Where does Jazz figure in the Lebanese leftist experience? What are the limitations and possibilities in appropriating or adapting cultural elements specific to African-American liberation and Black Power in a space and historical context ostensibly different from those within which such styles emerged? My research focuses on songs by leftist artists like Ziad, Khaled Habre, Ahmad Kaabour, Marcel Khalife and Omayma Khalil who achieved prominence during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) as embodiments of a leftist militant counter-cultural ethos for creative expression. I explore how political militancy gets to be understood and translated in the public sphere through creative expression propagated via mass-media. Beyond the particularities of Lebanon, I situate leftist artists within the transnational context of the global sixties. I examine Beirut as a nodal site of transnational revolutionary politics, informed by the radical rhetoric of the Palestinian liberation movement and the Lebanese left that integrated the “Arab Hanoi” within global solidarity networks from Cuba to Vietnam, Oakland to Paris. Blurring the boundaries between artistic expression and political praxis, leftist artists were also in conversation and contention with global forms of cultural production and expression. Aesthetically, their works integrate elements from diverse musical schools including jazz, rock n roll, French political songs, and Latin American styles. Nevertheless, this engagement with global musical forms was neither unidimensional nor a passive reception of globalized culture. Artists diverge from blindly importing prepackaged formulas of franji (western) music, while carefully incorporating other components, like jazz, funk, and soul — all of which point towards African-American culture and black liberation. In my talk I explore the logics influencing such a bifurcated engagement with American culture in Lebanon during the 70s and 80s. How was the struggle of African-Americans and its cultural articulations being adapted and represented in the works of leftist militant artists in Lebanon? I engage with the problematic of race and class, and the modes in which it was being understood and translated through an Arab Internationalism which sought tools of creative and aesthetic dissent from around the world that corresponded effectively to the particular and specific experience of Lebanon.