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Silenced but Not Silent: Asian Americans and Jazz

January 2007

DOI:10.1215/9780822389835-004

In book: Alien Encounters (pp.69-108)

Authors:

Kevin Analu Fellezs

Columbia University

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From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

two•••

Silenced but Not Silent: Asian

Americans and Jazz

Kevin Fellezs

In the early 1960s, a Japanese jazz pianist, composer, and big band

leader, Toshiko Akiyoshi, dressed in a traditional kimono, made an

appearance on the television game show What’s My Line? The

studio audience’s laughter when she signed her name on the guest board in

Japanese kanji script, as well as the host’s stammering attempt to pronounce

her name, revealed how unfamiliar mainstream American audiences were

with Asians and Asian culture. Moreover, when she revealed her professional

‘‘line’’ as a jazz pianist to the studio and home viewing audience, the studio au-

dience’s audible reactions indicated the discrepancy between ‘‘American jazz’’

and ‘‘Japanese woman.’’

∞

This distance has not been erased in the roughly

forty years since Akiyoshi’s appearance on the television show.

≤

In a JazzTimes

article in 2003, author Bill Shoemaker asks a central question about the con-

tinued marginality of Asian American jazz musicians ‘‘even within enlightened

jazz circles,’’ namely, ‘‘How [can one] change the American mindset about

race and culture through the most American of art forms?’’

≥

His question

answers itself, in part, by glossing over what the phrase ‘‘the most American of

art forms’’ articulates. A reworking of the question might get at the central

predicament Asian American jazz musicians face in the cultural marketplace:

how are Asian Americans ‘‘not’’ American and thus foreclosed from participa-

tion in this form?

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70 Fellezs

I would like to spend a few moments with Shoemaker’s article as it suc-

cinctly displays the problematic positionality of Asian American jazz artists in

normative terms. While his article is extremely thoughtful and gives voice to a

number of signiﬁcant Asian American musicians (all of whom receive some

attention in this essay

∂

), this predicament remains. Shoemaker is forced to

admit that while ‘‘hybridity and multiple identities are increasingly central to

jazz’s discussions about race,’’ it is still true that ‘‘if jazz is any barometer, the

issue of race in the U.S. is still largely two dimensional: black and white.’’

∑

Interestingly, he concludes his article by noting, ‘‘[The fact that] Hispanics

have become the U.S.’s largest minority more than a decade ahead of con-

sensus projections is just the latest indicator of the need to reassess the issue of

diversity in jazz.’’

∏

The inability to articulate an exclusively Asian American

space in an article about Asian American musicians, even by a writer sympa-

thetic to Asian American jazz musicians’ marginality, indicates the di≈culties

they face in their attempts to be heard on their own terms, however unsettling

that is to dominant perceptions of Asian Americans—perceptions fed by popu-

lar mythologies surrounding Asia and Asians in general that render Asians and

Asian Americans ‘‘unﬁt’’ as ‘‘all-American’’ subjects.

Furthermore, Shoemaker argues that there are two underlying reasons for

the exclusion of Asian American jazz musicians from jazz critics’ historio-

graphical project. One is the ability of ‘‘many Asian-Americans [to] assimilate

into the American mainstream with considerable ease, sometimes, like ice-

skating diva Michelle Kwan, rising to pop-culture-icon status with little or

anything made of their ethnicity.’’ Second, the ‘‘uncompromising [leftist] poli-

tics of the Asian-American jazz movement’s early years’’ may also impact any

inclusivist agenda Asian American jazz artists might hope to promote. While

later I will deal at more length with how this version of the ‘‘model minority’’

negatively impacts Asian American jazz musicians’ production of aesthetic

works, I want to make the observation here that what Shoemaker perceives as

an absence of ethnicity is actually a subsuming of ethnicity—a move that is not

as innocent as the one he suggests. Finally, progressive leftist politics may

indeed play some part in the critical reception of Asian American jazz, if it is

perceived at all, by downplaying aesthetics and attention to actual perfor-

mances in favor of promoting various political agendas, but this observation,

as Shoemaker notes, does not speak to the contemporary moment.

