Jazz Great Brubeck Honored as Traveling Diplomat

Travel Blog  •  Julia Ross  •  04.07.08 | 3:25 PM ET

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Jazz musician Dave Brubeck, best known for his classic “Take Five,” is in Washington, D.C., this week to receive a State Department Benjamin Franklin Award for “civilian service to international cooperation.” It turns out, according to a fascinating Washington Post story, that Brubeck is one of the country’s longest serving public diplomats, a role he first embraced in 1958 on a nine-country musical tour that included Poland, East Germany, Iran and Iraq.

The anecdote in the story about his early travel experiences is terrific. Though the U.S. Information Agency sponsored that first Cold War-era tour, Brubeck was on his own behind the Iron Curtain, simply dropped off on a street corner in East Berlin with no State Department minders to help him.

The band’s reception in Eastern Europe was surprisingly warm, as Brubeck remembers it. Decades later, a Polish fan would tell him, “You did not bring jazz ... You brought the Empire State Building, you brought the Grand Canyon, you brought America.”

Tags: Music, Pop Culture Travel, News and Briefs

Julia Ross is a Washington, DC-based writer and frequent contributor to World Hum. She has lived in China and Taiwan, where she was a Fulbright scholar and Mandarin student. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Time, Christian Science Monitor, Plenty and other publications. Her essay, Six Degrees of Vietnam, was shortlisted for "The Best American Travel Writing 2009."


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