Jazz in US Public Diplomacy towards the USSR (1962-1971): Is Music an Effective Tool of Strategic Communications?

In the 1950s jazz became the primary force in American
cultural diplomatic efforts. It consolidated itself as a
metaphorical representation of the core principles of
American democracy, as the two shared an inherent
tension between structure and agency, rigid rules and
improvisation. This simple but powerful metaphor
prompted the Eisenhower administration to establish the
Cultural Presentations Programme, which paid so-called
'jazz ambassadors' to perform all over the world, thereby
advertising the appeal of American cultural and political
values.
This PhD explores US-sponsored jazz tours to the USSR-by
Benny Goodman's big band in 1962 and Duke Ellington's
band in 1971-from a Strategic Communications
perspective. It locates these tours within a broader
framework of Public Diplomacy, which ran against the
backdrop of heightened tensions between the superpowers
and was woven into discourses around threats of violence
and mutually assured destruction. By investigating the role
of the jazz tours in superpower cultural relations, this study
will illuminate their relationships with geopolitical and
military contexts of the Cold War. Ultimately, this PhD aims
to offer a fresh conceptual understanding around musiccultural
diplomacy. It argues that the jazz tours (i)
underpinned US foreign policy with a values-based
discourse; (ii) opened a direct route to networks of
'persuadable' soviet citizens; (iii) acted as a safety-valve to
kinetic threats in geopolitics of the US-USSR.