I want to resituate the problematic predicament Shoemaker evokes by pos-

ing a question—‘‘Is there such a thing as Asian American jazz?’’—as central to

my investigation of Asian American jazz artists, their relationship to jazz dis-

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Silenced but Not Silent 71

course, and the marginal position they occupy in the jazz world. Because my

position is that there are many Asian American jazzes inﬂected in idiosyncratic

ways by individual musicians, I attempt no deﬁnitive answer, tracing instead a

broad outline around this question in order to contextualize the silencing of

Asian American jazz musicians by critics, writers, and scholars. My primary in-

terest is in how Asian American musicians negotiate the tensions brought to

bear by a mute chorus of indi√erent critics and a legacy of Asian American racial-

ization that supports their disenfranchisement from dominant American culture.

Before I discuss speciﬁc musicians’ strategies for dealing with this predica-

ment, I want to brieﬂy contemplate two formations: the discursive construc-

tion of a jazz canon and how certain stereotypes exclude Asian American

musicians from participating as equals with other ‘‘jazz subjects.’’

My tracing

highlights three important issues: recognition of Asian American jazz as pro-

tean and marked in di√erent ways by di√erent musicians; the fact that the

heterogeneity of the Asian American jazz scene mirrors the diversity of the

Asian American community itself; and the way in which the linking of culture,

politics, community awareness, and individual creativity provides a rich and

complex backdrop to Asian American jazz musicking.

∫

Black, White, and Beyond

Normative jazz discourse, both popular and scholarly, represents jazz as an

indigenous American expressive musical form that emerged from the con-

ﬂuence of vernacular African American and Creole musicking and other social

practices, as well as furtive traverses by black and white musicians across the

color line.

Ω

This narrative emerged in early jazz writings such as those of the

European conductor Ernst-Alexandre Ansermet, who in a 1919 review of early

jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet described ‘‘an ensemble of authentic musicians

of [the] Negro race’’ whose jazz musicking had ﬁnally reached Europe ‘‘in its

living reality.’’

∞≠

One of the ways in which later writers such as Hugues Panas-

sié, André Hodeir, and Gunther Schuller attenuated some of the racialized

essentialist notions implicit in Ansermet’s review was to declare that although

jazz was ‘‘the music of the American Negro, its universality has long since

been established.’’

∞∞

Scott DeVeaux, writing more recently, resituates one of

jazz’s deﬁnitional boundaries within ethnicity, stating,

Jazz is strongly identiﬁed with African-American culture, both in the narrow

sense that it is expressive of, and uniquely rooted in, the experience of black

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72 Fellezs

Americans. On the whole, [African American] ethnicity provides a core, a center

of gravity for the narrative of jazz, and is one element that unites the several

di√erent kinds of narratives in use today.

∞≤

Accordingly, jazz evolved into an embodiment of a color-blind democracy

in action cast in reductive, masculinist, black-white racial binarisms occluding,

however, the lingering inequalities between racialized, gendered, and classed

di√erence o√ the bandstand. As Gene Lees, a former Down Beat editor and jazz

writer, wrote in the conclusion to his book Cats of Any Color: Jazz, Black and

White (a title that underlines my assertion),

One of two things is true. Either jazz has evolved into a major art form, and an

international one, capable of exploring and inspiring the full range of human

experience and emotion. Or it is a small, shriveled, crippled art useful only for the

expression of the angers and resentments of an American minority. If the former is

true, it is the greatest artistic gift of blacks to America, and America’s greatest

aesthetic gift to the world.

∞≥

Explicit in Lees’s comment is the idea that jazz has moved from the African

American community into other American communities and on to the rest of

the world. He is explicitly not resigned to leaving jazz to ‘‘an American minor-

ity,’’ a minority, moreover, that is clearly not Asian American. While there are

notable exceptions (DeVeaux among them), dominant jazz discourse often

assumes this particular shape whether a critic is arguing for a broader inclusion

of white male musicians in various canonical projects or explicitly discussing

race in jazz.

∞∂

However, even as thoughtful a jazz scholar as DeVeaux is caught

in this binary bind, writing that jazz ‘‘has been justly celebrated as an exemplar

of racial harmony—a rare and privileged arena in which black and white

compete and cooperate in an atmosphere of mutual respect, supported by a

multiracial audience.’’

∞∑

Asian Americans, positioned outside of this construc-

tion of ‘‘real jazz musicians’’—as neither black nor white—remain silenced,

and unheard, within jazz discourse.

