Local Jazz Historian, Dave Usher, To Speak on Jazz Great Dizzy Gillespie at USC

DETROIT, MI. (Dave Usher PR) - Dave Usher, CEO of Marine Pollution Control and one of the best friends of the late jazz great Dizzy Gillespie, will speak on a panel discussing Gillespie's 1956 U.S. State Department historic tour of South America at the University of Southern California (USC) October 12.

The program will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tour that was a major diplomatic effort to indicate the progress being made in integration in the U.S. and to fight communism. More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the program.

The program is sponsored by the USC Annenberg School of Communication; the USC Center on Public Diplomacy; and the USC Integrated Media Systems Program.

Usher, who traveled with Gillespie throughout the world, was on the 1956 tour and recorded the concerts given by Gillespie. Indeed, during the last six years, Usher has produced disks of those South American concerts on the CAP CD label.

Besides Usher, the panel will consist of famed composer and arranger Quincy Jones - Gillespie's arranger and fourth trumpeter; Lalo Schifrin, pianist, composer and conductor who met Gillespie in Buenos Aires; and Adam Clayton Powell III, director of the USC's Viterbi School of Engineering's Integrated Media Systems Center whose father, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the famed congressman from New York's Harlem, sold the idea of the tour to the State Department.

The Eisenhower administration enlisted Gillespie and his 17-piece integrated band as the first "jazz ambassadors" at the urging of the New York congressman. The longtime civil rights advocate pitched the idea of sending the band - comprised almost entirely of African American musicians - abroad to combat communism.

Marine Pollution Control is one of the world's foremost environment management companies. Usher, whose company has helped clean up some of the worst oil spills, is considered a pioneer in developing methods for oil spill cleanups.