The Dj who helped win the Cold war; voice of America's Willis Conover got the Soviet Bloc jazzed up.

AuthorFreund, Charles Paul

VOICE OF AMERICA DJ Willis Conover is up for a postage stamp to honor his work in exporting jazz, especially to short-wave radio listeners in the old Soviet Bloc. A stamp would be a minimal tribute, given the remarkable role Conover played during the Cold War, though it would be just about the only "official" recognition he has ever received.

During Conover's four decades as a Voice of America (VOA) disc jockey from 1955 through the mid-1990s he upended communist cultural policy just by playing the prohibited, "degenerate" American music that his overseas audience longed to hear. Most Americans have never heard of him, but in the postwar era he was one of the best-known, and certainly one of the most popular, Americans in the world. He had millions of devoted followers in Eastern Europe alone; his worldwide audience in his heyday has been estimated at up to 30 million people.

Conover managed to tour Soviet Bloc cities occasionally during East-West thaws and, to his great surprise, was greeted at airports like a celebrity by huge cheering crowds. Moscow cabdrivers recognized him solely on the basis of his distinctive baritone voice. Writer James Lester has collected a series of remarkable quotes that suggest the emotional depth of Conover's impact on his audience: "In 1982, when Conover was in Moscow as an MC for a group of touring American musicians, someone took his hand, kissed it, and said, 'If there is a god of jazz, it is you.' Another young Russian wrote touchingly to him, 'You are a source of strength when I am overwhelmed by pessimism, my dear idol,' and still another greeted him in Leningrad with, 'Villis! You are my father!'"

Conover never said a political word, letting the jazz do the talking. What did the jazz say? The late Russian dissident and novelist Vassily Aksyonov was to make jazz integral to his fiction, especially in his 1984 portrait of the 1960s Moscow intelligentsia, The Burn. According to Aksyonov, his circle admired jazz for "its refusal to be pinned down"; it was a release "from the structures of our minutely controlled everyday lives, of five-year plans, of historical materialism;" it was, for those trapped in the Soviet system, "an anti-ideology."

"When you are in a jail, that music makes you wonder what kind of country produced it," pianist David Azarian once told Down Beat magazine. "I tell you, Conover was America's best weapon to destroy socialism and Communism."

Though Conover was to play an important role...

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