Introduction
The Duke Ellington orchestra's visit to the Soviet Union (USSR) during September and October 1971 marked their most important and publicised State Department tour ever, following acclaimed and successful State tours they made during the 1960s to the Middle East, Near East, Asia and Africa. The Soviet tour occurred during the efforts of President Richard Nixon to establish détente at the height of the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union and China. The announcement of the tour made the front page of the New York Times, and the Washington D.C. Star linked the Soviets' acceptance of Ellington (who they had ruled out for a tour in 1962) to Soviet counter-strategy in response to Nixon's recent friendly overtures, including the announcement of a visit to Communist China. Before Ellington's tour began, Nixon also announced his own upcoming trip to the Soviet Union. The Chicago Tribune's Moscow correspondent reported that Ellington's arrival was being ‘seen as a big shot in the arm for the [cultural] exchange program … [which] serve[s] as one barometer of the overall state of Soviet–American relations. The current situation, on that standard, has not been good’. A six-month American freeze after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, a cancellation of a 1970 Bolshoi Ballet American tour because of Jewish Defence League protests, and a currently unfulfilled exchange contract between the US and USSR were cited as evidence for this observation. Before he left the country, Ellington's unprecedented touring success would completely turn around the recent history of stymied cultural exchanges between the two countries.
Other jazz figures preceded Ellington to the USSR, including Benny Goodman (1962), Earl Hines (1966) and Charles Lloyd (1967), but Ellington was the most famous single American cultural figure to tour the country yet. The Fresno Bee voiced ‘one misgiving’ about the tour. They characterised Goodman as a ‘notably taciturn fellow whose stage talk, if any, was brief’. Ellington, on the other hand, ‘has a penchant for wry, elaborate, ornamental, mock-pretentious, multi-syllabic patter between numbers’. They warned the Russians to ‘start prepping their most facile and sophisticated interpreter’. Ellington, as usual, experienced no trouble communicating: his Soviet audience, prepared for his appearance by years of Voice Of America (VOA) jazz radio broadcasts and expensive illegal bootleg recordings, gave him a reception of Beatlemania proportions wherever he went.Footnote 1
During the 1970s, the State Department greatly increased Ellington and the orchestra's diplomatic appearances around the world, probably inspired by the immense amount of positive international publicity resulting from Ellington's appearance at the Nixon White House in April 1969, where he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award given by the United States. As demonstrated on numerous previous State-sponsored tours, Ellington could be counted on to represent the United States with grace and the consistent support of the idea of ‘freedom’. Ellington found not just acceptance in Communist and satellite countries, but often rabid enthusiasm that belied official Soviet government disdain or censorship of American jazz.
Yet, Ellington was no propaganda-spouting mouthpiece for the American government. He had his own ideas to communicate as well, ideas expressed for decades that would now receive an unprecedented international airing. As seen in publicity for his 1963 State tour, and in international press clippings distributed by the Government in the years following the tour, Ellington and his music were portrayed abroad as the pinnacle of American culture. In the 1950s, numerous controversies erupted within the US government establishment when Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie were sent abroad by the State Department in the mid-1950s, and jazz tours were discontinued for years afterward; in the 1960s and 1970s, the US government depicted jazz as high culture, the best America had to offer. Times were changing.Footnote 2
With the placing of Ellington on a State-sponsored Soviet tour, music served again as an instrument signifying a change in the portrayal and treatment of blacks in America and around the world, and as evidence of what blacks could achieve in the United States. For years, Ellington had represented black achievement and artistry like no one else in the jazz and black communities. Starting in the 1960s, the US government appropriated that image to sell a positive vision of American character and respectability to the world. Once again, as occurred many times during his illustrious half-century career, Ellington was seen as existing in a realm beyond entertainment, as signifying something important about America and the world. In this period, his influence moved beyond the United States and Western Europe and would continue to do so for the rest of his career.
Tour logistics
It took several months to nail down the logistics of the Soviet tour. Originally, the vocalists Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan were pencilled in to accompany Ellington and the orchestra, but the idea was quickly dropped. In early negotiations during January 1971, Cress Courtney, Ellington's personal manager, told State Department personnel that Ellington initially felt hesitant about touring the Soviet Union ‘because he's such an anti-communist’. Once again, Ellington's birthday appearance at the White House lent additional status to his presence. When Alla A. Butrova, head of the Western European and American section of the USSR Ministry of Culture, voiced scepticism about bringing Ellington to her country, the State Department's director of Cultural Presentations in Europe noted that ‘Duke Ellington was held in particularly high esteem by the President’.Footnote 3
For their services, the band received a rate of $19,000 per week (almost $100,000 in today's dollars), for four 140-minute concerts and one guaranteed non-travel, non-performing day per week. The State Department also paid $10,856 in pre-tour expenses. Two extra shows booked during the tour in Moscow earned the band another $18,000. Altogether, the Ellington orchestra played 22 sold-out shows in five locales over 33 days for a combined audience of 126,000, more shows per week than the original contract called for. Ellington's booking agency informed the State Department that, on his last European tour, Ellington earned $26,500 per week, which they felt showed ‘he is sincere in his desire to serve’. With the added shows, the orchestra actually pulled in a little more than $25,000 per week. Actually, they would have made that much if the Internal Revenue Service had not insisted on taking the contract's final payment of $16,000 to help defray over $100,000 in back taxes they claimed Duke Ellington Inc. owed them. It seemed particularly crass to garnish Ellington's wages when he was working on behalf of his country.
