The Forgotten Band Tour

Betsy Goolian

October 2009

It was 1965, the height of the Cold War. The tension of the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the U.S. and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, was still fresh in the country’s collective psyche. The U.S. State Department had been sending musicians into countries susceptible to the lure of Communism, on cultural exchange programs aimed at winning hearts and minds, since 1954.

In January of that year, nineteen U-M students were sent on one of those tours, this one to Latin America and the Caribbean. Led by Bruce Fisher (BM ’66, MM ’68), the band toured fifteen countries, performing some 100 concerts, returning to the U.S. that May.

The U-M Jazz Band had come to the State Department’s attention at the 1963 Notre Dame Collegiate Jazz Festival, where their pianist, Mike Lang (BM ’63), had won the competition’s outstanding instrumentalist award (the previous year, jazz legend Bob James [BM ’61, MM ’63, composition], and his combo took home the top prize).

Although the Jazz Band had been unofficially recognized by William Revelli and had even been presented as part of the 1964 Band-o-Rama concert, jazz was still looked upon with suspicion and was certainly not yet part of the curriculum. (Today, the School of Music, Theatre & Dance has one of the most acclaimed jazz programs in the country.)

In fact, when a State Department representative asked the School’s dean if the jazz band could be granted leave for the tour, James Wallace replied, “What jazz band?” Nevertheless, Wallace agreed and appointed a young instructor of musicology named Richard Crawford—not that much older than the students in the band—to accompany the musicians as official representative of the University of Michigan.

The tour took them to Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Paraguay, Surinam, Venezuela—both to urban centers, where they appeared on radio-television broadcasts, and to areas so remote that on one occasion their modest PA system blew out the electricity for an entire village. Accommodations ranged from comfortable to rustic. Their repertoire varied as they learned to gauge the sophistication—and tolerance—of their ever-changing audiences, some of whom had never heard jazz before.

For the most part, the tour was a success, as these ‘musical ambassadors’ made their way by plane from country to country and by bus from village to village. At one stop, however, they were heckled and bombarded with paper airplanes inscribed with “¡Castro, Si, Yanqui, No!” The trip ended on an unexpectedly dramatic note when the band, having just arrived in the Dominican Republic, found itself in the midst of an incipient revolution.

The rebels had taken over much of the city and the fighting was moving closer and closer to their hotel. After what seemed an interminable wait—even more so for their anxious families back home—the students were picked up by military trucks and evacuated to a Navy base in Puerto Rico. But the show went on as they flew to their final destination, Jamaica, for their last few concerts in Kingston and Montego Bay.

Fast forward to 2006. Richard Crawford, now the Hans T. David Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Musicology, was at Ohio State presenting a paper. In the audience was OSU faculty member Danielle Fosler-Lussier, whose special area of interest is U.S. sponsorship of musical performances during the Cold War.

During their post-lecture conversation, it was revealed that Crawford had accompanied the jazz band on that 1965 trip. “You were on the Michigan tour?” asked the incredulous Fosler-Lussier. Of course she was interested in the story for her research and began to contact band members who had been on the tour.

That serendipitous encounter became the catalyst for a long-overdue reunion of the band, some 45 years later. On Wednesday, October 21, jazz band members—the ones who can be found—will congregate for a private reunion at an Ann Arbor hotel. On Thursday, October 22, some of them—the ones who have kept up their chops over the years—will sit in on two numbers from that tour with Ellen Rowe’s U-M Jazz Ensemble in a performance at Rackham Auditorium at 8:00 p.m.

With thanks to Lanny Austin, Jose Mallare, and Richard Crawford.