The Jazz Ambassadors: The Untold Story of America’s Coolest Weapons in the Cold War

During the 1950s, the United States sent jazz musicians Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman, with their mixed-race bands, to the USSR to counter negative Soviet propaganda about race relations in America. The Jazz Ambassadors is a new documentary that recounts how the musicians struggled with the dilemma of presenting an image of American equality while Jim Crow segregation still prevailed and how they eventually lent their voices to the Civil Rights Movement on a global stage.