9. Dizzy Gillespie Stops a Riot

By Chris Campbell

Amidst the backdrops of the Cold War and the end of the British Empire, one of the world’s foremost jazz trumpeters was perhaps an unlikely candidate to unite a city divided by both major events.

Despatched by the US State Department on a tour of Southern Europe and the Middle East in 1956, Dizzy Gillespie was ostensibly on a mission to promote American culture in an area at risk of falling to communist influence.

Yet when he arrived in Athens to give a concert, he stepped not only into a key Cold War battleground but a violent anti-Imperial campaign; the Cyprus Emergency had, since 1955, divided the region amongst those who supported British imperial rule in Cyprus and those who wanted it unified with Greece.

American support for the British made Gillespie’s concert a prime target for protest, and agitators had attacked US-owned buildings only hours before he was due to play. Many turned up to the concert prepared to riot.

Despite the very real danger and the loud anti-American chants, Gillespie forged ahead. Within moments of the band’s first number, the would-be rioters began cheering instead and, when the concert finished, encouraged Gillespie into the crowd and carried him through Athens in celebration.

This incident, an exceptional example of both the power of culture to suspend political division and the positive potential of cultural diplomacy, was later immortalised in a musical, The Real Ambassadors, written by Dave and Iola Brubeck:

When Diz blew, the riots were routed,

People danced and they cheered and shouted.

The headlines bannered, the hour was his,

They dropped their stones and they rocked with Diz!

Further Reading

Lisa Davenport, Jazz Diplomacy: Promoting America in the Cold War Era (2009)

Danielle Foster-Luisser, Music In America’s Cold War Diplomacy (2015)

Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser, To BE Or Not… To BOP (1978)

Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (2004)

Cover Image

Dizzy Gillespie, photographed in 1947 (Creative Commons)