Jazz Behind the Iron Curtain

Support for WABE comes from the Atlanta History Center, connecting people to history and culture through exhibitions, programs and historic sites. Learn more about current offerings and upcoming events at AtlantaHistoryCenter.com. Support comes from Grady Health Foundation, presenting Move for Grady on Saturday, April 25th, featuring certified 5K and 10K courses and three cycling distances. There is something for everyone, benefiting Grady Health System. More at MoveforGrady.com. [Music] Welcome to the upside of Jazz here on WABE where we choose to feel good. One Jazz Record at a time. My name is Joe Alterman, and I'm a Southern Jazz pianist. When people think about jazz, they often think New Orleans, Chicago, New York, maybe Paris. They usually don't think about X-rays, specifically discarded hospital X-rays that people cut into circles, burned a hole through with a cigarette, and used to secretly press recordings of Duke Ellington. That really happened. [Music] Jazz in the Soviet Union is a complicated story. It wasn't simply banned and wasn't simply allowed. At different moments, it was encouraged, tolerated, sanitized, mocked, or pushed underground. Sometimes more or less all at once. And those contradictions are where the story gets especially interesting. Let's listen to Vajeev Moustas Veda from Azerbaijan. Someone will come back to later in this episode. But I wanted to open with him because the first time I heard his music, I thought, "Where did this come from?" And that question is basically what today is about. [Music] Jazz arrived in Soviet Russia earlier than most people would probably guess. In 1922, a poet and a dancer named Valentin Parnock returned to Moscow after spending time in Paris. [Music] He heard jazz there and became completely obsessed. He brought back saxophones, syncopation, and what was essentially an entirely new musical language. That year he presented what is generally considered the first jazz concert in Soviet Russia. And here's the part I didn't expect. In those early years, some Soviet cultural thinkers were actually supportive of jazz. The reasoning was that it came from black Americans, people viewed as oppressed. So certain intellectuals argued that jazz was a proletarian art form, modern, progressive even. But that didn't last. By the mid-1930s, under Stalin, the mood had changed. The government introduced socialist realism. Art was supposed to be clear, optimistic, patriotic, and most importantly useful to the state. But jazz didn't fit. It was improvisational, individualistic, it was too tied to nightlife, spontaneity, and personality. In the state made its feelings known. Profta, the official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party, the title which translates to "truth", described jazz as "music of the fat, the idol, and the board". A propaganda slogan circulated, and it apparently rung in Russia, which helps explain why it spread so well. The phrase was, "Today he plays jazz, tomorrow he betrays his motherland." And Khrushchev at one point added one of his own. There's one step from a saxophone to a knife. One step from a saxophone to a knife? Hold on to that, because Khrushchev comes back later in this story. And when he does, he says it to somebody's face. But here's the contradiction. Stalin didn't entirely hate jazz. He didn't like anything too hot, too loose, or too improvisatory. But he did enjoy certain dance orchestras with jazz elements. So the state ended up promoting a sanitized version of swing. Arranged, polished, restrained, no wild solos, nothing too unruly. A big band that swings very politely. A few musicians did important work in those early years. Alexander's Sphosphon was a pianist and band leader who heard Sidney Bichet when Bichet toured Moscow in the 1920s. And that was apparently all it took. Sphosphon walked away from the classical world and devoted himself to jazz. Leonid Ujosov led an ensemble that blended jazz rhythms with Russian popular song and became one of the most popular entertainment acts in the country. And then there was Oleg Lunstrom. That's his orchestra you're hearing right now, Blank Karevann. He led that band for decades, surviving changing governments, changing rules, and changing definitions of what was acceptable. Long enough that his orchestra became one of the longest running in the whole world, he loved Duke Ellington from a young age. And through all of it, his band kept playing Duke's music. Karevann, take the age train, Soviet musicians playing Ellington, decade after decade, no matter who was in charge. Some music just refuses to be stopped. After World War II, the Cold War set in, an American culture became increasingly suspect in Soviet eyes. That's when the Stiliyagi emerged. These were young people obsessed with American style, but they didn't actually know much about America itself, so they invented their own version of it. In their imagination, Americans were always dancing, always stylish, and always listening to jazz. The Stiliyagi were bright jackets, loud ties, narrow pants, pointed shoes. They danced the jitterbug. The