Willis Conover: The American Godfather of Polish Jazz
Willis Conover, host of the Voice of America's ‘Jazz Hour’ radio show, raised the most important generation of Polish jazz musicians – and then introduced them to the world.
My all-time favourite photograph of Polish jazz musicians was taken offstage. It was 1962, and Andrzej Trzaskowski’s Wreckers were touring in America for the very first time. During their stay in New York, the band visited the famous Birdland club, where they met the absolute jazz legends Ben Webster and John Coltrane. The composer of A Love Supreme can be seen in the middle of the photograph, looking over his shoulder straight into the lens. On his right side, two Polish kings of jazz – Michał Urbaniak and Roman Dyląg – are completely ignoring the photographer. These young, promising musicians are staring directly at the two giants of the saxophone, a mixture of shock and adoration in their eyes. On the other side of this photo, far left from Coltrane, an elegant man is sitting. That’s Willis Conover. If not for him, Urbaniak and Dyląg might never have learned who John Coltrane was.
Some say that the country where Conover was least known was the United States, as the broadcast he hosted on Voice of America for over 40 years wasn’t broadcast domestically except on shortwave. This doesn’t mean that he was an anonymous figure for the American jazz community. At the end of the day, he conducted interviews with a number of jazz legends and produced concerts at the Newport Jazz Festival… and even at the White House! Nevertheless, the idea that Conover was even more popular abroad is no exaggeration. As the host of the Music USA broadcast – especially the second part: Jazz Hour – he reached up to 30 million listeners. From January 1955, through transmitters located in Munich and Tangier, he smuggled jazz behind the Iron Curtain on a daily basis. For a whole generation of music aficionados and future musicians living there, he was more than an entertainer. He was a teacher – a true apostle of jazz.
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Willis Conover broadcasting with Voice of America in 1969, photo: Wikimedia Commons
As the oldest international broadcaster in the United States, Voice of America started reaching its audiences in early 1942 – just after the country entered World War II. Back then its main purposes were to inform about the progress of the war effort and to counter Nazi propaganda. When the war was over, the broadcaster’s mission changed, but its importance remained critical. Voice of America was still active as a crucial instrument of cultural diplomacy. Its radio shows were blocked constantly by Soviet officials, as they promoted democratic values. Notably freedom. And there’s no better way to promote freedom than to play jazz. This is why the influential music critic Gene Lees wrote in Jazzletter:
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Willis Conover did more to crumble the Berlin Wall and bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire than all the Cold War presidents put together.
This was helped by the language Conover used in his radio shows. In fact, Voice of America’s ‘special English’ was to some extent inspired by his way of talking. ‘Learning English’ – as we call it nowadays – implies simple structures, the avoidance of idioms and a core vocabulary of about 1,500 words. On top of that, the host of Jazz Hour spoke one-third slower than the host of a typical radio show would. In an article published in the magazine Jazz Forum, Polish saxophonist and composer Jan ‘Ptaszyn’ Wróblewski recalled that he and pianist Krzysztof Komeda tried to write down the musical themes he heard on the broadcast. Although Conover spoke very clearly, it wasn’t uncommon for listeners to mishear the name of the author of a given piece. As a result, one of jazz’s finest double bassists and composers was known as ‘Charles Menger’.
Another great jazz composer, Jerzy ‘Duduś’ Matuszkiewicz, claimed that for many musicians of his generation, Willis’ broadcasts represented the first school of jazz. ‘We learned standards by listening to the radio, with everyone remembering a section’, he told Jazz Forum:
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Of course, it was difficult to memorise a piece after just one listen. Listening conditions were quite poor, so each piece was played several times. As we listened, we completed more and more passages, so that we could play it back later.
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Michał Urbaniak, Jazz Jamboree 1986, Warszawa, photo: Jan Malec / Forum
The composer and violinist Michał Urbaniak, who can be heard albums such as Miles Davis’s Tutu, also learned about jazz from Conover’s broadcasts. He claims that for a dozen or so years, he listened to his radio show every day, recording every one of them on tapes.
Today, when we have almost unlimited access to art and culture, it’s hard to imagine the excitement of those young musicians who looked forward all week to the 9:15 p.m. broadcast, when a passage from of Duke Ellington’s Take the A Train signalled that the Conover broadcast was about to begin. Asked decades later about those late 1950s evenings, many musicians can still remember particular songs that they heard on Jazz Hour. For the double bassist Jan Byrczek, the first piece he heard on the broadcast was How Deep Is the Ocean by Teddy Wilson. Urbaniak had come across Bud Powell initially and had been overwhelmed by his complex chord progressions, but the next day, he turned on the radio anyway to listen to Louis Armstrong playing. From that day on, he became a jazz fanatic. Polish musicians were definitely into Art, as pianist Adam Makowicz remembers listening to Art Tatum for the first time on-air, and the saxophonist Zbigniew Namysłowski’s first jazz record – bought as a result of Conover’s broadcast – was an Art Pepper LP.
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Jan 'Ptaszyn' Wróblewski at Newport, photo: ptaszyn.com
It was ‘Ptaszyn’ who was the first Polish musician to meet Conover, during rehearsals for the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958. If the saxophonist was shocked by coming face-to-face with his idol, the radio host was allegedly even more astonished to learn that he was a cult figure in faraway Poland. He would soon find out for himself.
