At the close of last night’s concert at the 2007 Duke Ellington Jazz Festival, Executive Producer Charlie Fishman said his friend and mentor, the great Dizzy Gillespie (pictured), who was the focus of this year’s proceedings, chose to name his last big band the United Nation (in the singular) Jazz Orchestra to show the oneness of humanity. Fishman went on to say that Dizzy often told his colleagues that human beings all share two characteristics: the color red, because of the blood flowing through our veins, and the beat, because of the beat of our hearts.
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Karen Hughes also noted the unifying power of jazz. Just prior to last night’s performance, a tribute to Voice of America jazz disc jockey Willis Conover, who in the 1970s was the second most well-known American in the Soviet Union next to Richard Nixon, she cited how Conover’s broadcasts brought the true essence of America to people who were on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This uplifting sense of unity and pride in this nation’s most democratic art form is the reason that Duke Fest ’07 was an unqualified success. We can only hope the powers-that-be were paying attention to this gentle yet powerful message that art and culture can be as effective in diplomacy as guns and bombs.
DCist has already described the artists who played at this year’s festival at length, so there is really no purpose in giving a standard reporter’s description of this weekend’s concerts. To that end, we invite readers who attended the concerts to give us their thoughts of the performances. Though we attended several shows, the music is not the most important thing the audience took away from this year’s event, and this is an opportunity to reflect on the broader purpose it might serve.
With musicians from over twenty countries and ranging in age from 12 to 89, the sheer diversity of the talent at this year’s festival reflected Dizzy’s “One World” ethos. We witnessed jazz’s elder statesman Hank Jones, an African American who has played with such luminaries as Ella Fitzgerald and even accompanied Marilyn Monroe in her famous “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” share the stage with Roberta Gambarini, an Italian-born chanteuse whose classic delivery and sense of swing totally mask her roots. Twenty-year old Maryland native Alex Brown, a pianist whose star is on the rise, accompanied the great Paquito D’Rivera, a native of Cuba, in a setting that seamlessly appropriated the musical histories of Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
Image by Herb Ritts from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts website
