In 2011, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated April 30 as International Jazz Day “in order to highlight jazz and its diplomatic role of uniting people in all corners of the globe.”

The U.S. State Department sponsored jazz icons, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Quincy Jones and Sarah Vaughan, to travel the world as cultural ambassadors to combat racially-charged Soviet propaganda during the Cold War. Their mission was at the intersection of race, civil rights and public diplomacy.

To commemorate International Jazz Day, I nominated Lee Morgan’s The Sidewinder for inclusion in the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress. Recordings selected are “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”