Perhaps Ellington's ‘desire to serve’ was best demonstrated by the fact that he and the orchestra consistently played much longer shows than contracted for, of anywhere between 180 and 210 minutes, some of the longest concerts the band ever performed. The USSR State-run promoter Goskontsert paid for most of the tour expenses, including airfare and hotels, as well as fees of $1,000 per show to the United States and $2,000 to the Soviet Union. Such conditions did not keep Goskonsert from making ‘a great deal of money out of the tour’, according to the tour's State Department escort officer Joseph A. Presel. The State Department's share of money from the concerts came to $73,111, including the fees from Goskontsert, reducing the net cost of the Ellington tour for the US government to just $58,812 – an absolute bargain, considering the wealth of positive international publicity garnered.Footnote 4
It represented no accident that the Ellington tour was announced as an era of détente between the two Cold War superpowers was beginning.Footnote 5 Nixon had promised a tougher attitude toward the USSR during his 1968 presidential campaign, but behind the scenes, along with his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, they attempted to open up a wider dialogue with Soviet leaders, particularly on issues of nuclear missile disarmament, India–Pakistan relations, the status of Cold War Germany and ending the Vietnam War, among other concerns. Not all of these discussions bore political or diplomatic fruit, but the fact that the two countries were communicating more frequently was viewed as positive, particularly in light of former McCarthyite Nixon's surprising visits to the Soviet Union and Communist China in 1972. State Department dispatch traffic during the Ellington tour mentions both of these future trips. According to Cold War historian Deborah Welch Larson (Reference Larson1997), the ‘mistrust’ and ‘deadlock’ between the two countries ‘did not begin to break until spring 1971’, exactly when the Ellington tour was announced.
The Ellington Soviet tour can be viewed as part of the Nixon administration's efforts toward establishing détente, and the Soviet acceptance of Ellington can also be seen in this light. During the early 1960s, the Soviets refused to allow Ellington to tour their country. George Avakian, recording executive and producer, spoke with Madame Ekatarina Furtseva, head of the Soviet Ministry of Culture, while trying to set up a separate jazz event in the Soviet Union during the early 1960s. She asked for Avakian's recommendations on American jazz performers for a State Department tour of the Soviet Union. Avakian mentioned three artists that he had produced in the past. First, he forwarded Armstrong. ‘Too popular’, Furtseva quickly replied. His next suggestion was Ellington, who she rejected as ‘too intellectual’. Avakian argued that Ellington represented ‘our classical jazz artist’ and that this would help Russians relate to him and his work. ‘Our people wouldn't like him,’ she stated. Next, Avakian mentioned Goodman, who Furtseva liked best, particularly after he mentioned that Goodman's family emigrated from Russia and that his wife was Georgian. Avakian diplomatically did not mention that Goodman's Jewish family fled Russia to avoid pogroms.
‘The State Department could not dictate to the Soviet government,’ Avakian said decades later. ‘It was either Benny or nobody. I don't think they would have invited anybody else’ from the jazz world. Avakian understood why Armstrong met with such resistance from Soviet officials. ‘Armstrong would have caused riots in the streets,’ he argued, just as he had in other, less policed areas of the world during international tours. Frank Siscoe, the State Department's director of Soviet and Eastern European Cultural Exchanges, told Jet that Soviet officials expressed the fear that ‘their youth would get too excited if they saw the more established jazz groups [such as Ellington and Armstrong] in person and it would look like they [the youth] had completely accepted Western ideas,’ an outcome unacceptable to the Soviets. A State Department source told the New York Times that Ellington's name never emerged in negotiations, but Armstrong and Goodman did, with the Soviets stating their preference for the latter. As scholar Penny Von Eschen has noted, a successful Soviet tour by Ellington or another black jazz performer would also have contradicted the Soviets' assertions of American racism.Footnote 6
Preparations
Before the tour, minor complications surfaced. On 2 August 1971, a Soviet delegation attended the opening for a four-week Ellington stand at New York City's Rainbow Grill. According to a local paper, they recognised Ellington's biggest hits but, perhaps because of Nixon's upcoming trip to Communist China, ‘they showed no emotion when the Duke introduced his [composition] “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” by quoting Marshall McLuhan's recent conclusion that “the whole world is going Oriental”’. Something else bothered the delegation even more. Soon thereafter, Vladimir Golovin, Goskontsert's Deputy Director, contacted the State Department to object to ‘the body gyrations of [Ellington] vocalist Tony Watkins’. The Department informed Courtney that ‘Mr. Golovin has no objections to Watkins performing as long as his body movements are controlled … [his] major concern is that if the body gyrations are not markedly reduced, Soviet audiences will respond unfavourably and the Soviet press will be critical, thus jeopardizing the success of the whole tour.’Footnote 7
During the summer of 1971, Ellington also made personal dietary requests. In the last years of his life, he drank six or seven glasses of Coca Cola per day, with several spoonfuls of sugar and fresh lime or lemon juice added, and he felt it necessary to continue this energy-enhancing regimen on his Soviet tour. He was 72 years old, yet still extraordinarily active physically and artistically at the time of the Soviet tour. Coca Cola had not yet arrived in the Soviet Union, but the US embassy in Moscow offered to supply 15 cases of it for his exclusive use (not the orchestra's). They warned him that the embassy commissary frequently ran out of sugar, and that limes were impossible to procure in the USSR, but lemons were commonly available. Ellington would have to reimburse the embassy's expenses for these items ‘upon arrival’, since such beverage requests stretched ‘diplomatic customs regulations’. Ellington also demanded a daily steak on tour, the central item in his main daily meal. Golovin worried that steak might not be available in all five of the cities the band performed in, and the US embassy informed Ellington that ‘steak in the Soviet Union does not taste like steak in the United States. And that is one thing the Embassy cannot provide the Duke. Cokes and lemon, yes; American steak, no.’ The steak issue would return to haunt the State Department during the tour.Footnote 8
