At the height of the ideological antagonism of the Cold War, the U.S. State Department unleashed an unexpected tool in its battle against communism: jazz. From 1956 through the late 1970s, America dispatched its finest jazz musicians to the far corners of the earth, from Iraq to India, from the Congo to the Soviet Union, in order to win the hearts and minds of the Third World and to counter perceptions of American racism. Author traces the development of jazz as a key cultural export as well as the decline of its potency. She shows that the tours had effects far beyond what the State Department ever intended. The original purpose of the tours was to promote goodwill in strategic countries. However, musicians like Duke Elington, Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong were much more interested in playing to the common folk. They would find enthusiastic jazz musicians to jam with or simply soaked in the local music that percolated through the streets. They broke through the government's official narrative and gave their audiences an unprecendented vision of the black American experience. In this process, new collaborations developed between Americans and the formerly colonized peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, collaborations that fostered greater racial pride and solidarity.