Jazz Around the World

"Time for jazz," says the deep voice carefully. "Time for jazz," echo tens of thousands of loudspeakers around the world, as the strains of Duke Ellington's Take the A Train die into the background. For the next hour, seven nights a week, 52 weeks a year, the world's most widely heard disk-jockey program has the attention of listeners in 80-odd countries. It is the second and more popular portion of Music U.S.A. (the first half is pop tunes), the Voice of America's only regular music program. The words come from Disk Jockey Willis Conover; the music comes from all over America.

A typical show, recorded on tape in Washington to broadcast from ten Voice stations a month later, includes such diverse items as Count Basie's swinging Straight Life, Joe Newman's Midgets, Charlie Parker's Air Conditioning, the Modern Jazz Quartet's Django, oldtime Trumpeter Papa Celestin's When the Saints Go Marching In, legendary Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke's Singin' the Blues, and a rousing number called I'm All Bound 'Round with the Mason Dixon Line, by the day's interviewee, Dixieland Trumpeter Jimmy McPartland. Between numbers, Conover quietly and succinctly tells about the next record or gently nudges his guest to talk about his life and times. "While they're learning to admire Americans as performers, listeners around the world are learning to admire America," says Conover. The show almost never tries to peddle overt pro-American or anti-Communist propaganda, is put together in the belief that "jazz is its own propaganda."

Not the Legs. The Voice was almost totally tone-deaf until two years ago; officials doubted the propaganda value of music. But it had at least a couple of staffers who were jazz buffs. Program Manager Eugene King and his deputy, John Wiggin, eventually made the point that, like it or not, jazz is a valuable exportable U.S. commodity. To sweeten its sometimes pungent flavor, the Voice decided to introduce the jazz with an hour of good pop music. To find an announcer the Voice held auditions, selected Buffalo-born Disk Jockey Conover, 35. His qualifications: a pleasantly resonant voice, the ability to speak slowly enough to be understood by foreigners with a little English, and an intimate knowledge of jazz; he owns a phenomenal 40,000 records, and draws from his collections for the Voice show. In most parts of the world, jazz is a kind of Esperanto to the young generation from 15 to 25, and even countries with boiling anti-American prejudices enjoy and respond to it. In Communist-dominated centers, jazz was a more or less secret pleasure for years --the commissars labeled it capitalist depravity--but it is now permitted openly and apparently without prejudice.

No Poison. Music U.S.A. has only a handful of taboos: no "physically suggestive" lyrics; nothing that might be racially offensive (Conover never identifies his Negro performers as such), and absolutely no rock 'n' roll. Says Conover: "I see no reason to poison the ears of overseas listeners."

At a rate of 1,000 a week, letters come in to let the Voice know it is being heard: New Zealand ("I have yet to hear a slush-pump [trombone] player who sends me more than Miff Mole"), Switzerland ("Thank you, Angel, for Oscar Petersen's Tenderly"), Poland ("more jamba, boogie"). No letters have been received from Russia, but Manager King heard the program while visiting Moscow and suspects that it is being taped for the benefit of Russian jazzmen who want to learn U.S. arrangements. In Hungary the Voice learned that there is a jazz band that tapes the jazz show every day.

Perhaps the comment that makes Music U.S.A.'s creators proudest came in a recent letter from Communist Prague: "You are doing a really good job, not only that you do our evenings more pleasant and unforgetable, but there is much deeper meaning of it--to become acquainted of the development of the art and spirit of American nation with all its optimistic roots of thinking."

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