Willis Clark Conover, Jr. (December 18, 1920 – May 17, 1996) was a jazz producer and broadcaster on the Voice of America for over forty years. He produced jazz concerts at the White House, the Newport Jazz Festival, and for movies and television. By arranging concerts where people of all races were welcome, he is credited with desegregating Washington, D.C., nightclubs.[2] Conover is credited with keeping interest in jazz alive in the countries of Eastern Europe through his nightly broadcasts during the Cold War.[3]
As a young man, Conover was interested in science fiction, and published a science-fiction fanzine, Science Fantasy Correspondent. This brought him into contact with horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The correspondence between Lovecraft, who was at the end of his life, and the young Conover, has been published as Lovecraft at Last.[4]
He later moved to Washington, D.C., and focused on jazz in his programming, especially the Duke Ellington hour on Saturday nights. His guests on this program and Saturday morning shows included many artists, such as Boyd Raeburn.
Conover came to work at the Voice of America, and became known to jazz lovers via the hour-long program Voice of America Jazz Hour. His slow delivery and the use of scripts written in "special English" made his programmes more widely accessible and he is said to have become the first teacher of English to a whole generation of East European jazz lovers.[5] Conover was not well known in the United States, even among jazz aficionados, as the Voice of America did not broadcast domestically except on shortwave, but his visits to Eastern Europe and Soviet Union brought huge crowds and star treatment for him. He was a celebrity figure in the Soviet Union, where the Voice of America was a prime source of information as well as music.
^Willis Conover: Broadcasting Jazz To The World, by Terence M. Ripmaster (born 1933), iUniverse (2007); OCLC180237422
^Loucks, Donovan K. (August 2015). "Donald A. Wollheim's Hoax Review of the Necronomicon". Lovecraft Annual (9): 212–218. ISSN1935-6102. JSTOR26868506.
^Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2006, pp. 180–181.
^ abCold War broadcasting : impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: a collection of studies and documents. A. Ross Johnson, R. Eugene Parta, Timothy Garton Ash. Budapest: Central European University Press. 2010. ISBN978-1-4416-7708-2. OCLC671648365.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
Interview with Conover about the appeal of jazz music to international audiences, October 23, 1985, C-SPAN
