Radio Free Europe and Cold War Jazz @

 Radios Free Europe and Cold War Jazz

 

Czech disc jockey Eva Stankova was once described in a newspaper article as a “lovely and vivacious refugee.“ She lived in New York and taped her music programs at the New York RFE office. Her program was called “Date with Eva” that was described in 1951 as, "a disk jockey program, brings once again into the enslaved land the native folk music and western jazz banned by the Reds." She traveled throughout the United States giving interviews over domestic radio stations, which played excerpts from her broadcasts and interviews with jazz greats. 

 

In the 1950s, Radio Free Europe broadcast pre-written scripts, using phonetics, read by famous jazz musicians Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Woody Herman, Oscar Peterson, Earl Hines and Stan Kenton. Newspapers in 1957 carried her photograph with the caption: "Checkin' in Czech -- Roy (Little Jazz) Eldridge says a few words in Czechoslovakia in the Czech language. Helping the famed trumpeter overcome the language barrier is pretty Eva Stankova of Radio Free Europe." The programs were then made available to U.S. audiences through the Crusade for Freedom. 

 

The Billboard magazine in 1958 proudly proclaimed itself in its sixty-fourth year to be “The Amusement Industry’s Leading Newsweekly.”  The March 3, 1958, issue had a full-page article entitled “A Report to the Music Industry” that dealt with Radio Free Europe and the Crusade for Freedom A photograph of the Munich RFE headquarters and a graphic of the RFE transmitter sites and how programs were broadcast from Germany and Portugal to East Europe.  The article focused on music: “The youth in these countries want to know about and hear the latest American pop, dance and jazz records.  And music of all kinds comprises some 15% of broadcast time to each country behind the Iron Curtain.”

 

For the 1959 campaign, the Advertising Council also sent out a two-record set to radio stations: one was entitled “But not for me—Freedom is not free” that contained brief personal appeals in support Radio Free Europe, from musicians and entertainers, Duke Ellington, Arthur Godfrey, Hy Gardner, Judy Holliday, Robert Preston and Dorothy Collins. It was distributed with a second record “This Guitar Chose Freedom” that told the story of Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo and his escape to freedom in 1956. Television personality Steve Allen was the speaker and Szabo is heard on the record playing songs “I remember you,” ‘Berklee’s Delight,” “You go to my head” and “Chinatown my Chinatown.” The theme of the recording was “How American jazz – stifled behind the Iron Curtain – sounds in a free land.”