The Wall Street Journal (New York, NY)

There's Art and Music in These American Ambassadors' Portfolios (Page D6) Naomi Schaefer 28 January 2004

Circulation: 1,820,600

New Yorkers who walk into the oak-paneled Carnegie Club on West 56th Street will encounter a now unfamiliar scent—cigar smoke. The club, which is one of a few legal cigar bars in a city gone smoke-free, has nostalgia written all over it: musty bookshelves, waitresses who don't carry the drinks themselves but are followed by tuxedoed men who perform that service, and, most of all, Cary Hoffman and the Stan Rubin Orchestra.

Every Saturday night, it turns out, Mr. Hoffman, a Jewish, 70-something Queens native, sings Sinatra. Or channels him. I'm no Sinatra expert, but the critics—and the middle-aged woman in the front row who could hardly stop swooning—seem to agree that Mr. Hoffman sounds exactly like Sinatra. The show is not an impersonation, though. It's just a delightful combination of Sinatra's early songs, a few tidbits about his career, and some patter about Mr. Hoffman's own love affair with the Chairman. At one point in the show just before New Year's, Mr. Hoffman introduced the band and noted the absence of its leader, another gentleman from Queens, Stan Rubin. "He's in Iraq," said Mr. Hoffman, "bringing swing to the Shiites."

Mr. Hoffman was joking, but he needn't have been. Through a program called CultureConnect run by the U.S. State Department, Mr. Hoffman and Mr. Rubin can take their act on the road. Launched a little over a year ago, as a response to the attacks of 9/11, the program sends prominent American writers, artists and musicians to foreign countries to serve as "cultural ambassadors." And they, in turn, pick artists from those countries to visit the U.S. "It gives us a vehicle for people of good will to connect," says Patricia S. Harrison, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. She explains, "One easy way to do this is through art and music because you don't need translation." (And given the dearth of translators available in the U.S., that's no small advantage.)

In the next several months the program will be sending cellist Yo-Yo Ma to South Korea as well as somewhere in the Middle East and singer Mary Wilson to Ethiopia, Oman, India and Bangladesh. There are also tentative plans for author Frank McCourt to visit Syria and Algeria. Ms. Harrison emphasizes that these artists will not just be giving a free performance and then jetting off to their next engagement. Rather, they will be meeting with high-school and college students in each of these countries, giving master classes and hosting discussions, to find what Ms. Harrison calls "common ground." Opera singer Denyce Graves, who has traveled to Venezuela, Poland, Russia and Romania for the program, explains that such exchanges "make people more compassionate and tolerant and understanding. We realize that we are more alike than unalike."

Though most of these students are not destined to become world-class artists, Ms. Harrison acknowledges, "they still want to know, `do I have a place in this world?'" And in countries where young men and women are encouraged to believe their "place" is to act as explosive material in the holy war against America, it's hard to overestimate the utility of these conversations.

But there is another sense in which it is important to send artists like Ms. Graves and jazz musician Wynton Marsalis (another of the program's ambassadors) to Muslim countries. Though one hesitates to say there is anything reasonable in the impression that these young people have of America as the Great Satan, it is certainly true that the parts of American culture that get through to these countries are often crude, sexually explicit and lowbrow. Ms. Graves notes, "I see what's being imported in terms of American culture, and it's not a fair representation of who we are. I have cringed at what people think is American, but if you don't have a chance to visit, all you have is what's being said to you."

Indeed, one needn't go as far as Pakistan to find religious people who see American culture as a potentially destructive influence. Plenty of religious communities in the U.S. are disgusted with offensive rap lyrics or installation art like the elephant-dung painting of the Virgin Mary. But many of these communities have tried a policy of cultural discernment, in which they teach young people to take what is best from American culture, to examine it through the eyes of their religious beliefs, and to adopt the parts of it they find in keeping with their principles. Such discernment requires an acceptance that they will encounter elements of American culture they don't like, but that this, in and of itself, is no reason to shut out the secular world. By sending abroad the best of what American art, music or literature has to offer, CultureConnect can perhaps move the Muslim world to let some of Western culture seep in.

Ms. Harrison, who has already spent some time in Iraq with Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser (another ambassador), says she has big plans for the country. The Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra visited the U.S. a few weeks ago as part of the reciprocation program, and Ms. Harrison hopes to arrange a concert in Iraq by Yo-Yo Ma. It's too late, of course, for the residents of Baghdad to hear Frank Sinatra, but there are a couple of guys from Queens who might be able to fill in.

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