Music and Diplomacy Notes…
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Duke himself was even more of a conundrum. “He is a gentleman from head to toe, entirely concentrated on his music, his comfort and his reputation,” said Simons, who’d just earned his doctorate in history from Harvard. But the bandleader couldn’t get dressed without a valet, canceled offstage functions at the last minute, suffered perpetual real or imagined illnesses, and never even tried to rein in band members who were boozing, carousing, and ignoring Simons’s entreaties. Then there was Fernanda de Castro Monte, “a lady whose presence [with Ellington] was a constant source of acute embarrassment and apprehension to American officials,” Simons wrote. The worry was that a relationship with a “strikingly blonde” white woman would touch a third rail back home. “Ellington also insisted, to the general hilarity of those who were so informed, that the lady was a writer helping him to translate a libretto into French,” Simons recalled, with “no evidence at any time that this claim had any basis whatsoever in fact.” The State Department thought about dispatching a higher-ranking official “to separate Duke from Fernanda,” Simons recalled in an interview with the author 60 years later, but that turned out not to be necessary. “Both Ellington and his friend were conscious of the dangers of adverse publicity which her presence brought with it,” Simons wrote in his report. “They were willing to do anything to avoid them, short of separating.”
Ellington’s tour to the Soviet Union in 1971 wasn’t the first cultural exchange between Cold War adversaries, but visits by American jazz bands were a new sort. At the time, Russians joked that cultural exchanges meant that “we’ll send our violinists from Odessa and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra to New York, and you send us your New York Philharmonic violinists from Odessa who’d emigrated to America.” These hard-drinking, hard-playing trumpeters, drummers, and bass players were an entirely different sort—patently American and, for the Soviets, totally exciting.
If you have the chance read the whole thing, because it’s absolutely fascinating. For funsies, leave thoughts in the comments as to the best and worst cultural diplomats that the US could offer the world today…