government hated them, newspapers mocked them, police harassed them, and sometimes they were beaten. But they kept dancing anyway. They weren't exactly a political movement, and they weren't trying to issue a manifesto. They just wanted to swing. But in a society built on conformity, that alone was enough to become a kind of rebellion, whether they intended it that way or not. And then, in 1957, something strange happened. The Soviet government hosted the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow, and for a brief moment, jazz and western dancing was not only tolerated, but officially permitted in public. The very thing the Stiliyagi had been getting harassed and beaten for was suddenly allowed, and then, just as suddenly, it wasn't. Here's something that doesn't get talked about enough. Jazz musicians in the Soviet Union weren't usually treated like political dissidents. The authorities generally weren't losing sleep over caravan. But musicians who toured internationally corresponded with western artists, or listened to foreign radio, could attract attention. And sometimes officials would simply show up at jazz concerts and sit in the back, not really to listen, but to watch. They weren't just worried about the music itself. They were worried about what the music was doing to people, what it was making them feel, and what it was making them want. That's actually a subtler fear than just banning something outright. They understood that the real danger wasn't only in the notes, it was in the room. Interestingly, jazz was rarely suppressed as aggressively as rock music would be later. Jazz could seem intellectual, even respectable enough, that the authorities often saw it as less threatening than the chaos and youth energy of rock. A man in a turtleneck listening to a piano trio, for example, was easier to tolerate than teenagers screaming at electric guitars. They were wrong about that, of course, but it bought jazz a little breathing room. By the late 1940s, western records were almost impossible to get. So people built an underground recording system. It was called Rintgen as Dott, X-ray published. They used discarded hospital X-rays, cut them into circles, burned a hole in the middle with a cigarette, and pressed music onto them with homemade machines. So you could end up with a record that had somebody's rib cage on it, and Duke Ellington coming out of the speaker, or a skull, playing Charlie Parker. They were called bone records, the sound quality was terrible, and they wore out quickly, but people treasureed them anyway. When people wanted to share the music, they often went underground in the most literal sense possible. Private apartments actually became jazz clubs. There was a tradition and Soviet culture called the Kavartnik, which translates to an apartment concert. Originally the term was more associated with poetry readings and folk music, but jazz found its way there too. People would gather in somebody's living room, curtains closed, 20 or 30 people crowded onto couches, the floor, windowsills, anywhere they could fit, and somebody would put on a record. Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Lewis Armstrong, sometimes musicians would bring instruments and play live. These gatherings weren't necessarily illegal in every instance, like so much else involving jazz in the Soviet Union, they existed in a gray area. But people understood that too much western music and too small a room could attract the wrong kind of attention, so they kept the curtains drawn and the volume low. But they kept gathering. There's something about that image I find incredibly moving. It's not a concert hall, it's not a nightclub. Just somebody's apartment, curtains closed, a turntable spinning, and a room full of people who needed to hear this music badly. enough to take the risk. A lot of Soviet musicians learned jazz from radio broadcasts. Foreign stations like The Voice of America, they would stay up late trying to tune in and the signals were often jammed. So the music came through in fragments, it would fade in, disappear, and come back through static. One saxophoneist later said, "We learned bebop from the air." And the person most responsible for that was a radio host named Willis Conever, who hosted a jazz program on Voice of America called MusicUSA. Time for jazz. This is Willis Conever in Washington, D.C. with The Voice of America Jazz Hour. The music of Duke Ellingham. In our first five programs, we have presented more or less contemporary examples of Elling Conever. Conever's estimated audience across the Soviet block, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and beyond, was around 100 million people. He played Ellington, Gillespie, Miles, Bird. He spoke slowly and clearly in a deep baritone because he knew many of his listeners were learning English from his broadcasts, and he became one of the most listened to broadcasters in the world. But in America, hardly anybody knew who he was. The voice of America actually wasn't allowed to broadcast domestically. The law that funded it prohibited it from reaching American audiences. It