For their initial descent into the Soviet Union, every member of the Duke Ellington orchestra flew first class for the first time, on Ellington's orders. Ellington had Courtney communicate to the State Department his insistence that he ‘does not want to arrive in Moscow in a segregated group’. ‘He said he didn't want any distinction between himself in first-class and the band in a different class’, recalled band aide Robert L. Jones. ‘They were all first-class [when they flew into the Soviet Union on behalf of their country] … it was the only time he ever mentioned something like that, and he himself flew first-class all the time and nobody cares. Actually, to the guys, he was first-class, that was their kind of attitude.’ The gesture demonstrated that, for Ellington, this represented a different State Department tour than previous trips. He had long communicated his antipathy towards communism. While he was magnanimous as usual to Soviet fans and engaged in no political grandstanding on the tour, he wanted his performances and presence to embody the differences between what he viewed as the freedom and democracy of his home country, and the current situation in the Soviet Union. As he had many times throughout his career, Ellington communicated by example, rather than more confrontational methods.Footnote 9
Escort officer Joseph A. Presel, in his tour report, touched upon some of the reasons why the Ellington orchestra proved so popular and why Soviet leaders had been resistant to and threatened by jazz for decades:
The US could send performing seals and get away with it, so great is the desire of the Soviet population to experience things American. The Ellington orchestra operated within the atmosphere that those considerations create. It had two other attributes, though, that set it still further apart from other, similar ventures. First, it was jazz, and second it was historic. Those who govern the Soviet Union have always had an ambivalent attitude towards jazz, one that mostly treated it as a phenomenon, and an undesirable one at that, of the bourgeois world, rather than as an expression of the oppressed working class in capitalist society. It has always been hard for jazz to be performed in the USSR. (Presel Reference Presel1971b)
Life magazine noted that Stalin banned the music during most of his reign, though a couple of American jazz bands, including one featuring Sidney Bechet, performed in the Soviet Union during the mid-1920s.Footnote 10 The principal reason the power of jazz loomed threateningly to the leadership of a Communist country went beyond the ideological and political explanations offered by Presel: the music promoted avid freedom of expression, not just musical, but also sexual, racial and social. It radiated individual, unpredictable non-quantifiable creativity, on the bandstand and on the dance floor. Its foundation lay partly in the religious roots of the spiritual and of gospel music. These were all forbidden properties in a totalitarian state. These qualities also marked the reasons jazz was so threatening to many whites and blacks in the United States during the first decades of the 20th century, as Ellington well knew from experience.
The tour
Upon arrival in Moscow, the orchestra was greeted by Alexei Batushev, a physicist and the head of the Moscow Jazz Club who gave Ellington a bear-hug, and ‘40 other diehard jazz fans eager for a glimpse of one of their long-time favorites of the American music world’. One of those fans yelled at Ellington: ‘We've been waiting for you for centuries!’ Ellington told the assembled fans and press at the airport that ‘these are guys who've been listening to what we've been doing for a long time, so you feel like it's all the same family, the same tribe’. Though almost no Western recordings were officially available in the Soviet Union, VOA had made Soviet audiences familiar with the Ellington repertoire. One fan at the Moscow airport said he had taped 500 Ellington songs over a 20-year period. A relatively small number of fans gathered for Ellington's initial arrival, but the Soviet press, controlled by the cautious government, had provided ‘almost no publicity’ of the Ellington tour yet. The jazz grapevine in the Soviet Union, however, had spread the word and ‘tickets to the concerts [were] already much sought by Russians with foreign friends and tastes’. In Leningrad, the tour's first official stop, as Ellington recalled in his autobiography, ‘we are met by a big band that marches across the airfield toward us playing Dixieland jazz, with trombones sliding, clarinets smearing off, and all the musicians blowing in the traditional manner.’Footnote 11
Audience reaction to Ellington started ecstatically, and stayed that way. Leningrad audiences packed a 4,200-seat venue for five nights straight. Tickets were priced at 5 roubles ($5.50 – almost $30 in today's dollars) for orchestra seats, and about $4 for balcony seats, with black market prices reaching $50 or more per ticket since demand greatly exceeded quantity. Every night, hundreds surrounded the venue hoping to scalp tickets. This ticket situation stayed constant during Ellington's run in the Soviet Union. In Kiev, tickets proved so hard to procure that members of the local police band wore their uniforms in order to sneak into a show. At first, an ‘American official’ expressed alarm about the heightened police presence, until one of them explained the situation. The audience, ‘predominantly a young crowd and, by Soviet standards, quite fashionably dressed [with] a few midiskirts, turtleneck sweaters, wide ties, and bright colors sprinkled through[out]’, demanded 45–60 minutes of encores nightly and stood and applauded for 10 minutes or more after the band finally left the stage. Even Communist party officials were witnessed smiling and clapping along. This kind of behaviour became common on the tour, but reached a height on the last night in Leningrad, when Ellington and the band played an hour and a half of encores. Circumstances like these formed the main reason why Ellington played at least three – and sometimes close to four – hours per show.
