Beating Jamming With Jazz: Beaming Music over the Iron Curtain

Willis Conover and Louis

Armstrong

No disc jockey of Radio Free Europe or Radio Liberty gained the legendary status of Willis Conover, who daily hosted the music program “Jazz Hour“ for the Voice of America (VOA).

A new 13-minute podcast about Willis Conover and Jazz music broadcast over VOA has just been posted on The Jazz at Lincoln Center website. It is listed as "preview" but it is a full program. The podcast description reads:

During the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States had a secret weapon: Willis Conover's "Jazz Hour," carried on the shortwave radio signals of The Voice of America across Russia and Eastern Europe:. Starting in 1955 and running for over forty years, 'Jazz Hour' nurtured generations of jazz musicians who grew up under the restrictions of Communism. On this edition of Jazz Stories we hear Willis Conover and two outstanding jazz musicians, Czech bassist George Mraz and Russian trumpeter Valery Ponomarev – both of whom learned about jazz from his broadcasts.

That is not without trying of RFE and RL but for the jamming of the frequencies of both RFE and RL throughout most of the Cold War. That being said, both RFE and RL had popular music programs including jazz. 

We will take a brief look at how jazz not only overcame jamming to reach listerners eager for western music, but also acted as a rallying tool to get Americans to back the Crusade for Freedom and RFE.

Here is an example of jamming, taken from the Crusade for Freedom film "Towers of Truth" narrated by famed television journalist Walter Cronkite:

RFE's Eva Stankova

Czech disc jockey Eva Stankova was once described in a newspaper article as a “lovely and vivacious refugee.“ She lived in New York and taped her music programs at the New York RFE office. Her program was called “Date with Eva” that was described in 1951 as, "a disk jockey program, brings once again into the enslaved land the native folk music and western jazz banned by the Reds." She traveled throughout the United States giving interviews over domestic radio stations, which played excerpts from her broadcasts and interviews with jazz greats. 

In the 1950s, Radio Free Europe broadcast pre-written scripts, using phonetics, read by famous jazz musicians Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Earl Hines and Stan Kenton. Newspapers in 1957 carried her photograph with the caption: "Checkin' in Czech -- Roy (Little Jazz) Eldridge says a few words in Czechoslovakia in the Czech language. Helping the famed trumpeter overcome the language barrier is pretty Eva Stankova of Radio Free Europe." The programs were then made available to U.S. audiences through the Crusade for Freedom. 

The Billboard magazine in 1958 proudly proclaimed itself in its sixty-fourth year to be “The Amusement Industry’s Leading Newsweekly.”  The March 3, 1958, issue had a full-page article entitled “A Report to the Music Industry” that dealt with Radio Free Europe and the Crusade for Freedom A photograph of the Munich RFE headquarters and a graphic of the RFE transmitter sites and how programs were broadcast from Germany and Portugal to East Europe.  The article focused on music: “The youth in these countries want to know about and hear the latest American pop, dance and jazz records.  And music of all kinds comprises some 15% of broadcast time to each country behind the Iron Curtain.”

For the 1959 campaign, the Advertising Council also sent out a two-record set to radio stations: one was entitled “But not for me—Freedom is not free” that contained brief personal appeals in support Radio Free Europe, from musicians and entertainers, Duke Ellington, Arthur Godfrey, Hy Gardner, Judy Holliday, Robert Preston and Dorothy Collins. It was distributed with a second record “This Guitar Chose Freedom” that told the story of Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo and his escape to freedom in 1956. Television personality Steve Allen was the speaker and Szabo is heard on the record playing songs “I remember you,” ‘Berklee’s Delight,” “You go to my head” and “Chinatown my Chinatown.” The theme of the recording was “How American jazz – stifled behind the Iron Curtain – sounds in a free land.”

Radio Liberty did not attempt to influence the American public for funding, so there was no equivalent of RFE’s disc jockey Evan Stankova. In the late 1950s, jazz great Louis Armstrong visited Radio Liberty’s New York studio. He agreed to an interview and introduced the program in carefully rehearsed Russian. He then played his trumpet to the accompaniment of a popular Soviet song "Five Minutes." Louis Armstrong also once was interviewed by Radio Free Europe. 

Below is a composite of his Russian language program introduction and photograph of Louis Armstrong before the RFE microphone.

The Benny Goodman band toured the USSR in 1962. Goodman became the first jazz musician to tour the Soviet Union for the State Department, when he made thirty appearances in six cities in five weeks. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev attended the band’s opening night in Moscow. Goodman opened the show with "Let’s Dance" and "Greetings Moscow," a number based on a Russian folk song. Khrushchev later sent Goodman a note reporting that he had been “very pleased and delighted to be at the concert.” 

Goodman in Moscow

Goodman gave an impromptu solo clarinet performance in Red Square. The New York Times noted that he became a visiting “Pied Piper” for curious children who swarmed around him in the shadow of the Kremlin.

Since Russian officials had banned the American musicians from fraternizing with ordinary citizens, reportedly band members Phil Woods and Zoot Sims made contact with jazz fans, who called out to them from behind trees and bushes as they walked through Moscow parks.

Original compositions of "Soviet" jazz musicians were "smuggled" out of the USSR by members of the Goodman band, who had surreptitiously met with the local musicians. In June 1963, Radio Liberty introduced a new weekly half-hour program produced in New York that was called This is Jazz (eto dzhaz). 

The first broadcast was that of eight musicians who played the smuggled jazz compositions: Bill Crow, bass, and alto saxophonist Phil Woods, tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, pianist John Bunch, trumpeter Art Farmer (using mostly the fluegelhorn) trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, baritone saxophonist Nick Brignola and drummer Walter Perkins. 

The jazz session broadcast was recorded but not released. A CD entitled The Liberty of Jazz with nine of the songs was recently reproduced by SoLyd Records in a limited edition. The CD jacket includes a photograph of the Radio’s transmitter site in Spain and the famous jazz performers. The songs can be previewed for purchase, including the Louis Armstrong recording of "Five Minutes," at numerous internet sites including Amazon and iTunes. 

For more photographs of music personalities before RFE's microphones, visit the RFE/RL Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/slide-shows/28470