ABSTRACT
President Dwight D. Eisenhower got Dizzy in 1956—famed bebop trumpeter John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie, that is—when Gillespie's integrated band embarked on the first government-sponsored jazz tour of the Middle East with the aid of the President's Emergency Fund. With America in the throes of a political and cultural revolution that had put the black freedom struggle at the center of American and international politics, the prominence of African American jazz artists was critical to the music's potential as a Cold War weapon. The idea of promoting jazz musicians as cultural ambassadors was the brainchild of an alliance of musicians, civil rights proponents, and cultural entrepreneurs and critics. The narrator of Invisible Man suggests a methodology for understanding the musicians' approach to the world and the way they made sense of their surroundings. Jazz musicians didn't simply accept the way they were deployed by the State Department.
