The following weekend we attended a concert by the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars Jazz Band at the 2008 Caesarea Harbor Jazz Festival. The setting was beautiful, the performance was first-rate and lots of fun, and we enjoyed it all immensely. Here we are with our Israeli friends T. and D.
Caesarea (קיסריה in Hebrew) is an ancient port city that now lies between Tel Aviv and Haifa. King Herod once had a palace there facing the sea. According to our guide book, “it took King Herod 12 years to build his much beloved abode on the beautiful Mediterranean coast of the Province of Judea.” (The Jews at that time were under the yoke of the Roman Empire, and it was the Romans who appointed Herod to rule over them.)
Today one can still see the ruins of the hippodrome where horses and chariots once raced for Herod’s pleasure, the 4,000-seat amphitheater where gladiators battled for his entertainment, and of course his once sumptuous palace on the shore.
The amphitheater was locked up for the evening, but we walked through the hippodrome, which brought to mind Mark Twain’s amusing “translation” in The Innocents Abroad of an ancient newspaper review of a gladiator battle at the Roman Coliseum.
Walking amongst the ruins of Herod’s palace, I was reminded of a more sober piece of literature, Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
The Crusaders came to Caesarea many years after Herod and built a massive fortress there, which served as the backdrop for the concert. I found it a little strange to hear American jazz in this setting, echoing off the walls of the old Crusader castle.
I know, of course, that according to the public relations and marketing department of Bin Laden & Co., America is the latest incarnation of the Crusaders, but to my mind the Crusaders were in many ways the antithesis of America: Old World, medieval, European, and (as Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has recently reminded me) the embodiment of a feudal and anti-democratic caste society. (Israel too is identified with the Crusaders in radical Islamist propaganda, which is ironic considering the bloody pogroms that the Crusaders perpetrated on their way to the Holy Land upon Jews.)
I had a great time at the concert, not only because I love jazz music, but also because it was a pleasure to experience an evening of Americana so far from home. A. raised the question whether jazz is still distinctively American music. It would be interesting to know whether Israelis (and, more generally, other people in the rest of the world) continue to associate jazz with America today. To my mind, the two are still very much inseparable. (Certainly, their name notwithstanding, the particular New Orleans style of the Jeff Barnhart International All-Stars is distinctively American.) It was this association that led the U.S. government to send jazz bands on international tours to bolster America’s image during the Cold War. As The New York Times recently reported:
The idea behind the State Department tours was to counter Soviet propaganda portraying the United States as culturally barbaric. [Harlem congressman Adam Clayton] Powell’s insight was that competing with the Bolshoi would be futile and in any case unimaginative. Better to show off a homegrown art form that the Soviets couldn’t match — and that was livelier besides. Many jazz bands were also racially mixed, a potent symbol in the mid to late ’50s, when segregation in the South was tarnishing the American image.
Jazz was the country’s “Secret Sonic Weapon” (as a 1955 headline in The New York Times put it) in another sense as well. The novelist Ralph Ellison called jazz an artistic counterpart to the American political system. The soloist can play anything he wants as long as he stays within the tempo and the chord changes — just as, in a democracy, the individual can say or do whatever he wants as long as he obeys the law. Willis Conover, whose jazz show on Voice of America radio went on the air in 1955 and soon attracted 100 million listeners, many of them behind the Iron Curtain, once said that people “love jazz because they love freedom.”
By the same token, hostility to America sometimes expressed itself as a rejection of jazz. In his fascinating and insightful historical study of anti-Americanism in Europe, Uncouth Nation, Andrei Markovits describes the reaction of European elites against jazz in the early twentieth century, a reaction that was often suffused with racism and anti-Semitism: “As would be the case with rock and roll after World War II, after World War I jazz was vilified as decadent ‘nigger music’ purportedly promoted by profit-hungry Jews who, by undermining the authentic and indigenous qualities celebrated by the elite, ultimately seemed intent on undermining the very fabric of European life.” Such reactions to American popular culture have by no means entirely disappeared today; one can still find them, though sometimes in more muted forms, in Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world.
There were no signs of such cultural antagonism in Caesarea. On the contrary: For his part, Jeff Barnhart repeatedly emphasized what a pleasure it was for his band to come to Israel and play here, and for their part, the large Israeli audience reciprocated his enthusiasm and seemed to enjoy the performance every bit as much as I did. Of all the countries in the world, Israel is probably the one that least needs American jazz ambassadors. Nonetheless, I was very happy that they came.
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