When asked by United Press International if the Leningrad audience ‘was one of the more enthusiastic’ he'd ever seen, Ellington replied, ‘Absolutely. Only more so.’ Trumpeter Harold (Money) Jackson, who later in the tour sang and played ‘Hello Dolly’ when USSR fans asked for something by Louis Armstrong, agreed with his boss: ‘It's great to play for Soviet audiences. They go wild.’ Ellington also found himself impressed by the fact that ‘an awful lot of young people’ were requesting his autograph. Although Ellington performed esoteric material on the tour, such as ‘Fife’, ‘Happy Reunion’, ‘La Belle Plus Africaine’ and the full 15-minute version of his musical tribute to ‘Harlem’ (dedicated on the first night to the US Ambassador), Soviet audiences were most excited about the band's old hits, and to the orchestra's chagrin, the repertoire changed little from night to night. Russian crowds also appreciated tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves' improvisations on Russian songs entitled ‘Moscow Nights’ and ‘Dark Eyes’. Escort officer Presel felt that Ellington should have showcased more of his newer, more challenging pieces in order to inspire Russian jazz composers, as he felt Alvin Ailey did in the recent tour of his ballet company. After Presel pointed this out, Ellington included ‘more modern pieces’.Footnote 12
The State Department seemed particularly excited about after-hours jam sessions, some official and some not, between Soviet musicians and the Ellington orchestra.Footnote 13 On the afternoon of 16 September, an official jam session sponsored by the Leningrad Union of Composers occurred at the Dom Druzhby (the ‘Friendship House’ of the Institute of Soviet–American Relations). This represented the kind of ‘generally stiff and structured “warm meetings” which the Soviet officialdom has become so adept at staging over the years’, according to the embassy's report.
But, as a State Department telegram noted in detail, ‘a more important informal session’ transpired that same night after Ellington's show at the Kamerton (‘Tuning Fork’) Jazz Club. Unlike the other session, permission for this show was sought through US embassy, not Soviet, channels. When Presel brought up the idea to road manager Mercer Ellington, Ellington's son ‘enthusiastically’ agreed to it. The event was held in ‘strict secrecy’ with supposedly only club members attending, and Ellington's musicians were only told the location 10 minutes before their arrival. Despite such measures, 150 people packed the club, including ‘several prominent Soviet jazz musicians … the head of the Leningrad Composers Union … Life and AP photographers … and watch dogs from the Dom Druzhby and Goskontsert’. They saw an impromptu 17-piece jazz band, almost evenly comprised of Soviet jazzers and Ellington band members, perform. Presel found the show ‘remarkable because … the Ellington band members and Soviet jazz musicians [were joined] as equals, because of the sophistication of the Soviet musicians and the depth of their knowledge of jazz … and because the [Ellington] band found it fun’. Over a hundred people waited outside, watching the proceedings for hours through sidewalk-level windows. When Ellington arrived, he was promptly ‘caught in [the] press of [the] enthusiastic crowd, and left almost immediately. Kamerton members said later they were “mortified” by the incident and hoped Duke was not offended’.
The next day, US embassy officials were informed that the club ‘would be made inactive for at least a year’ for scheduling the jam session sans official permission. The man who headed the Dixieland band that greeted the Ellingtonians at the airport ‘is also scheduled for at least an oral dressing down for not requesting prior permission’. The main organiser of the Kamerton jam session, Vladimir Khavkin, ‘twenty-six, Jewish … [with] a full beard and rather wild bushy hair’, was assigned the task of submitting himself to Soviet officials because he was the organization's ‘expendable man’. ‘The police all know me, because I am a suspicious person,’ he told State Department officials. ‘I have friends in Europe, America, and Israel and have therefore been photographed, bugged, and taken in for questioning many times’. Such was the price of dissent in the USSR; these incidents during the Ellington tour demonstrated that Soviet government officials were prepared to allow only so much freedom without sanction.
