The Jazz Ambassadors

The Cold War and US Civil Rights movement collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race.

In 1955, as the Soviet Union’s pervasive propaganda about the US and American racism spread globally, African-american Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr convinced President Eisenhower that jazz was the best way to intervene in the Cold War cultural conflict. For the next decade, America’s most influential jazz artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck, along with their racially-integrated bands, travelled the globe to perform as cultural ambassadors. But the unrest back home forced them to face a painful moral dilemma: how could they promote the image of a tolerant America abroad when the country still practiced Jim Crow segregation and racial equality remained an unrealised dream?

Narrated by Tony-winning star of Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr.

Friday, BBC4, 9pm