Several members of the U-M Jazz Band that toured Latin America and the Caribbean in 1965 will sit in on two numbers performed on that tour with Ellen Rowe’s U-M Jazz Ensemble in a performance at 8 p.m. Oct. 22 at Rackham Auditorium.
The tour opened 15 months after the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, which had brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war. Through the Cold War period, the U.S. State Department had been sending musicians into countries on cultural exchange programs aimed at winning hearts and minds.
The U-M Jazz Band had come to the State Department’s attention at the 1963 Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival, where its pianist Mike Lang won the competition’s outstanding instrumentalist award. In January 1965, 19 U-M students making up the band began the tour, performing some 100 concerts in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Paraguay, Surinam and Venezuela.
They performed in urban centers on radio-TV broadcasts, and in areas so remote that on one occasion their public address system blew out the electricity for a village.
The trip ended on a dramatic note when the band, having just arrived in the Dominican Republic, found itself in the midst of a revolution. The tour, deemed an overall success, wrapped up soon after in Jamaica.
Fast forward to 2006. Hans T. David Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Musicology Richard Crawford, who represented U-M on the tour as a young musicology professor, was presenting a paper at Ohio State University. In the audience was OSU faculty member Danielle Fosler-Lussier, whose had been studying U.S. sponsorship of musical performances during the Cold War.
Upon learning Crawford was on the legendary tour, she began to contact band members for her research, making a reunion possible. Several will join the performance at Rackham.
— Compiled by Lanny Austin, Jose Mallare and Richard Crawford