In addition, the construction of Asian Americans as exoticized aliens, de-

sired in certain constructions and moments but just as often viliﬁed for their

responses to the exclusionary practices of the dominant American culture,

further reduces the chance that they will be heard as ‘‘real Americans,’’ par-

ticularly when they are involved with a music that has been constructed within

a racialized binary that excludes them.

∞∏

Part of the ‘‘alienization’’ of Asian

Americans has been the feminization or emasculation of Asian American

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Silenced but Not Silent 73

males, who, stereotyped as either asexual eunuchs or passive males, are hardly

the robust masculine ﬁgures jazz discourse produces in its valorization of the

‘‘kings’’ of jazz.

∞π

Jazz tropes such as the ‘‘cutting contest,’’ ‘‘blowing hard,’’

and the ‘‘battle of the bands’’ betray a masculinist slant that forecloses Asian

American male participation.

∞∫

Asian American jazz musicians of both genders are further disallowed from

being heard as ‘‘real’’ jazz artists due to the model minority stereotype, which

positions Asian Americans as noncreative ‘‘nerdy’’ types, liminally caught be-

tween black and white America, serving as a racial ‘‘bu√er zone’’ for whites

while viewed suspiciously by other disenfranchised communities of color due

to the false belief in the upward social and economic mobility of all Asian

Americans.

∞Ω

The still active arguments in jazz scholarship concerned with the

authenticity and ownership of jazz—even by those such as DeVeaux, who seek

to disassemble the black-white binarism inherent in jazz historiography—

cannot escape the inability to hear Asian American musicians as jazz musi-

cians due in large part to the distance between stereotypes about black primi-

tive genius, the white bohemian fascination with black emotional freedom,

and Asian American exoticist stereotypes, foreign both to American cultural

norms and the extroverted emotional display or passionate abandon required

of ‘‘authentic’’ jazz musicianship. This remains true, as we have seen, even

when scholars attempt to critique essentialist and outdated stereotypes within

jazz. Jazz scholars have escaped explicit exclusionary gestures but implicitly

support Asian American silencing through a distinct lack of interest in Asian

American jazz musicians, due in part to the maintenance of a critical view-

point I have been describing.

≤≠

There are a number of rhetorical strategies that Asian American jazz musi-

cians have used to respond to this fundamental problem, but I am presently in-

terested in mapping how the ideological frameworks for mainstream jazz dis-

course and the speciﬁc racialization of Asian Americans have worked in tandem

to reduce Asian American jazz musicians’ visibility as both ‘‘real Americans’’

and ‘‘real jazz musicians.’’ Deborah Wong describes this perception:

The long history of Other colors in jazz—that is, Asians and Latinos—is con-

sistently reﬁgured as absence. If the very idea of an Asian American jazz is new or

strange, this demonstrates—successfully—the American hermeneutics of race as

binary: either/or, Black/White. Any other kind of jazz simply isn’t [authentic

jazz].

≤∞

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74 Fellezs

Needless to say, this conﬂation of ‘‘real American’’ and ‘‘real jazz musician’’

ignores the global reach of jazz musicking that produces, for example, South

African, Filipino, and Norwegian jazz artists.

≤≤

While critics and scholars may

be quick to respond a≈rmatively to both the global appeal of jazz and the rise

of non-American jazz artists, the bulk of jazz studies focuses on American

artists (again, largely African American or European American males). To sup-

port this emphasis, the argument is made that American jazz musicians pro-

vided the primary innovations and creative energies to the music. While I am

not arguing, for example, that Cantonese opera had more to do with jazz’s

‘‘swing’’ rhythm than African American musical practices, the historical and

social context for jazz musicking has long since reached beyond the New

Orleans brothel, Chicago’s ‘‘black and tan’’ clubs, or New York’s Harlem dis-

trict.

≤≥

Nor am I arguing for the erasure of African American musicians or their

importance to the creation and development of jazz; nor am I advocating that

jazz now ‘‘belongs to everyone,’’ having been su≈ciently dislocated from the

histories of oppression and creative contestation that African American mu-

sicking articulates. Rather, my point is that the long exclusion of Asian Ameri-

can histories in other areas is mirrored in the historiographical silence regard-

ing Asian American jazz musicians, particularly in the present moment.

