Silencing the Voice of America

Time for jazz… Willis Conover speaking… This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour…

When, as a schoolboy in the late 1950s, I started to discover the music I love and write about, that process took some work. The music wasn’t easy to find, which of course added to the sense of its value. One priceless resource was the nightly Jazz Hour on the Voice of America station, beamed around the world from studios in Washington DC as a tool of the US State Department’s soft-power policy.

Willis Conover, a white man in early middle age, spoke slowly and clearly in an Eisenhower-era sort of voice, so that listeners in other countries with perhaps only a smattering of English could get his meaning. It wasn’t a voice that indulged in hip vernacular, but somehow it conveyed a love of the music, as did the fact that the show’s signature tune was Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train”.

As I recall, the Jazz Hour was part of a nightly two-hour strand labelled Music USA. The first hour was devoted to the last knockings of the Swing Era. What followed, I think at 10pm UK time, was 60 minutes of what interested me. This was where, in late 1959, I first heard “All Blues”, that mesmerising track from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, igniting a relationship that would lead 50 years later to the writing of the book that gave this blog its title. I can still remember the first time I heard those little syncopated muted trumpet figures that Miles laid over the fade. A whole new world was opening up, right there on the family radio.

Similarly, I remember being hypnotised again a few months later when Gil Evans’s “La Nevada” came over the VOA airwaves. It was the lead track from Evans’s latest album, Out of the Cool, and Conover played all 15 minutes of it, complete with solos from the trumpeter Johnny Coles, the bass trombonist Tony Studd, the tenor saxophonist Budd Johnson, the bassist Ron Carter and the guitarist Ray Crawford, all propelled by Charlie Persip’s restlessly propulsive snare-drum accents and Elvin Jones’s maraccas, with Evans’s piano and Crawford’s guitar and the background tapestry of semi-improvised woodwind and brass figures adding a commentary to what is still the richest and most compelling extended piece of jazz I know.

To be honest, I haven’t listened to VOA since the ’60s. I don’t even know whether it still broadcasts jazz alongside its news and other programming. But I have a lot for which to thank the Jazz Hour, even though its true intended audience during the years I listened was much further to the east, behind the Iron Curtain, where it reached people in Poland and Russia and East Germany who were even hungrier for the music and the culture for which it seemed to stand, one of freedom from repression.

I remember one particular sign of VOA’s effectiveness. On many nights the music on the Jazz Hour would obliterated by a loud and sometimes prolonged burst of static. The Soviet bloc’s jamming stations were doing their job.

This past weekend, the 1,300 employees of the Voice of America were told of an executive order signed by President Trump stripping the station of its resources. The document instructed its managers to reduce its output “to the minimum presence and function required by law” in order to “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

The knowledge that VOA was launched in 1942 to beam anti-Nazi propaganda to Germany and its occupied territories adds a layer of irony that would be funny were it not essentially tragic. Among those likely to be gratified by the decision are Elon Musk, who called for it to be shut down, and Vladimir Putin, who blocked its broadcasts to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.

Willis Conover died in 1996, aged 75. He’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery. I imagine he’d be glad not to be around for all this.

* The photograph of Willis Conover interviewing Louis Armstrong was taken in 1955.