was strictly for overseas listeners. So Willis Conever became famous everywhere he could be heard, and unknown everywhere he lived. He never played a note. He just opened the door and 100 million people walked through it. One Russian drummer said that the thing that struck him most when he finally heard American swing records was how relaxed the musicians sounded. The amazing thing he said was that they sounded like they were smiling when they played. I love that. In a musical culture built around discipline, precision, and correctness, there was a revelation. Sometimes you really can hear freedom. The most remarkable individual story in all of this, at least to me, is Eddie Rosner. At some point during World War II, Eddie Rosner and his orchestra were brought to a theater in Moscow and told the play. The hall was enormous and it was completely empty. Not a single person in his seats just Rosner and his musicians on stage looking out at row after row of empty chairs. His manager had no explanation, but they did what musicians do. They played the show, the whole thing, start to finish for absolutely no. Afterward a message arrived. Stalin had been in the balcony and he liked it. Eddie Rosner was born Adolf Rosner in 1910 in Berlin to Polish Jewish parents. He was a violin prodigy and by six years old he was enrolled at the Stern Conservatory, one of the finest music schools in Germany and he graduated with honors. He was supposed to have a career in classical music, but instead somewhere in his teens he heard jazz and that was the end of that. He picked up the trumpet and by the late 1920s he adjoined the wine-traub's syncopators, one of the most celebrated jazz ensembles in all of Europe. They toured the continent. They played a board transatlantic ocean liners running between Hamburg and New York. In 1930 they appeared on the soundtrack of a new film called The Blue Angel, which was the film that made Marlena Dietrich a star. Eddie Rosner was 20 years old and already on a movie soundtrack. He was tall, elegant, handsome, pencil mustache, matinee idol face. He reportedly learned to speak English like a New York cab driver and he corresponded with drummer Drene Krupa. American musicians who met him on his travels kept telling him to come over to America, but he thought his future was in Europe. He was wrong about that, but not yet. In 1934 Rosner's band was touring Italy, Louis Armstrong was there too and at some point their paths crossed. They had a trumpet cutting contest in Armstrong 1. Afterward two men exchanged publicity photos. Rosner signed his "to the white Louis Armstrong". Rosner signed his "to the black Eddie Rosner". They each carried the others nickname for the rest of their lives. And what's striking about that exchange is that it doesn't sound like condescension from Armstrong. It sounds like recognition. One great trumpet player recognizing another across an enormous gulf of circumstance. Rosner wore the nickname "the white Louis Armstrong proudly". He recorded St. Louis Blues. He recorded Caravan. He played the American songbook with a sound that also carried something else in it. Something Eastern European. Something from the concert hall. Something from a world Armstrong had never inhabited. His arrangement of Caravan in particular had a quality other versions didn't. Something haunting. Something that didn't quite belong to any one continent. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Rosner left Germany for Poland. He set up in Warsaw, assembled a big band of mostly Jewish musicians and gave Polish audiences their first real exposure to American jazz. The crowds were huge. The show was dazzling. Technical brilliance, real swing, and a band leader who looked like he walked out of a movie. One of the regulars in his Warsaw audience was a young pianist named Vatislav Spilman. You may know that name from later on. His memoir became the basis for Roman Polonski's film "The Pianist". Spilman heard Rosner and Warsaw clubs in the 1930s and never forgot it. Rosner married Ruth Kaminsky, the daughter of the great Yiddish theater actress Aida Kaminsky. They were happy and Warsaw life was good. And then, after September 1939, it wasn't. Germany invaded Poland. Rosner later summed up the situation with one line. In 1939, it didn't help being a Jew playing Negro music, even if your name is Aida. He and Ruth packed up what they could and they fled. They crossed the newly established German Soviet border and Tobialli Stock, and Soviet occupied Belarus. And Rosner did the only thing he knew how to do. He formed a band. The band came to the attention of the first secretary of the Communist Party of Belarusia, who happened to love jazz. He recommended Rosner to the right people and before long, Rosner was invited to perform in Minsk. After the show, the secretary arrived in the dressing room with his bodyguards and proposed renaming the ensemble, the state jazz orchestra of the Bailo-Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. Eddie Rosner, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, was now leading a Soviet state jazz orchestra. Then