This project was very interesting. I chose to focus on a topic that I had a limited knowledge on. The subject of jazz musicians being sent abroad as ambassadors was discussed in a foreign policy class I took, as well as a class on American Popular Culture.
Finding photographs for this essay was not that simple, though I knew immediately what I wanted the essay to be comprised of. However, obtaining photographs that illustrated the points I wanted to make was difficult. First of all, I tried to get most of my photographs from government websites, so as to try and avoid copyright issues. The majority of the government websites that I researched had very little, if any, photographs of jazz musicians overseas. The photographs of President Eisenhower and that which I used to illustrate segregation in the United States were the easiest to find.
I ended up doing a google search for the musicians and got a very large amount of hits. From there I limited to the search to apply only to government websites. This severely limited my options. The photograph of Dave Brubeck and his band was found within an article on the National Endowment for the Arts website, and that of Dizzy Gillespie was on the America’s Story section of the Library of Congress website. I had hoped to get a photograph of Louis Armstrong as well, as he was one of the more famous jazz ambassadors. However, with the limit of five pictures, I decided to go with those that gave the most complete picture of the jazz ambassadors’ experiences, so Louis Armstrong had to be cut out.
All in all, I really enjoyed this assignment. It took me awhile to find each of the photographs, but I learned more about the topic as I was searching for them. After creating this essay I am more interested in reading about the experiences of the jazz musicians overseas during the Cold War.
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