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KARACHI: You can hear the great jazz musician Louis Armstrong in a sepia picture playing an uplifting tune on his trumpet for a group of hospitalised children around him in Cairo, Egypt (1961).
The fact that a majority of the kids are gleefully looking at the camera does not make any difference to Louis and he keeps blowing his trumpet with the vim and vigour typical of the great man.
This and other 50 odd pictures at the opening of a photo exhibition titled ‘Jam Session: America’s Ambassadors Embrace the World’, organised by the US Consulate-General at the Indus Valley School Gallery on Saturday, provided art and music lovers with a sense of how ‘cultural diplomacy’ can work wonders in fields where politics fears to tread.
The display features images of jazz musicians from the US who moved around the world as musical envoys between the 1950s and the ‘70s, particularly during the Cold War.
The photos, gleaned from a number of sources, primarily tell the tale of world tours, which jazz giants Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and a few quintets went on, and they hide in no equivocal terms the ‘diplomatic’ angle to their musical trips.
The viewer can tell from the very first exhibit on display in which Mr and Mrs Benny Goodman are meeting crown prince Akihito, the future emperor, in Tokyo (1957).
It does not take the viewer too long to recognise the image that reflects the ‘rock star’ status of jazz maestros. In one shot, the great Duke Ellington is seen mobbed by fans in the Soviet Union (1971).
While the grab has an ostensible music-loving connotation, the venue where the action is taking place points to the Cold War zone. Mind you, it is not necessary that (Edward Kennedy) Duke Ellington, the inimitable pianist, was aware of his diplomatic role. After all he was a musician.
By the way, Benny Goodman had already visited the Soviet Union in 1962 where, according to a picture, he ‘takes the Moscow crowd by storm’. But the most eye-catching Goodman photo is from his 1956 tour of Bangkok in which he strikes a pose alongside some traditional dancers.
Anyone who believes that original and live jazz came to Pakistan much later after the country’s inception is utterly mistaken.
Dizzy Gillespie’s trip to Karachi (1956) is mentioned in an image in which he’s playing one of his favourite instruments for snakes. The Benny Carter American Jazz Quintet’s 1975 Rawalpindi concert has also been documented in the exhibition.
With respect to the aesthetics of a photograph (lighting, space, action and capturing the moment) no shot surpasses the beauty of the moment when The Dave Brubeck Trio featuring Gerry Mulligan is in a concert in Warsaw, Poland (1970). The view has a cinematic appeal to it.
Jazz may be a western genre, but it did not take it long to reach as distant (and socially different) regions as South Asia.
This is vindicated from a 1972 photograph of Duke Ellington greeting the audience at the Tamil Union Oval, Colombo, Sri Lanka. His flying kiss gesture is wholeheartedly received by music lovers.
Perhaps the least impressive image, in terms of background, is of Clark Terry and his Jolly Giants taking part in a concert in Karachi (1978). The shamiana (marquee) behind them and over their heads looks rather anachronistic.
The exhibition will be open till Jan 28.
