coldhearted scientist وداد

Always of interest to me are the ways in which folk and ethnic musics are deployed in the service of national projects. Penny M. Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Harvard, 2005) discusses one such case.

From Brian Morton’s review (The Nation, June 27, 2005, 38-41):

Between 1956 and the late 1970s, the State Department dispatched jazz musicians to an array of Third World and Soviet bloc countries, including East Germany, Iraq and the Congo…[Members of] a marginalized people [were] sent abroad to sing the praises of the very country that marginalized them.

Axé.