The Jazz Ambassadors

The Cold War and Civil Rights collide in this remarkable story of music, diplomacy and race. Beginning in 1955, when America asked its greatest jazz artists to travel the world as cultural ambassadors, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and their mixed-race band members, faced a painful dilemma: how could they represent a country that still practiced Jim Crow segregation?

• 
  Leslie Odom Jr.

  Narrator
• 
  Quincy Jones

  Self
• 
  Dizzy Gillespie

  Self (archive footage)
• 
  Louis Armstrong

  Self (archive footage)
• 
  Duke Ellington

  Self (archive footage)