s splashiest jazz club up to that point—Yue Fu, a pet project of the successful nightlife entrepreneur Leon Lee—was forced to close within a year because of insufficient revenue. The talk among local musicians was that the Blue Note Beijing, owned by a Chinese company in a licensing agreement, could all too easily suffer a similar fate.

  “It takes time to build the tourist business,” Steve Bensusan, president of Blue Note Entertainment, said during a tour of his imposing facilities in Beijing, which include a media command center and a greenroom roughly the size of the entire Blue Note club in New York. “But that’s what we’re striving for: the international traveler, the business traveler. We also want to expose people to the music. We’re making a big splash in the hope that it filters down.”10

  Beyond issues of corporate expansion and new-market penetration, the very fact of this Blue Note club also signaled a new chapter in the evolving story of jazz in Beijing. Corea suggested as much in a preshow press conference, when he issued a friendly word of advice, promptly translated for his audience: “Make a vibe here, where the local musicians and the local audiences can hang out and feel comfortable. That’s how you build a club that can live.”

  The press conference also featured a brief solo piano performance by A Bu, a former child prodigy from Beijing. Sixteen at the time, he was enrolled in the precollege program at Juilliard in New York City, while going out on the odd international tour. (Six months after this encounter, I’d run into him again in Havana, at the All-Star Global Concert.)

  Speaking of Beijing’s jazz ecology, A Bu was sanguine: “It’s growing every day now,” he said. But he was careful to add that there was room for improvement, especially in the area of audience development: “Most Chinese, I have to say, they do not know what is jazz.”11

  Beijing is not only the seat of Chinese government but also a prized cradle of national culture, and jazz has always been excluded from any substantial institutional support. The East Asian studies scholar Adiel Portugali has drawn a connection between the music’s marginal status and the ideological thrust of the post-Maoist state, as exerted through China’s powerful Ministry of Culture. “The delicate subtext of the notion of freedom in jazz,” he writes, in a collection called Jazz and Totalitarianism, “can raise ideas and associations that oppose the bureaucratic nature of political systems that are inclined towards totalitarian control.”12

  But a small, vibrant scene does exist in Beijing, largely situated
in and around the city’s hutong neighborhoods, whose narrow alleys and crumbling courtyards date back to the thirteenth-century Yuan dynasty. At the time of my visit, two of Beijing’s leading jazz rooms inhabited former siheyuan—courtyard—houses: Jianghu Bar, a laid-back hangout on Dong Mian Hua Hutong; and Dusk Dawn Club, more commonly known as DDC, about ten minutes away on foot. Both attracted a stylish young audience with at least a modicum of jazz comprehension, or the willingness to listen and learn.

  North of the Forbidden City, in a part of town still crisscrossed by hutongs, sits the East Shore Live Jazz Café, the leading jazz club in Beijing and maybe the most crucial in all of China. It can be found up a narrow flight of stairs, amid a huddle of unpretentious buildings near the Jinding Bridge, on Houhai Lake. From inside the club, large picture windows overlook the lake, whose glassy surface shines by night with the reflection of lights from the other shore.

  My first of several visits to the East Shore was on a Saturday night, when the room was packed with local twenty- and thirty-somethings, most of them listening intently. They were there to hear Xu Zhihan, a twenty-two-year-old guitarist, leading a quartet of local jazz stalwarts: Xia Jia on piano, Ji Peng on bass, and Bei Bei on drums. The music was sophisticated and sleek, a startlingly close approximation of what you might hear at, say, Smalls Jazz Club in New York City. (Spike Wilner, the owner of Smalls, had been at the East Shore just a day or two earlier.) At one point the band segued from a Joe Henderson tune, arranged in a lilting odd meter, to an original with a luminous chord progression and an easy-drift groove. Xu Zhihan soloed with low-key poise, hanging behind the beat as he spun variations on the theme. Xia Jia was even more impressive, reeling off piano improvisations at once soulful, harmonically forward, and marked by painterly restraint.