Jazz: America’s Secret Sonic Weapon

At the height of the Cold War, the U.S. government recruited jazz icons such as Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington to tour the world as cultural ambassadors and burnish America’s reputation as a beacon of multi-cultural freedom and creativity. While this projection often obscured a far more complicated reality, the tours proved incredibly effective, inspiring one reporter to dub them “America’s secret sonic weapon.” At Evergreen—once the home of Ambassador John Work Garrett and his arts patron wife, Alice Warder Garrett—diplomacy and jazz have long co-existed. They will once again harmonize at this outdoor concert and talk co-sponsored by the Baltimore Jazz Alliance and featuring music by Peabody jazz sextet Kenyatta and narration by Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars professor Anna Harwell Celenza. Staged on Evergreen’s newly renovated historic terrace, this program will illustrate the power of jazz to seduce the world even as it remained a source of cultural dissonance for some Americans.

Light refreshments will be served.