came the empty theater and the message from the balcony. The Stalin liked it. The state jazz orchestra of the Bailo-Russian SSR was given its own railroad sleeping car and sent across the Soviet Union to perform for soldiers, party officials and civilians. They played in Moscow, in Armenia, Uzbekistan, Siberia. They rode flatbed trucks to the front lines. During World War II, as the war raged around them, Eddie Rosner and his orchestra crossed the entire Soviet Union in their own train, playing jazz. He received a medal for the liberation of Warsaw. He was named honored artist of the Bailo-Russian Republic and he reportedly earned up to 100,000 rubles a year, whereas the average Soviet worker earned about 2000. The historian S. Fredrick Star wrote that it is doubtful that any jazz musician on Earth has ever been compensated more generously within his own society. Again, a German Jewish refugee from Nazi Poland, Stalin's band leader, the highest paid musician in the USSR. Then the war ended and everything changed. Stalin's anti-Kosmopolitan campaign swept through Soviet society in the post-war years. Foreigners were suspect, Jews were suspect, Western influence was suspect. Even major Russian composers like Prokofia and Shastikovych were censored. Rosner saw what was coming and he and Ruth tried to leave. But they were caught near Levyv on the Ukrainian border attempting to cross into what would become the Western zone. He was charged with illegal border crossing, conspiracy, cosmopolitanism and espionage and was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp. Historians described the camps he was sent to as among the most brutal in the entire region. The commander at Rosner's first camp had once attended one of Rosner's concerts and never forgot it because of that he allowed Rosner to form a band among the prisoners. After found some of his old side men, musicians who had also been swept up in the arrests and he taught other prisoners how to play. When they didn't have instruments they actually made their own. Think about what that means. In one of the most remote labor camp systems on earth and a place designed to break people, Eddie Rosner was building a jazz orchestra from scratch, teaching the guards children music theory, making instruments out of whatever they could find. The orchestra performed for guards and camp officials, they were transported between camps, touring, still, always touring. He kept playing because it was the only thing he had and because there's something inside musicians that just cannot be made to stop. Stalin died on March 5th, 1953. It was Porum. Porum is the Jewish holiday that commemorates the survival of the Jewish people against a ruler who wanted them destroyed. It's the story of Esther and Hamen. I have no idea what Eddie Rosner made of that coincidence. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But it's in the record and it belongs here. the following year in 1954. He was 44 years old and he had spent eight years in the Goulog. He returned to Moscow where he formed a new orchestra. And, improbably, he had a genuine second career as a Soviet popular musician. Popular enough that state media quietly received instructions to boycott his name because the authority still didn't know exactly what to do with him. In 1971, the Soviet entertainment apparatus forced him into mandatory retirement. His jazz they decided was still too modern, too exclusive, too much itself. And in 1973, at 62, Rosner left the Soviet Union for the last time and returned to West Berlin. The city where he had been born. The West Berlin Jewish community tried to help him rebuild a career. There were even plans involving Duke Ellington. There were discussions with the West German government. But Rosner was exhausted. His health was failing. Decades of displacement and imprisonment had taken what those things take. He died in West Berlin on August 8, 1976. He was 66 years old. All of his scores were lost, scattered, or destroyed. His name was officially forbidden in the Soviet Union twice. When a memorial concert was organized in Moscow in the 1990s, the producers had to transcribe his music from 'Old 78s because nothing written had survived. One historian said, all the Rosner legacy was scattered and exterminated. His name was concealed, slurred over, veiled, hushed up. The later decades of the Soviet Union produced some genuinely remarkable music, not just to spike the restrictions, but sometimes because of the strange pressures they created. Vajif Moustacheveta from Azerbaijan, who you heard at the top of the show, fused jazz with traditional music of the region, modal improvisation, meeting swing in a way that sounds like almost nothing else. Then there's Nikolai Kapustin, a classically trained pianist who spent years playing in jazz bands, then wrote piano pieces that sound exactly like bebop, even though they're fully notated. Classical compositions written out in detail, soaked through with jazz rhythm and harmony. The first time you hear one, you can't quite figure out what you're listening to, not confusion's part of the thrill. In the 