≤∂

‘‘We’ve Been Here, Too’’

The tenor saxophonist Francis Wong emphasizes the long historical trajectory

of Asians and their involvement with ‘‘Western’’ popular musicking both

within the United States and in Asia and the ‘‘Brown Paciﬁc.’’

≤∑

Pointing to

historical and ethnographical work such as George Yoshida’s Reminiscing in

Swingtime: Japanese Americans in American Popular Music, Wong reminds us that

Asians have been producing ‘‘Western’’ popular music since at least the begin-

ning of the twentieth century. In an interview, Wong asked, rhetorically but

provocatively, ‘‘What is the history of popular song?’’ In answering his own

question, he revealed much that has been hidden in popular music discourse.

[Let’s suppose] that [the] American popular form was [not] limited to only music

that was made in the continental United States. Let’s say you included music that

was made in Hawai’i, in those forms, and made, if not recorded, in places like

Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan. Because the great thing about Japan—a few years

ago there was this Sony retrospective on swing music recorded in Japan but a lot

of the musicians on those recordings were Japanese Americans. So what do you

say about that? Is that American music? Should it be on the radar at all?

≤∏

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Silenced but Not Silent 75

Wong’s answer provides a way of understanding the historical currents

beneath contemporary Asian American jazz and a possible rationale for their

discursive silencing. Because of racialized hiring practices in musicians’ unions

in the United States during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century, many Asian

American musicians were forced to perform on Asia-bound cruise ships, and

many of them found lucrative careers in Japan and China. Like black enter-

tainers in America who found the life of an itinerant musician or dancer

preferable to the miserable existence found at the bottom of the industrial

labor force, many of these expatriate Japanese American musicians found the

di≈cult life of an entertainer preferable to the manual labor jobs in agricul-

ture, for instance, in which they would otherwise have been employed.

≤π

Doubtless, the promise of fame and fortune, though rarely achieved, also held

out a greater incentive than an anonymous life of drudgery and hard labor that

held scant opportunity for any real material gain. For these reasons, and

because their careers occurred largely outside the United States, Asian Ameri-

can musicians (i.e., U.S. citizens) from this period have been e√aced in jazz

histories.

≤∫

In a similar fashion, Filipino musicians, because of their long contact with

Spanish and American culture, were able to produce Western-style popular

music and dance, becoming known as ‘‘the entertainers of the Far East’’ or, as

Wong put it, ‘‘As part of the United States’ territories, [Filipino bands] were the

real territory bands!’’ Normative jazz discourse, however, has continually reg-

istered real jazz as an ‘‘indigenous’’ American cultural form.

≤Ω

Again, this

‘‘Americanization’’ of authentic jazz silences Asian jazz musicians. Wong elab-

orates on this theme.

Sure, these records sold and had their inﬂuence in the world. [But] there’s another

way to look at it. Tatsu Aoki, my friend, the bass player from Chicago, he’s the

same age as I am. So he gets this question sometimes: ‘‘How come you play the

blues or jazz? You’re from Japan!’’ [His answer is] because it was forced down our

throats during the occupation.

≥≠

Wong’s anecdote about Aoki indicates the role of U.S. military power in the

dissemination of American popular culture. Military and political leaders have

long realized that the ideological underpinnings of cultural expression, par-

ticularly popular culture, serve to inculcate subordinated populations in domi-

nant institutions and structures of feeling. Unfortunately, this is another topic

that I can only point toward in this essay, but I cannot emphasize too strongly

the value-laden labor popular culture is able to do as an adjunct to mili-

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76 Fellezs

tary strength and diplomatic pressure, a ‘‘forcing down the throats’’ of non-

American populations of U.S. ideology or, at the very least, a show of Ameri-

can cultural domination.

More important to this essay, Aoki’s response locates jazz musicking in Asia

in a speciﬁc way. American popular music, of which jazz is but a part, is ‘‘forced

down the throats’’ of occupied populations. The colonialist resonance is un-

avoidable, and yet, like the South Asian cricket player or the French-speaking

Algerian, these coerced practices become ‘‘indigenized’’ or ‘‘made local’’ and

begin to transform the once-foreign practice and the foreign introducer as well

as the indigenous practitioner.

