by Cora Bullock
March/April 2006

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IT TAKES A SPECIAL BREED OF MUSICIAN TO LEAVE THE COMFORTS OF HOME and travel to a country nearly destroyed by civil war and dictatorship and wrangle with the government to get visas and permission even to play. Then you go to towns where electricity is iffy, the censorship board is ready to yank you out, and you’re not even allowed to publicize your concert – all just to play to a small crowd of a few hundred people. But the musicians of the non-profit organization American Voices do just that, having traveled to more than 80 countries since it started in 1992 to bring American music to ears that either have never heard it or haven’t heard it for years. Funding comes from a hodgepodge of sources, including embassies, companies, ministries of culture, local hotels, and airlines. (They’ve begun a push to increase funding from U.S. companies and individuals.)

The person behind this organization is an erudite, well-spoken, classically trained concert pianist. John Ferguson’s calm demeanor bespeaks years of world travel and experience dealing with difficult governments. He’s lived in Holland, Germany, and France and moved a few years ago to Bangkok.

American Voices represents more than the spread of American music, and when Ferguson talks about their mission, it’s easy to get swept up by his passion. “It takes on a larger dimension, to go to these countries that are often portrayed in the news as hotbeds of unrest or terrorism or the struggle against terrorism,” he says. He gives as an example Turkmenistan, where they performed a concert version of West Side Story. “They’re struggling under heavy dictatorship there. And it gave the local musicians a lot of hope to be allowed to work with Western musicians,” says Ferguson. The concert was even broadcast on national television, a sort of diplomatic triumph in his eyes. “Here in the States, we take these things for granted, but sometimes, just putting on a concert version of a Broadway show changes everything for local people,” he says. “It’s like the sun comes out. They realize there are people out there who care about them, think about them, and take the trouble to come to their country, and they’re allowed to get on stage with Americans and perform. It’s a big psychological triumph for them.”

Houston-born Ferguson has always loved international travel. When he was just 17, he studied in France with the famous piano teacher Nadia Boulanger, who was 82 at the time. Upon graduating from UT, Ferguson worked as an artist in residence for the state of North Carolina, where he learned the community approach to arts organizing. He left in 1999 to return to Europe to study.

Everything changed when the Berlin Wall came down. “At the time, I had a chamber music group that specialized in American repertoire,” Ferguson says. The group had played at a German festival, and its organizer had close ties to the American embassy in Bonn. “We just happened upon a very energetic foreign service officer, Paul Smith. He was very excited to have us as a resource, Americans living in Europe, down the street, more or less,” says Ferguson.

Smith asked them to play concerts in former Eastern Germany, which led to performances in what was still the Soviet Union; just a year before its collapse, they were in Latvia and Lithuania. “Basically, what we saw was that in these countries that had been separated from contact with the United States by the Cold War, there was this huge interest in Americans and American music. You would have thought we were Madonna and her band arriving in Latvia,” says Ferguson. The chamber group held concerts in public schools for 6- to 18-year-olds in Latvia. Before they went, they were asked to play for 90 minutes. “We said there was no way. School kids don’t go for our music, but they were hanging on the edge of their seats listening to every note we played.”

In those days, they were often the first U.S. musicians to ever visit these cities in the Soviet Union and East Germany. Their first projects centered on American classical composers. Over the years, American Voices has grown into an organization presenting hip-hop, jazz, blues, country, opera, and Broadway artists. During the George Gershwin centennial in 1998, the artists toured the Middle East and Persian Gulf countries and South Asia – that year dramatically expanded their reach. In 2000, they toured Southeast Asia. By 2005, American Voices started performing in Africa, in isolated countries like Eritrea, Mauritania, and Gambia. They’ve held jazz festivals in Baku, Azerbaijan; Jazz Bridges (in which American jazz artists perform with local musicians) in Burma; summer jazz and Broadway academies in Taiwan; and six months after September 11, they were in Kazakhstan. They have donated more than 75 music score collections to conservatories and libraries, “how to break dance” DVDs, and other educational materials.

American Voices intentionally concentrates on places of conflict or isolation. “Usually audiences are so grateful for whatever we have to offer that the response is always very enthusiastic,” says Ferguson. In Vietnam, one of the most popular groups American Voices sent was HaviKoro, a hip-hop break dancing group based out of Houston. They had audiences of 5,000 screaming teenagers – “And I mean screaming,” stresses Ferguson. HaviKoro espouses positive messages, which is a good thing because they didn’t get approval for the concert until the final dress rehearsal (basically a thinly veiled censorship meeting).

Ferguson plays in the Broadway and classical music programs, and, depending on the organizational challenges, he’ll also accompany groups to facilitate concerts when dealing with difficult countries. It helps that he has a network of people around the world with whom he has worked. It also helps that he has two American passports that allow him to travel to countries that dislike and mistrust each other: “If I go to Azerbaijan, I use one passport. If I go to Armenia, I use the other.”

When told he must be a master diplomat, he chuckles and says, “You learn how to say one thing while thinking another.” But overall, the musicians are rarely met with hostility. “As musicians, we’re welcomed with open arms and carte blanche. We’re often a welcome change from State Department diplomats and people like that who come promoting policies that nobody likes,” says Ferguson. Political opposition does crop up, sometimes in unsuspecting places. For example, the Malaysian government has a ban on collaborating with American cultural organizations because of the ransacking of the Iraq National Museum after the invasion. In countries in which you’d expect governments to be more difficult, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Syria, the musicians are quite welcome.

The musicians are not of your normal variety. “The work is so difficult, you have to locate special personalities, people who really enjoy the work and enjoy the interaction and are willing to go the extra mile, literally and figuratively, and deal with dust and chaos and corruption,” says Ferguson. “They feel it expands their horizons as artists and as individuals.”

The organization is comprised of mostly American artists living in Europe who are devoted to the American repertoire. They also have artists living in the United States, especially Houston artists, because the organization is based in Houston. They have worked with some famous artists, such as the baritone Kurt Ollmann and the conductor David Handel, but they haven’t had the staff resources to go to New York City and hold auditions.

One of Ferguson’s favorite places he’s performed is Afghanistan. He was there in late 2005, and the Afghans were amazed to see Americans who were not soldiers, aid workers, or diplomats. They told him it made them feel so normal.

Working there proved to be a real challenge. The climate is very dry, the altitude is very high (around 8,000 feet), and it was very dusty – the singer, CoCo York, was always struggling against the dust, and it didn’t help the instruments, either. “Aside from the instruments, you never knew if there was going to be electricity. Once you had a generator going, you didn’t know if the stream of electricity was going to be constant,” Ferguson says. Plus, there were only two functioning pianos in Kabul (the Taliban had destroyed the others), one at the Indonesian embassy and one at the French embassy, “so we had to move heaven and earth just to get those pianos into a room so we could rehearse.”

They were also under very strict security regulations. They couldn’t promote the concert, so it was by invitation only. They rehearsed for a week with traditional musicians and a pop group for the program, in which musicians created jazz treatments of the music of what could be considered the Afghan Elvis, Ahmad Zahir. His heyday was the ’60s and ’70s, and he is still a cultural icon there. By the end of the week, word-of-mouth produced some 450 people crammed into a small courtyard where the musicians performed, and they danced in the aisles. Says Ferguson proudly, “When you see an audience reacting that way, you know you’ve accomplished everything you wanted to do.”

For more information on American Voices, visit www.AmericanVoices.org.