The Jazz Ambassadors film + Q&A with director & composer

We're thrilled to present this very special screening of 'The Jazz Ambassadors' in beautiful home cinema at a private residence in Ramsgate. The film will be followed with a Q & A between the film's score composer,  Ramsgate-based Mike McEvoy, and the director Hugo Berkeley.  

This documentary is a remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race.  In 1955, as the Soviet Union’s pervasive propaganda about the U.S. and American racism spread globally, African-American Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. convinced President Eisenhower that jazz was the best way to intervene in the Cold War cultural conflict. For the next decade, America’s most influential jazz artists, including Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck, along with their racially-integrated bands, traveled the globe to perform as cultural ambassadors. But the unrest back home forced them to face a painful moral dilemma: how could they promote the image of a tolerant America abroad when the country still practiced Jim Crow segregation and racial equality remained an unrealised dream? Told through striking archival film footage, photos and radio clips, with iconic performances throughout, the documentary reveals how the U.S. State Department unwittingly gave the burgeoning Civil Rights movement a major voice on the world stage just when it needed one most. Leslie Odom, Jr., narrates. 

As this is such a special FREE screening we would be most grateful if you could make a generous donation to the festival. We have to charge a booking fee to cover our ticketing costs. Thank you!

Big thanks to Mike McEvoy, Hugo Berkeley & our hosts Michelle & John  Whitaker for making this event possible.