≥∞

Aoki, instead of rejecting jazz, gains a cultural

practice that he, in turn, makes ‘‘his own,’’ transforming both the terms ( jazz,

Japanese musician) and the terms of engagement (occupation, cultural domi-

nance). This admittedly disproportionate cultural reciprocity, then, becomes a

new cultural expression, reﬂecting the histories on both sides of the exchange. I

want to be careful here about raising the idea of hybridity with, as Paul Gilroy

asserts, its presupposition of ‘‘two anterior purities,’’ because I agree with him

that ‘‘there isn’t any anterior purity. . . . Cultural production is not like mixing

cocktails.’’

≥≤

As Gilroy indicates, cross- and transcultural contact and transfor-

mation happen in ‘‘already mixed’’ peoples, spaces, ideas, and dreams. The

responsible task for the critic, then, is to follow the lines of contact, while

acknowledging the futility of unraveling the fused object ‘‘back’’ into two

single strands, to ﬁnd the complex interweavings of histories, including power

relations, cultural expressions (both as individual and collective expressions),

and other social relationships without also reifying the moment of mixture

(thus allowing the process to continue and enact other mixtures).

Again, in calling jazz an American music I do not want to elide the cen-

trality of African American musical practice in forming jazz but to emphasize

how jazz has been discursively shaped into a ‘‘multicultural’’ musicking that

expressively renders American assimilation and integration. Jazz discourse

allows for the transformative articulation of South American, Cuban, and

European jazz musicians who are able to ‘‘indigenize’’ jazz musicking into

legitimate jazz forms. ‘‘Latin jazz,’’ ‘‘European jazz,’’ and even ‘‘Gypsy jazz,’’

while arguably problematic categories, are still considered legitimate forms of

jazz, if somewhat subsidiary to a North American ‘‘mainstream.’’ Yet a corre-

sponding ‘‘Asian (or Asian American) jazz’’ has yet to emerge. As we will see,

there are Asian American jazz musicians who are ambivalent or even antago-

nistic toward such a project. However, one only has to consider how dif-

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Silenced but Not Silent 77

ferently Gonzalo Rubalcaba or Django Reinhardt is positioned in relation to

Jon Jang or Mark Izu to comprehend this situation.

≥≥

My point, however, is not

to indicate how a musician becomes known or unknown, acclaimed or dis-

paraged, as an individual but to point out how it is impossible for a musician to

claim an Asian jazz background. An Asian jazz musician is always seen as

‘‘coming into’’ a jazz tradition from an external space.

Yet what is evident is that Asian Americans, even when they were displaced

from the United States and normative jazz discourse, were nonetheless in-

volved in jazz musicking as early as the 1920s.

≥∂

In terms of indigenizing jazz in

Asia, it is worthwhile to note that, because of expatriate Asian Americans’

involvement in the popular music scenes of Shanghai and Tokyo, an inevitable

blending of Chinese, Japanese, and African American music cultures occurred.

The ‘‘jazzing’’ of Chinese and Japanese folk songs is one way to measure this

cross-cultural tra≈c.

≥∑

Francis Wong references recorded documentation of

this movement (in fact, he has recorded ‘‘jazzed’’ versions of Chinese and

Japanese folk songs).

There is a record of that period [1910–46]; there were several record companies.

Because, at least for Chinese [audiences], there were at least three record com-

panies doing a variety of music—Chinese or Cantonese opera, dance music. You

can ﬁnd recordings of Chinese folk songs set to swing or Latin music. So it wasn’t

just covers of swing tunes, although I think there was some of that. But I think the

most interesting stu√ is Chinese folk songs or Chinese pop songs in popular dance

rhythms, which is essentially [the] jazz of that period.

≥∏

This early historical record of the movement between jazz and Asian musi-

cal idioms has been sadly ignored by jazz historians and has implications that

continue to resonate today.

≥π

If jazz musicking in its commodity form is

partially invested in its marketability, then jazzed versions of Chinese folk

songs may, in fact, be too marginal for large corporations to promote and

distribute. Does the failure to promote jazz versions of Chinese folk songs

further their marginality or would more active promotion actually induce

greater sales? The issue I would like to raise here, though, is not whether such

recordings would sell but whether there has been a predetermination made by

the culture industry about the marketability of jazzed Chinese folk songs that

underscores the critical silencing of Asian American jazz artists.

≥∫

The history of Asian American jazz musicking, as Francis Wong suggests, is

the foregrounding of a series of ‘‘re-cognitions.’’