1970s and 80s, the Gandalin trio and Lithuania pushed into free improvisation, about as far from approved Soviet aesthetics as you could get. And it wasn't just the Soviet Union, similar things were happening all across the Eastern block. In Poland, a pianist named Kristof Kameda was developing one of the most original jazz voices in Europe, music so distinctive that Roman Polanski later hired him to score Rosemary's Baby. Kameda discovered something Soviet musicians discovered too, in a society that can control almost everything it could name, instrumental music could still slip through the cracks. It's harder to sense or something you can't easily explain. During the Khrushchev thaw of the 1960s, as the climate loosened for just a little while, jazz began to reemerge into the public view. Festivals were organized and audiences turned out in huge number. The Tallinn Jazz Festival of 1967 became almost legendary. Musicians from across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe gathered in Estonia. What happened there was an explosion, not of slogans or protests, but a pure enthusiasm for the music. The audience gave itself over to it completely. And that was exactly the problem. The authorities became nervous, not about what was being said, but about what was being felt. The festival was never really allowed to happen again in quite the same way. One moment Soviet jazz culture came fully into the light and the curtain came right back down. There are accounts from prison camps of people in solitary confinement singing quietly to themselves, not performing, not entertaining anyone, not making some grand public statement just singing to stay human. And that's a different thing. That's something much older than politics. In the 1950s, the United States figured something out. The Soviet Union had a devastatingly simple propaganda argument against America. Look at the South, look at the firehoses, the lunch counters, the signs that said white only, and they pointed to newly independent nations in Africa and Asia and said, this is what American democracy actually looks like. And it was not easy to answer. So someone in Washington had an idea, jazz. Send the jazz musicians, let the music make the case that American politics couldn't. The logic was that in many parts of the world, people didn't trust America's government, but they loved American music. So the State Department began sending jazz musicians abroad. Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dave Rubat. Officially, it was cultural diplomacy. The music would go, and the politics could. There was only one problem with that premise. And the musicians knew it immediately. These were black artists being asked to represent American freedom abroad while living under segregation at home. While the same government sending them on tour was failing to protect the right of black children to attend school, while hotels in their own country wouldn't even let them stay where they performed. When the State Department asked Dizzy Gillespie to come in for a pre-tour briefing before his 1956 trip to prepare him for questions about American racism, he declined. His response was, "I've got 300 years of briefing. I know what they've done to us, and I'm not going to make any excuses." He went anyway, and the tours were remarkable. An American ambassador later wrote, "We could have built a new tank for the cost of this tour, but you can't get as much good will out of a tank as you can out of Dizzy Gillespie's band." In the Soviet Union, Louis Armstrong was already a kind of a legend. People who had never seen him in person knew his name. His records circulated on bone records, on copied tapes, on rare imported LPs passed from hand to hand like sacred objects. Some Soviet musicians said that the first time they heard that trumpet and that voice it felt like entering a different emotional universe, not just a different musical style, a different way of being in this world. Armstrong was the most famous musician on Earth at that point. The State Department wanted him badly, and he resisted for years. Then in 1957, when Governor Fobbus called out the National Guard to block nine black children from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and President Eisenhower initially failed to respond decisively. Armstrong canceled his planned Soviet tour and told a reporter, "The way they are treating my people and the South, the government can go to hell." The next day, it was headline news around the world. The State Department had hoped to use him to prove America stood for freedom. Instead, he used the platform to say it didn't. And then, in one of history's stranger ironies, American diplomats tried to turn even that into propaganda. Look, even a black man in America can criticize the President and not be punished. That's how free we are. They were playing a weak hand as well as they could. Armstrong eventually relented, and in 1960, he toured Africa. The reception was overwhelming, more than a million people across the continent, and Ghana, the Congo, Nigeria, Kenya, crowds lined the roads. At one stop, the band