The show of more than 50 photographs of some of the United States' best jazz musicians can be seen for two weeks.
Between the mid-1950s and the end of the 70s, popular American jazz musicians would travel around the world as cultural ambassadors. The idea for these jazz tours came from Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who chose an authentic American genre that would properly represent the United States in cultural diplomacy, even when played on the stage of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. As The New York Times put it in 1955, jazz was America's "supersonic weapon," the exhibition catalogue says.
The images include ones of of Louis Armstrong surrounded by African children and on camelback, playing his trumpet with the pyramids of Giza and sphinx in the background. Other jazz greats featured in the exhibition are Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman, photographed on four continents around the world.
The exhibition will travel to Paris after Pécs.
Source: Hungarian News Agency (MTI) / Photo: Máté Nándorfi