A harbinger of jazz to come
In the early 1950s, jazz music was officially banned in Poland as a symbol of ‘imperialist’ American culture. During this period, no festivals could promote this genre of music. Only people with certain connections and social status could have listened to jazz – at events organized by the editor-in-chief of Przekrój, Marian Eile, or at banquets organized at the American Embassy in Warsaw. The situation changed in 1956 due to the Polish October, which marked the end of Stalinism in the country and a certain liberalisation of the system. That same year, the first jazz festival was held in Sopot. Two years later, the event moved to Warsaw, where it was renamed Jazz Jamboree in 1959. Without taking anything away from Conover and his body of work, it’s worth mentioning that his broadcast arrived at a fitting time. Suddenly, his Jazz Hour became the soundtrack for the Polish thaw.
As a result of this transition, Conover was not only able to travel to Warsaw, but he was also received there with all honours. In an interview conducted for the Library of Congress, he recalled his arrival at the airport in Warsaw as the most unforgettable experience of his first European trip as a radio host:
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Looking out the window of the plane when we landed, I saw, at the foot of the ramp, some people with cameras, people with tape recorders, some little girls carrying flowers, and a big crowd behind the airport fence. I thought: ‘Well, I’d better wait till whoever that’s forgets off’, and I was the last person off the plane. And that’s when the cheering started from behind the fence. It was for me.
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Roman Polański, Jan Zylber, Andrzej Trzaskowski, Krzysztof Komeda, Andrzej Nowakowski, Henryk Kurek, Tadeusz Łomnicki &Andrzej Wojciechowski in Andrzej Wajda's film 'Innocent Sorcerers', 1960, photo: Kadr Film Studio / National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute / www.fototeka.fn.org.pl
Conover remembers that before he got into the car the American Embassy provided, a band of 20 or even 30 musicians had begun playing in his honour. Driving to the city centre, people were bicycling and motorcycling alongside, waving at him. At the same time, musicians from all over Poland were travelling to Warsaw to perform at the National Philharmonic in order to show him what they’d learned from Jazz Hour. Conover recalled this evening in the aforementioned interview:
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I was introduced from the stage – I was sitting in the front row with a bunch of people – the place was absolutely packed […] and the applause went on so long, I rose to acknowledge the applause, but it went on even after I’d sat down, so long that I finally had to get up on stage and say something myself.
The same day, there was a less formal meeting between Conover and the musicians. The American proved to be a skilled diplomat while answering numerous questions regarding the place of Polish jazz in the world. Roman Waschko told Jazz Forum that according to the American radio host, in terms of jazz, Poland was fifth in Europe – behind England, West Germany, Sweden and France. In the same issue of the magazine, Matuszkiewicz recalled Conover’s arrival to Warsaw as a breakthrough moment:
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Here we met in person with a world-famous figure, with his great knowledge, and that wonderful voice. We hoped that it would pave the way for musicians, that we would establish contacts with people abroad – and this indeed happened. He was the first harbinger of what was slowly coming.
The concert at the Philharmonic was recorded and released later on an LP entitled Willis Conover Meets Polish Jazz. This wasn’t, however, the most important recording made during his stay in Warsaw. In the studio of the Polish Radio, Conover recorded five broadcasts devoted exclusively to the phenomenon of Polish jazz. By broadcasting them, he contributed significantly to its promotion around the world. And not for the last time, as it would soon turn out.
In the following years, Polish jazzmen slowly began to perform in the West. In 1962 Andrzej Trzaskowski’s band The Wreckers toured in the United States. Although the group’s leader received a special scholarship from the US State Department for the occasion, Michał Urbaniak, who played in the band, claimsed in an interview for Jazz Forum that Conover’s role in organising this tour could not be overestimated. The Polish violinist recalls that Conover was waiting for them at the New York airport with two limousines, from which jazz was blasting loudly. ‘I was stunned for two whole months. Willis was the soul of it all, showing us around everywhere’, said Urbaniak. It was during this tour that Conover took Polish musicians to Birdland and introduced them to Coltrane and Webster.
When Urbaniak moved to the United States in 1973, he contacted Conover, who was eager to help him. He was supporting not only Polish musicians – the Polish Radio journalist Andrzej Jaroszyński could always count on staying at his apartment. Their friendship resulted in the programme Muzyka wśród Przyjaciół (Music Among Good Friends), which Conover prepared for the Polish Radio for years.
After 1959 Conover continued to participate in Polish jazz festivals. It was mostly likely during his visit to the Jazz Jamboree in 1976 when he became acquainted with the works of pianist Adam Makowicz, whom he later helped to make a career in the US. Andrzej Trzaskowski remembered meeting him at the same festival in 1983. When the leader of The Wreckers wanted to interrupt the conversation to listen to a Miles Davis concert, Conover was to reply that it wasn’t worth it, because the famous trumpeter’s music had become irrelevant 20 years earlier. As one can see, even an expert can sometimes make mistakes.
Despite the ongoing Cold War, in 1977 Conover was awarded the Decoration of Honor Meritorious for Polish Culture. In 1995, a year before his death, Jazz Forum published a profile of him, titled: ‘A Debt That Cannot be Repaid’. It’s hard to argue with such statement, as for a whole generation of Polish instrumentalists to come, Conover and his broadcasts were simply… instrumental.
Written by Jan Błaszczak, Jun 2021
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