State Department files document an additional official session at the Dom Druzhby in Moscow near the end of the tour. A big band composed of both American and Soviet musicians, including electric guitar and flugelhorn, offered several impromptu numbers. Ellington performed a new song on piano, announcing it by saying: ‘I have composed a new song for you called “My Love”’. He later joined the group on balalaika, a present from the Soviet musicians.
Soviet authorities tended to discourage, or at least insist on closely scrutinizing any contacts between Soviet and American citizens, especially musicians. When Mercer Ellington planned to accept an invitation for him and other Ellington band members to witness a rehearsal of the Minsk Philharmonic, a Goskonsert representative told him ‘that they had checked with the appropriate parties and that Mercer was mistaken’. According to the embassy report, the representative claimed that Mercer had been ‘led … down the garden path. Mercer, a man of the world if ever there was one, somewhat heatedly let Goskonsert know in no uncertain terms that if anyone was trying to fool anyone else, it was Goskonsert, not the Minsk musician’ who invited the band. Mercer, his father, and other band members ended up viewing and enjoying the rehearsal.
As B.H. Klosson of the US embassy recalled, guards, police, or Goskonsert interpreters and employees were ubiquitous at Ellington shows, particularly at theatre doors after performances, to keep social and musical fraternization between Soviets and Americans to a minimum. ‘In Minsk, the lobby of the stage entrance was almost wall-to-wall with “goons”’, Klosson reported. While Goskonsert officials assured US officials that security personnel were just ‘simple employees of the theater’, embassy employees and some Russian civilians present felt that some of the ‘goons’ were KGB officers. However, as Klosson noted, such attempts at intimidation and isolation did not curtail Ellington and the band's efforts to establish contacts with Soviets ‘in every city’ they visited. Ellington ‘talked and met and jammed with Soviets’. More importantly, the State Department encouraged such activities, which served as a counterpoint to the Ellington orchestra's extensive 1963 State tour through the middle and near east, when the band complained that they only encountered elites. In the Soviet case, and in the band's subsequent dates in Eastern Europe, ‘it was the Communist elite that that US officials were hoping to bypass’ in order to reach the ‘man in the street’, according to historian Penny Von Eschen.Footnote 14
Presel found that ‘the Soviets were scared of Ellington, both personally and because … of his relationship with the President, and because of the Duke's importance in the United States’. He felt that the announcement of Nixon's upcoming visit to the USSR exacerbated this fear, and the accompanying desire to do nothing to offend Ellington in his travels. Presel also felt that such circumstances ensured a smoother tour for the Ellingtonians, resulting in far fewer inconveniences, such as the lost luggage, stolen costumes, last-minute scheduling and bad pianos that plagued Earl Hines' 1966 Soviet tour. But Presel kept the true identity of the Soviets' object of fear a secret: ‘I saw no need to enlighten the Soviets who accompanied us as to Ellington's true nature: that he is a very thoughtful 72-year-old gentleman who wants basically to be left alone to compose and play music and have someone – me in this case – to whom he could bitch for an hour or so every few days’. Presel also remarked that ‘Ellington was very happy to get mad at the Soviets when I asked him to; it was very effective’. Ellington seemed to have no trouble occasionally venting frustration at the Soviets for his own reasons as well, without government intervention.Footnote 15
Tensions of a different kind arose from the introduction of the issues of race on the tour. Many articles in the Soviet press dwelled on the subject of Ellington as a black composer, as if to stress his status as an oppressed minority, and cast aspersions on the American treatment of minorities while praising one of them. ‘The interviewers were by no means knowledgeable about jazz and were much more interested in getting Ellington to admit that he was a black composer than they were in his musical accomplishments’, recalled Presel. At such times, Ellington pointed out the fact that he had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom ‘and that he was an “American” composer. He was uninterested, he said, in people's colour and assumed they were indifferent to his. The Soviet journalists normally found this a baffling line of thought’. The Embassy reported what occurred when the Ukrainian Composers Union in Kiev explored the same tack with Ellington present:
It was a fascinating mixture of proclamations of brotherhood and slinging of words. Here was a self-styled rugged individualist of the American music world meeting with composers who had made their careers rocking no boats in the sea of socialist realism. Sparks were inevitable, and when one of the Ukrainians suggested that the Duke as a ‘successful Negro musician and composer’ really represented the product of his environment, Ellington flared. Every man must play his own music, he said, and if he tries to imitate others he is a failure. He, Ellington, had succeeded by creating his own distinct music, and he owed his success to no one and nothing but his own hard work and creativity. And furthermore, to say that there is such a thing as Negro jazz is simply ignorant. There is only jazz, and every musician plays it in his own style, if he is genuine, regardless of skin color. Neatly mouse-trapped, the Ukrainians all nodded in pious acknowledgement of the truth in this, and the meeting ended soon after with words of brotherhood and an exchange of gifts.Footnote 16
Ellington's difference of opinion with these observers represented a declaration of the musical and racial freedom he had fought for and won in the United States over the previous half-century, a freedom that clearly did not exist in the Soviet Union. It also signified his broad rejection of any kind of categorization. As was true on his previous State Department-sponsored tours, especially in 1963 and 1966, Ellington was not about to allow others, particularly Communists, to use his race to bash his country and its way of life, or call into question why he had achieved so much success.