arrived in the middle of an active civil war. Both sides laid down their rifles and came to the fairy landing to listen. After the concert, the shooting resumed, the music could stop a war for one evening. And then, the itinerary reached South Africa. The apartheid government banned Armstrong from performing, not because of anything he said, but because he refused to play for a segregated audience. And because his band was too racially mixed for apartheid law to accept, the very thing he was fighting against at home had followed him to the other side of the world. Gillespie could play in Athens, Greece, but they couldn't play in Athens, Georgia. This contradiction never went away. It just kept reappearing in different places. In 1962, Benny Goodman became the first American jazz musician to actually tour the Soviet Union directly. Six weeks, multiple cities with full state department support. The band he brought was pretty serious, including Phil Woods, Zoot Sims, Jimmy Nepper, Malewis, Joe Wilder, and they had the fresh range with by major writers from New York, including Alcone, Tagdamer and Gary McFarland, real great music. They also rehearsed a tune called Mission of Moscow. Mel Powell had written it 20 years earlier in 1942, but now they were finally playing it in the actual place. Here's the thing in Washington nobody seemed to understand. By 1962, Soviet jazz fans had already been listening to Voice of America for years. To Willis Conn over coming through the static night after night, they heard bebop. Some of them were already moving toward more experimental music. Goodman, chosen in part because he seemed like a, quote, "safe figure" was actually playing catch-up to his own audience. In fact, Soviet fans had studied the music so closely from such scarce material over so many years that some of them knew Goodman's own recorded history better than he did. After concerts, audience members asked him about obscure sessions from the 1930s, specific personnel, forgotten details he himself had half-lost track of. That's what Conn over's broadcasts had created, not casual fans, but scholars, people who had built an entire inner world out of fragments of music coming through a jammed signal. And then, Cruise Jeff, the same man who said that there's one step from saxophone to a knife, reportedly told Goodman to his-- face that he didn't like jazz. Goodman meanwhile had largely abandoned those newer arrangements in favor of his old 1930s war horses and had demoralized his own band before they even reached Moscow by nickel and diamond them on salaries and making the whole experience miserable. When somebody asked Zoot Sims what it was like playing in Russia, he said, "Every where you go with Ben he is like Russia." Bill Crow, the bassist on that tour, later wrote that they'd arrived in the Soviet Union as musical ambassadors, only to discover they were playing in what he called, quote, "the least democratic band he'd ever been in." Now, Goodman wasn't the only one with a cruise chef's story. My piano teacher, the great Don Friedman, once told me about a tour he did with alto saxophoneist Joe Mani, they learned that cruise chef was actually staying in a neighboring hotel. So one night, Mani went on to the balcony and serenaded him. The tune he picked was Russian Lollaby, which is actually an Irving Berlin song. Don never knew if cruise chef actually heard it, but I'd like to think that he did. And here's something else about those tours that doesn't get talked about enough. The music didn't just travel outward, it came back changed. Dave Brubeck was on a state department tour in 1958. He went to Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India. While he was in Turkey, he heard street musicians playing in 9/8 time. The rhythm he'd never encountered that way before, and he couldn't stop thinking about it. So he brought it home, sat down at the piano, and wrote Ruranda Al-Ataq. One of the most recognizable jazz compositions of the 20th century exists because the state department sent Dave Brubeck to Ankara in 1958, and he paid attention. The government thought it was sending American music out into the world, which it was, but the world sent something back. Jazz was never uniformly banned in fascist Italy the way it was in Nazi Germany, but it was squeezed. By 1938, with the racial laws in place, American music, especially music associated with Black Americans, became increasingly suspect. The regime tried to quarantine it. Jazz was labeled "inemium music." Foreign musicians were sometimes given Italian-ized names to slip past censors. Louis Armstrong, for example, on Italian records, became Luigi Fortobrocchio. By 1941, when Italy was fully at war with the United States, American music was outright prohibited. That lasted until 1943, when the regime collapsed. Years later, a young Italian jazz pianist, who had been a boy at the time, said that I was never censored from playing jazz at home. Contrator would everyone think even the Germans had their jazz orchestras during the war. Let's visit that boy, who was first exposed to jazz at the age of four. That boy's