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78 Fellezs

The idea [is] to recognize that the art form [ jazz] is practiced in our communities

and it has a relationship to the social historical development of our commu-

nities. . . . Fact: this art form was practiced in these communities. [The] fact is that

it was practiced in these communities in the form that it was practiced in other

communities—whether it’s the drum and bugle corps or the swing band, the

avant-garde free jazz, whatever. . . . It’s just like saying, ‘‘We’ve been here, too.’’

And recognizing that we’ve been here too actually strengthens the idea about

how important this art form is.

≥Ω

Wong testiﬁes to the fact that Asians not only have a long trajectory of pro-

ducing Western popular music but have done so in ways that resemble the

methods of other producers of Western popular music. Asian Americans, in

other words, produce music that would have the ability to move beyond the

Little Tokyos, Saigons, and Seouls were it not for the cultural politics of

the culture industry and the ‘‘perpetual foreigner’’ image that disbars Asians

and Asian Americans from participating in ‘‘non-Asian’’ cultural endeavors and

prevents audiences and critics from viewing Asian American artists and au-

diences as possessing the same acumen, talents, and taste formations as do

members of other communities.

∂≠

The representational legacy of ‘‘exotic’’

Asian Americans results in a widely held perspective that does not allow for

Asian American participation in contemporary mainstream cultural produc-

tion—in which jazz musicking has taken its ‘‘proper’’ place.

∂∞

Opening Chords

The time of the burgeoning Asian American jazz scene had much to do with

the links between Asian American jazz, a nascent pan-Asian identity in pro-

gressive Asian American politics, and collaboration with, as well as inspiration

from, African American models.

∂≤

Asian American jazz came to its ﬁrst matu-

ration during the late 1970s and early 1980s when leftist political activism, pan-

Asian American identity formation, and a growing sense of a speciﬁc Asian

American aesthetic and musicking intersected in provocative ways. Similar to

the ways in which some African American free jazz musicians connected black

nationalist politics with their musicking, these young Asian Americans began

to formulate a similar connection, explicitly drawing on black mentors and

models. As the pianist Jon Jang relates in an interview with Nic Paget-Clarke,

Part of what Francis [Wong’s] and my music is about is the collaboration of Asian

Americans and African Americans. As musicians who work in the world of jazz,

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Silenced but Not Silent 79

who speak the language of jazz, we honor that tradition. We respect African

Americans. Our race relationships have been strong because as artists we’ve

developed that respect and understanding.

∂≥

Jang’s second recording, Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? was released in

1984, and on the day of its release he performed with his ensemble at the Asian

Paciﬁc Student Union conference. As he related later, ‘‘We sold about sixty

records at the conference. Students were asking me to autograph the record.

There was a tremendous response.’’

∂∂

Francis Wong expands on this theme.

I think it’s the politics. The period in which we emerged, ’84, ’85, ’86, and ’87—

when we ﬁnally formed Asian Improv [a record label owned by Wong and Jang],

those were the years of Jesse Jackson’s ﬁrst run for president. It was the years of

the Vincent Chin campaign. It was the years of the ﬁght against the Simpson-

Mazzoli bill. ’82 through ’88 were high-water marks for the Asian American

consciousness movement. I think that was the context for the formation of an

Asian American music label.

∂∑

Though Jang and Wong both designate 1988 as a pivotal transformative

moment in their association with an explicitly political Asian American stance,

the early years of their creative endeavors were also informed and shaped by

an Asian American political agenda. I will deal with how this position changed

for them shortly, but for the moment I would like to remain situated in the

ﬁrst years of the creation of what is now known as Asian American jazz.

Another band, United Front, included both Asian American and African

American members, reﬂecting the trans- and cross-cultural perspective within

Asian American jazz. Founded in 1980 by two African Americans, the alto

saxophonist Lewis Jordan and trumpeter George Sams, the band soon added

Japanese American bassist Mark Izu and, somewhat later, African American,

Choctaw, and Japanese drummer Anthony Brown. Their political activism led

them to perform at political rallies as well as jazz clubs. Another connection to

progressive political struggles was their use of texts written by such African

American thinkers as Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X in conjunction with

their music. As Brown explained to Brian Auerbach in Down Beat magazine,

It wasn’t a conscious choice to select political works, but it ﬁts right in with the

music. It just happened that poetry that is really strong and to the point is oft-

times political. It makes sense considering the times we are in. Words go right

to the heart of the matter, which is what we try to do with the music. So it

ﬁts right in.