At home, Ellington had represented what he referred to as ‘Negro music’ since the 1920s, had been called a ‘race leader’ in the black press since the early 1930s, authored dozens of compositions programmatically celebrating African American history and personages, played hundreds of benefits for black organisations, postulated at length about black history in interviews in national newspapers, and even participated in a sit-in in Baltimore in 1960. But overseas, while representing his country, in the tradition of American diplomats, he refused to badmouth his country, preferring to dwell on the progress that had been made in the area of race relations and the advantages of American democracy. In 1966, Ellington recalled that when encountering foreigners on State Department tours, ‘the big question when they meet an American negro [sic] is always the race problem’. They would ask if ‘it was true that a Negro had been beaten up in Alabama a few days back. ‘It's true,’ I said, “but where else in the world could that happen and you'd know about it the next day way over here?” We have all the problems of a free country.’Footnote 17
Press reaction
The Soviet press gave the Ellington tour unprecedented coverage. While the Soviet media often interviewed foreign artists, ‘published results are generally woefully small’, according to the embassy's report. ‘If an article does result, it is generally well after the performing arts group has left town – the Soviets don't believe in free advertising for foreign groups.’ This established model did not apply on the Ellington tour. The embassy counted nine ‘favorable’ reviews printed while Ellington remained in the country, with some of them classified as ‘raves’. Most impressive was a large one-third-page spread entitled ‘Orchestra of Virtuosos’ in Pravda, the largest circulation newspaper in the Soviet Union. Jacob Beam, the US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, wrote in a telegram to Secretary of State William P. Rogers that this marked the first time ‘Pravda has even acknowledged the existence in the country of a US performing arts group’. Lavish compliments were offered by the review, as well as this comment about Ellington's ‘Harlem’: ‘full of melancholy, sadness and the rebelliousness of the Negro ghetto’. This article was followed by a piece called ‘Duke Ellington: I Love You!’ in Sovetskaya Rossiya, one of Russia's most conservative papers. ‘This, from the organ of the Party Central Committee, was heady stuff indeed!’, exulted the embassy's report.Footnote 18
North American press reaction also proved voluminous and telling. Aside from syndicated reviews of the concerts, the Ellington tour also inspired many pieces on editorial pages that linked him to the hopes and anxieties of the Cold War. A Canadian paper noted the ‘delirious reaction’ to Ellington in the Soviet Union, and viewed it as ‘a further reminder that not all Russians are cast in the same mould as the bureaucratic and diplomatic zealots who speak and act for them’. The editorial page of the Topeka [Kansas] State Journal commented that ‘the international language of music – especially lighthearted jazz – is a good way to take minds off sober world problems. We might even dare hope it is a “disarming” exchange of pleasantries’. In an editorial called ‘“Da” for the Duke’, the Hartford [Connecticut] Times remarked that ‘it is the good fortune of the United States that it has other things to export besides computers, office machines and automobiles … we can safely say the Duke is one of our superior exports’. A Schenectady Gazette editorial on ‘Duke Power’ pointed out how many of the concerts were sold out early, ‘attesting to the popularity of American jazz in a country whose officialdom frowns on it’.Footnote 19
To the chagrin of Ellington, the State Department and the Soviets, the story that dominated American media coverage of the tour centred on the steak controversy.Footnote 20 ‘Duke can't cut it On Russian steaks’, ran a typical headline in the 20 September edition of the Los Angeles Times. The article claimed Ellington ‘was unable to eat Russian steak and was losing five pounds a day’, and that the tour was in possible jeopardy. The truth proved less dramatic, but underreported. As the US embassy and Goskonsert warned, Soviet steaks were far from Ellington's usual standard. Just a few days into the tour, he requested steaks from Reuben's, one of his favourite restaurants in New York, shipped at his own expense. Pan Am Airlines flew them from New York to Moscow gratis. Russian customs officials held up and ruined the first shipment for lack of an international certificate of origin. A second batch caught up with Ellington in Minsk, the second stop on the tour. While State Department personnel noticed that the steaks helped the ‘Ellington morale’, they also reported that his health was never in ‘jeopardy’. When Dr Logan, Ellington's personal physician and close friend, visited the tour in Rostov, he found that Ellington had actually gained five pounds. Even before the steak controversy, Ellington had voiced his enjoyment of Russian food on the tour, especially borscht and caviar. But steak represented his staple food, and he missed it, though he also told the Associated Press that ‘there is nothing like a cheeseburger’. ‘While admiring Duke's patriotism and taste’, Secretary of State Rogers, in a priority telegram, let the US embassy in Moscow know that the international publicity resulting from such remarks inspired McDonalds and Gallagher Steak Houses to contact the State Department with offers to ship cheeseburgers and steak to Ellington, supposedly in hopes of gaining publicity. Rogers instructed the embassy to ask Ellington to avoid making food-related comments. Later, Ellington's friend H. Robert Udkoff visited the tour and, to Ellington's delight, taught Russian chefs how to make American cheeseburgers.