name was Romano Mussolini, and he was one of the sons of the fascist dictator. Romano first heard jazz when his older brother Vittorio brought some 78s back to the family villa. They were Duke Ellington records, and Romano was done for. Duke became more important to him than his father, El Duce. His father actually encouraged him musically. Benito played the violin, and the two of them played together at home. Music was one of the only things that they really shared. The last time Romano saw his father alive, he sat down at the piano and played for him. Benito was leaving, slipping out to the car that would take him away from his hiding place for the last time. His wife, Rochelle, later recalled him pausing in the doorway to listen to the music drifting down from upstairs. The tune Romano was playing was Duke Ellington's saddest tale. Eleven days later, Benito Mussolini was dead. After the war, Romano tried to build a life in music. El Duce's son, carrying a cursed surname, played gigs for 320 Liar a night under an assumed name that was Romano Full. In Rome, between jobs, he sold chickens to survive. His fellow musicians eventually told him, "You have nothing to do with politics. You are a musician. Use your own name." So he did, and slowly the music won. By the 1960s, he was leading the Romano Mussolini All Stars, one of the most respected jazz groups in Italy. He toured with his Eagle Espion. Duke Ellington, the man whose records he had once played in that villa, supported him and became a friend. And in New York, Romano told Duke the story, "What happened? The departure and the doorway and the song." Duke listened, and then he told Romano something that he hadn't known. Duke had written saddest tale while his own mother was dying. Romano said that every time he heard the tune, he was moved to tears. Duke told him, "Ben Romano, you really do love the blues." Critics described his playing as something like a slightly melancholic Oscar Peterson, occasionally inspired always efficient. One writer said that he made the refrain's run on time. Whether that was intentional, I honestly can't tell you. And then there's Chet Baker. Don Friedman once again, he also told me that he was on a European tour with Chet Baker, and they ran into Romano. Chet, who had his own complicated relationship with just about everything, apparently didn't know what to say. So there was an awkward greeting and awkward silence, and then Chet, being Chet, just stuck out his hand and said, "Hey man, sorry about your pops." When Romano died in 2006, friends from the jazz world played New Orleans funeral music at his service. And some members of the congregation gave straight-armed fascist salutes. Jazz and fascism in the same room one last time. But a four-year-old boy had heard Duke Ellington and fascist dictators' house. And 60 years later, when they buried him, the first song they played was George Gershwin's Summertime. In the Soviet Union, teenagers were cutting jazz onto X-rays. In Siberia, a trumpeter was leading a swing orchestra in a labor camp. In Moscow, 20 people were crammed into somebody's apartment with the curtains closed, listening to a turntable. In an American radio studio, a man almost nobody at home had heard of was broadcasting jazz to 100 million people behind the iron curtain. In Turkey, an American pianist heard something in the street and carried it home in his ear. In Italy, a dictator's son was sneaking off to practice jazz piano. On a hotel balcony somewhere, a saxophone was serenading a Soviet premiere with an Irving Berlin-Tunne. Different systems, different borders, same music. Historians who studied this era often point out that jazz functioned as a kind of neutral zone in the Soviet Union. It wasn't exactly official culture, but it wasn't entirely underground either. In a society where speech could be dangerous, music offered another kind of freedom. That's part of why it survived everywhere it went. Improvisation itself is a kind of freedom. You can write down what a musician is allowed to play, but you can't write down what happens between the notes. I don't think that proves anything grand, but I do think it points towards something real about what this music is and what people need it for. And that's the upside of jazz. You know, every day on Up First, NPR's Golden Globe nominated Morning News podcast, we bring you three essential stories. At the heart of each story, our questions. What really happened? What really mattered? What happens next? At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious and to follow the facts. Follow up first wherever you get your podcasts and start your day knowing what matters and why. At WABE Radio, Atlanta's home for NPR, we help businesses connect with Atlanta's most educated, affluent, and influential audiences. From broadcast radio to podcasts, live audio streams, and e-newsletters, WABE Atlanta offers creative, multi-platform solutions designed to grow your brand and expand your reach. If you want to elevate your marketing strategy, now is the time to include WABE Atlanta and your plans. Learn more at wab.org/underwriting.