During the Cold War, racial segregation was the law and practice in much of the country. With the backdrop of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the U.S. Department of State launched the Jazz Ambassadors program, a cultural diplomacy initiative to promote American values abroad through music.
The program began in 1956 and was part of a broader effort by the U.S. government to counter Soviet propaganda. Jazz diplomacy was intended to win hearts and minds and promote a positive view of America as the land of freedom. Jazz Ambassadors included Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Morgan and Nina Simone. Quincy Jones was the music director for the first tour.
A new documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” shows how unwitting jazz musicians were used by the CIA to cover their geopolitical machinations in the 1950s and ‘60s. Jazz musicians were unknowing decoys in the CIA’s plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically-elected leader of the newly independent Republic of the Congo.
From the New York Times review of “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”:
This film, though, treads less optimistic territory. One of its major threads is the C.I.A.’s use of unwitting Black musicians to not just spread soft power abroad during the Cold War but also, potentially, provide a smoke screen for the agency’s more covert dealings. Archival footage and audio of interviews with agents, in some cases many years later, underline the point: Art was art, but it was also a useful tool for machinations the artists quite publicly opposed.
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That’s why “Soundtrack” lands on a coda. Each of these historical threads, in some way, led to the Feb. 15, 1961 demonstration at the United Nations protesting Lumumba’s assassination, organized by a group called the Cultural Association of Women of African Heritage and led by Lincoln, Rosa Guy and Maya Angelou. But the story didn’t end there. “Soundtrack” makes an explicit connection between what happened in Congo in 1960 and ongoing conflict today. These events occurred a while ago, but they’re not really history, “Soundtrack” argues. The past, one might say, is never dead. It’s not even past.
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