The State Department attempted to find out who leaked the incorrect information about Ellington's health. The news stories referenced ‘US officials’, but the Department determined that it must have been one of the American ‘hangers-on’ in Ellington's entourage. While the State Department, including the Secretary of State, were clearly unhappy about the publicity over the steak controversy, it is also true that a memo written by the Director of Cultural Presentations before the story was leaked to the American press explored the possibilities of exploiting Ellington's culinary displeasure:
Jokingly, if we wanted to embarrass the Soviets a little it would have been tempting to suggest to Reuben's that they advertise Reuben's steaks going to Duke Ellington in Russia. It was not suggested. But Reuben's is the eatery of a lot of New York columnists, and Reuben's would not be concerned about foreign relations or diplomatic delicacies – only Reuben's delicacies. Headline: Duke Only Likes American Steaks.
Ellington, in keeping with his beliefs about communist conspiracies, blamed the rumours on ‘someone in Washington working for the opposition’. He also believed that his rooms were bugged and subject to photographic surveillance while he was in the Soviet Union. Musician/arranger Aaron Bridgers recalled Ellington telling him that he bowed out of politeness to potential eavesdroppers whenever entering his Soviet hotel rooms.Footnote 21
Luckily, the press either did not pick up on or chose not to report on various alcoholic and sexual shenanigans engaged in by band members. In a handwritten note composed during the tour, Presel reported that ‘I circle on the black edge of catastrophe all the time but we've avoided it so far … both alcoholic and sexual frustrations appear to be overcome sufficiently often that none of the band has gone round the bend … in fact morale is better than I feared.’ In his more formal tour report, Presel marvelled at the band's ‘remarkable ingenuity in contriving to supply themselves with both [sexual and alcoholic] commodities despite all of the difficult conditions that obtain in the USSR. I am in awe of the band's abilities in these areas’. The band particularly objected to the ‘ubiquitous little old ladies’ who handled room keys on each floor of their hotels, thereby making it difficult to sneak guests into their rooms. An English businessman living in the band's Moscow hotel complained to the Washington Post of ‘a lot of parties’ late at night. Somehow the tour avoided ‘scandal’, sometimes by a small margin, according to Presel. One of his favourite memories in this regard featured a Goskonsert official objecting to two local girls riding on the band's bus in Leningrad. The official objected ‘bitterly’ to their presence, and said: ‘I don't mind people who aren't in the band on the bus, but why do they have to pick the two people who are well known as local prostitutes? It's very uncultured!’Footnote 22
On the road in the USSR
Living conditions for Ellington and the band were actually quite rough much of the time in the Soviet Union. They frequently complained of being cold in their hotel rooms. Udkoff remembered Ellington composing in the bathroom with a hot shower constantly running so the steam would keep him warm while he finished a commission for a post-USSR concert piece in Jacksonville, FL. As usual on Soviet tours, everyday staples in America like soap, hair conditioner, pens, film and razors were difficult to procure. Aside from the steak controversy, food often presented problems for the band. Presel felt the problems may have been purposeful. Not only did food usually arrive ‘cold, delayed and unattractive’, but often the senior Goskonsert representative failed to guarantee ‘that restaurants stayed open late enough to ensure that the group got a hot meal after the show’. While he could never prove it, Presel believed that the head Goskonsert contact ‘was spending less than the budgeted [five roubles] per day per man and was pocketing the difference. It would not surprise me either to be told that he had a good side-line going in selling Ellington buttons and records and the jazz brochures’, which were supplied by the State Department for Soviet fans. The band's hotels generally had no room service. Food problems were not made easier for the State Department by the fact that no one had told them until arrival that the Ellington orchestra had two vegetarians and two diabetics controlling their insulin through diet. These four band members endured a particularly difficult culinary experience during the tour. A Washington Post reporter concluded that ‘Ellington and his men seem to have survived the Soviet Union rather than thrived’. When he went to see the band at breakfast in Moscow one morning, ‘he found that almost half the men had gone to the American embassy to see the doctor there’.Footnote 23
Ticket problems also surfaced in Moscow, the tour's last stop.Footnote 24 The State Department discovered that only 800 of the 4,400 seats for the band's four shows went on sale to the public. The majority of seats were assigned to middle- and lower-level party functionaries by orders of the Fourth Department of the Party Central Committee. Music editors at Soviet newspapers received no tickets, and the Moscow Composers Union only got two. Such were the perils of Goskonsert's direct connection to the Soviet government. As a result, long all-night lines of Muscovites gathered at the Teatr Estrady hoping to score tickets, and the militia was called out to break up the lines. The State Department felt this approach emanated from the Soviets' long-term unwillingness to permit ‘good exposure for American performing arts groups’ in Moscow, ‘the seat of government’. The Soviet government wanted to control the audience, and perhaps dampen enthusiasm at the shows for Ellington. With many members of the international press present in Moscow, they did not wish to provide a ready platform that demonstrated how hugely popular an American artist could be in the Soviet Union.
