MATT MARTZ: "This experience teaches me how to, more or less, teach teenagers, how to say 'OK, we're having a problem with this section, let's clap it, let's sing it.'"

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STEVE EMBER:

The orchestra performs for free but receives donations that help pay for necessities like sheet music.

MATT MARTZ: "In our first concert, we made eleven hundred dollars, which was fantastic. That helped pay for a lot of music that we had purchased. Then this last concert in January, we made over fifteen hundred dollars which is just incredible."

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BARBARA KLEIN: Art and culture can bring people together. So they can often be effective instruments of public diplomacy. For the United States, one of the most successful public diplomacy efforts of the late twentieth century was the Jazz Ambassadors programs.

An exhibit launched in Washington looks back at this exercise in musical diplomacy.

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STEVE EMBER: "Jazz ambassadors" like Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck traveled the world. These musicians visited more than thirty-five countries from the nineteen fifties to the seventies. They traveled in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Their music influenced the image of the United States and helped ease Cold War tensions.

Curtis Sandberg at the Meridian International Center in Washington is curator of the exhibit called "Jam Session."