The Real Ambassadors is a poignant tale of cultural exchange, anti-racism, and jazz history. And it's a love story — between life-long husband and wife partners, Iola & Dave Brubeck and their vision for a better world.

Appalled by the racist treatment of Black jazz musicians in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, the Brubecks wrote a musical based on the Jazz Ambassadors Program established by President Eisenhower and the US State Department during the Cold War. In an effort to win hearts and minds, jazz musicians were sent out around the world to represent the freedom and creativity of America through their art form. Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and most of the other Jazz Ambassadors were Black. The irony is that they were treated like royalty around the world, but could not stay in hotels or play in integrated bands in their own country.

Performed live only once, at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1962, the Real Ambassadors featured Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae, Dave Brubeck and Lambert Hendricks and Bavan.

The musical was a chance for Louis Armstrong to speak out about his deep feelings about racism and segregation in this country — feelings he rarely expressed publicly.

The story features original music, rare archival recorded letters sent back and forth between the Brubecks and Louis Armstrong about the project, rehearsal recordings and interviews with Dave and Iola Brubeck. Other voices include: the Brubecks' sons, Chris and Dan Brubeck, Keith Hatschek, author of the book, "The Real Ambassadors,” Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum, and singer/actress Yolande Bavan, the last surviving performer involved in the project.

Thanks to: Keith Hatschek, Chris Brubeck, Dan Brubeck, Ricky Riccardi, Yolande Bavan, Lisa Cohen, and Wynton Marsalis.

Special thanks to: The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation and the Louis Armstrong House Museum; Michael Bellacosa and the Brubeck Collection, Wilton Library, Wilton, Connecticut; The Complete Louis Armstrong Columbia & RCA Victor Studio Sessions 1946-66 Mosaic Records 270; The Milken Family Foundation Archive Oral History Project; and The Library of Congress.

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson) and Brandi Howell in collaboration with Jackson Spenner. Mixed by Jim McKee.

The Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, popularly known as WSPA, ran for four summers from 1974 to 1979.
You could learn woodworking in the morning and feminist theory in the afternoon, and then let loose and make candy houses in the evening. Childcare was free, tuition was minimal, and the locations were scattered throughout the country, making it easy for interested parties to attend.

WSPA was the brainchild of seven women, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Phyllis Birkby, Katrin Adam, Bobbie Sue Hood, Ellen Perry Berkeley, Marie Kennedy, and Joan Forrester Sprague. These women represented a mix of academic, professional, and practical experience. What they wanted to create was an educational curriculum, by women and for women, that freed architecture from the hierarchies of existing schools and practice.

At their workshops, held on a succession of college campuses, starting with St. Joseph’s College in Biddeford, Maine, everyone was a student and everyone was a teacher. No one was passive. For many of the participants, it was their first experience of being the majority gender in a design classroom or architecture office. Even decades later, they remembered the experience with happy tears.

As with many collaborative enterprises with shoestring budgets, WSPA eventually dissipated, but not before giving a generation of women architects the tools (sometimes literally) to imagine a more communitarian world.

Produced by Brandi Howell with host Alexandra Lange for New Angle: Voice, the podcast about Pioneering Women in American Architecture brought to you by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

Special thanks in this episode to Leslie Kanes Wisemen, Katrin Adam, Cathy Simon, and Paulett Taggart. And to the Smith College Special Collections, which houses all of the WSPA archives. Visit NewAngleVoice instagram page to see some incredible photos from this collection, including the Building Charades and Architecture Cakes. Visit New Angle: Voice wherever you find your podcasts.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) with Brandi Howell and Nathan Dalton. We're part of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of curated podcasts created by independent producers. Visit kitchensisters.org for more stories and info about our projects and public events.

We travel to the Mississippi Delta and the world of Lebanese immigrants, where barbecue and the blues meet kibbe, a kind of traditional Lebanese raw meatloaf. Lebanese immigrants began arriving in the Delta in the late 1800s, soon after the Civil War. Many worked as peddlers, then grocers and restaurateurs.

Kibbe — a word and a recipe with so many variations. Ground lamb or beef mixed with bulgur wheat, cinnamon, salt and pepper. Many love it raw. However it’s made, it’s part of the glue that holds the Lebanese family culture together in the Mississippi Delta and beyond.

We visit Pat Davis, owner of Abe’s BAR-B-Q at the intersection of Highway 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the famed crossroads where, legend has it, blues icon Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil to play guitar better than anybody. Since 1924 Abe’s has been known for it’s barbecue, but if you know to ask, they’ve got grape leaves in the back.

Chafik Chamoun, who owns Chamoun’s Rest Haven on Highway 61, features Southern, Lebanese and Italian food — but he’s best known for his Kibbe. Chafik arrived in Clarksdale from Lebanon in 1954, and first worked as a peddler selling ladies slips and nylon stockings.

Sammy Ray, Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University, Galveston, talks about growing up in a barbecue shack that his mother ran on the edge of what was then called “Black Town.” His father peddled dry goods to the Black sharecroppers.

During the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Abe’s BAR-B-Q and Chamoun’s Rest Haven were some of the only restaurants in the area that would serve Black people. “We were tested in 1965,” Pat Davis remembers. “A bunch of Black kids went to all the restaurants on the highway and every one refused them except Chamoun’s and my place. And everybody else got lawsuits against them.”

The list of famous Lebanese Americans is long and impressive. Ralph Nader, Paul Anka, Dick Dale, Casey Kasem, Khalil Gibran and Vince Vaughn, to name a few. But the one most people talked about on our trip was Danny Thomas. Pat Davis took us out in the parking lot to listen to a CD that he just happened to have in his car of Danny Thomas singing in Arabic.

“We called ourselves Syrians when we first came here,” Davis says. “And until Danny came and said he was Lebanese then we all began to realize we really are Lebanese and Danny Thomas can say it. So we’re Lebanese now.”

Produced by The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva), mixed by Jim McKee, for the James Beard Award winning Hidden Kitchens series on NPR.

The Kitchen Sisters Present is produced by The Kitchen Sisters with Nathan Dalton and Brandi Howell. We are part of PRX's Radiotopia, a curated network of podcasts created by independent producers.

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