Ultimately, because of the ‘general scandal’ and uproar over the lack of Moscow tickets, Goskonsert ‘made a late and unprecedented request’ to the American Embassy for extra Ellington shows in Moscow. The US Cultural Affairs Officer in Moscow agreed, but stipulated that the shows take place in a much larger venue than the Estrady, such as the Lushniki Sports Palace, which seated nearly 10,000 and had never hosted an American act. Golovin, deputy director of Goskonsert, replied: ‘Impossible.’ He told the embassy that the Sports Palace was currently laying down ice for future hockey matches. The embassy responded: ‘Melt the ice.’ Golovin again claimed this was ‘impossible’, but, as the State Department crowed in the official tour report, ‘Goskonsert blinked’ and ‘the ice melted’.
Presel, in his tour report, wrote about what he viewed as the significance of the Sports Palace shows:
Despite the total lack of advertisement, the hall was sold out for both concerts. While it meant much more work for the band, it was worth a great deal to experience the Soviets coming to us to ask us to perform more, to expose still larger numbers to Ellington's art. It made up for a lot of no-saying that is a constant feature of Soviet officialdom on these tours. Obviously they had so badly miscalculated the pressure for tickets that they had to give in. It was extremely good for our morale.
But not for the band's morale. They registered their ‘intense disgust’ at the arrangement, which took away days they would have had off. Even Ellington, usually a tireless workhorse on the road, had to be ‘worked on’ by Presel and Mercer Ellington before he acceded. The $9,000 fee per show, one of the band's biggest ever paydays, must have helped convince him, especially after the IRS had garnished $16,000 of the band's salary. Another extra show in Moscow occurred when the Protestant chaplain of the US embassy asked Ellington to perform a Sacred Concert before a private audience of about 200 international diplomats at Spaso House. The choir consisted of hastily assembled embassy employees and their families, rehearsed by Tony Watkins, the band vocalist whose body movements had so upset Soviet officials in New York City.
A Success?
Most involved viewed Ellington's Soviet tour as an unprecedented success. Within a month following it, he had received letters of thanks and congratulation from both President Nixon (‘a job well done’), and his Democratic rival in the 1968 election, Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (‘America is even more in your debt’). Ellington's influence in the Soviet Union outlasted his presence. After he left, a leading radio and TV figure in the Soviet Union devoted two of his programs to American jazz, particularly Ellington, a rare and probably unprecedented occurrence in the Soviet media. Eight months after the Ellington tour, the Soviet Union welcomed the Jones-Lewis orchestra, ‘the first … strictly contemporary, innovative [American] jazz’ group allowed to tour the country. For Ellington personally, he told many interviewers that his time in the Soviet Union had inspired his writing. ‘Anybody who writes music, plays music, has a sincere interest in music wants to come to Russia, particularly the people who write music I'm sure, they all want to come here to see if breathing the same air that those great composers breathed might help them a little bit’, he told an interviewer for Radio Moscow during the tour. ‘This is really the plateau of music.’ During the broadcast, he mentioned Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff. During shows in 1972, he played a new original piece called ‘Moscow Metro’.Footnote 25
Ellington's multi-layered vision of freedom, and the various struggles that he, the band and State Department officials encountered during the tour had provided a sharp contrast to the domineering presence of the Soviet government. The tour helped expose the limits of what the closed society of the Soviet government could shield from their own people. Ellington had made a strong impact, the strongest that any American artist had yet made in the Soviet Union. In a 1972 interview with the New York Times, Ellington reminisced about meeting audience members who had travelled to see the band from as far as Mongolia and the Baltics, and how he had brought back ‘three truckloads’ of presents from Soviet citizens. ‘The concerts ran [for] hours but not a person moved out of a chair the whole time’, he told them. ‘How often in a lifetime do you get 24 audiences like that?’Footnote 26
Conclusion
In the month after their last Moscow concert, the Ellington orchestra toured 17 European countries under the billing of ‘American Jazz Week in Eastern Europe’, including the Soviet satellite states of Poland (where Dizzy Gillespie guested with the band), Yugoslavia and Hungary. Two days after their last European date in Barcelona, the band began a 24-day nine-country Latin American tour with a show in Rio de Janeiro on 16 November 1971. Once again, the 72-year-old Ellington embarked upon a schedule that would have exhausted most people, but seemed renewing for him.
By the time Ellington returned from an extensive Asian tour in February 1972, he had visited over 40 countries during the preceding five months, many under State Department auspices, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of satisfied ticket holders and dozens of adulatory State Department embassy reports. He had earned acceptance as an important, though unofficial, American diplomat from both major American political parties. The letters from American citizens and representatives during the 1950s and 1960s protesting the idea of the US government sponsoring jazz musicians abroad formed a distant and non-recurring memory. No one questioned the idea of jazz as a worthy ambassador of the United States, even when the State Department began sponsoring shows by more controversial maverick musicians such as Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus later in the 1970s. If anything, State Department officials hoped that Coleman and Mingus' Eastern European audiences would pick up on the sense of rebellion these performers radiated. Ellington had opened the door with his vision of artistic and political freedom, as expressed in his music and his diplomatic manner. He had asserted a powerful and lasting message on behalf of his country, transmitted around the world, without having to stand upon a soapbox.