∂∏

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80 Fellezs

The debt to African American artists and activists can also be seen in the

strategies these Asian American jazz artists utilized in order to distribute their

creative musicking. Francis Wong states,

rpm was the label for the band, United Front. It was the label they had created to

be a vehicle for their recordings. The self-produced approach has a long tradition

in creative music, in jazz—from Strata East that was run by African American

musicians; to Debut Records, Max Roach and Charles Mingus’s label; to Sun Ra

who had his own label. . . . The idea is creating the work, producing it yourself,

and trying to have some independence. We didn’t really have a choice because we

were excluded and disenfranchised. We needed to have something. It’s not like

Jon [ Jang] could make a recording and then automatically have an outlet for his

work. He had to create that vehicle for himself so we collaborated together to

form [the record label] Asian Improv.

∂π

This turn to self-determination in the face of disenfranchisement is not only

found in African American models. But while African Americans have a long

history of political and social struggle they can draw from in their continuing

ﬁght for social equity, in the existing national mythology Asian Americans,

particularly after World War II, had quietly assimilated in the limited ways

allowed them. There was little public consciousness about Asians who chal-

lenged racist stereotypes such as the labor organizers on Hawai’ian plantations

and Californian agricultural concerns in the early 1900s, writers such as Carlos

Bulosan and Sui Sin Far, and World War II era activists such as Fred Korematsu

and Frank Emi.

∂∫

The Asian American political movement of the period heightened aware-

ness of these earlier struggles, and Asian American jazz musicians began to

weld their aesthetics (largely based in a free jazz idiom) to progressive leftist

politics. Jang, in an article for East Wind, wrote about how acquiring a politi-

cized aesthetic began to inform his musicking.

Feeling the thrust of the [Asian American] Movement helped reshape ‘‘East Wind’’

and ‘‘Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?’’ on a higher political and artistic level. The

‘‘Charlie Chan’’ piece was no longer a ‘‘light’’ sarcastic blues rap, but also expressed

‘‘heavier’’ elements revealed in the anti-Asian violence theme of Vincent Chin.

∂Ω

He also notes the coalitional possibilities for the music as he recounts di√erent

moments at concerts where he felt it opened ‘‘people’s vision and feelings for

revolution more broadly,’’ stating unequivocally that ‘‘these experiences have

shown me how music can play an important role in building unity, not only for

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Asians, but for all oppressed nationalities and working class people.’’

∑≠

The late

1970s and early 1980s saw the political awakening of a sizable minority of Asian

American youths, who were largely college educated and politicized during

their college tenure. Asian American jazz musicians, taking a page from Afri-

can American jazz artists, began to link their musicking to their political

beliefs. While they began to generate small but dedicated followings, organiz-

ing jazz concerts (eventually establishing the Asian American Jazz Festival),

forming distribution networks, applying successfully for arts grants and musi-

cal commissions, and pursuing other funding opportunities, their music,

which was indebted to the free jazz aesthetic as performed and conceptualized

by Archie Shepp and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music

(aacm), was not readily accessible to mainstream audiences.

They were also blending Asian instrumentation and, for some such as Mark

Izu and Jon Jang, exploring traditional Asian musicking, including pedagogical

methodologies and performance practices. This attention to traditional Asian

musicking marked their seriousness and designated their music as more than

merely an additive ‘‘exoticism,’’ as was often the case in earlier attempts to

blend Asian musicking with jazz.

∑∞

It is this aesthetic and cultural turn that

begins to signify the shift of Asian American jazz, away from the political

awakening of its early formation for some artists.

Asian American Jazz Changes

The drummer Anthony Brown deﬁnes Asian American jazz as ‘‘jazz produced

with an Asian American sensibility.’’

∑≤

The questions begged, of course, are

what is an Asian American sensibility and what di√erentiates it from other

musical sensibilities? Brown, who holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology, eluci-

dates what he means by listing the ﬁve criteria he uses to deﬁne Asian American

jazz. Asian American jazz is ‘‘played by Asian Americans, reﬂecting the Asian

American experience [and] involving traditional Asian instruments [as well as]

traditional approaches to those instruments.’’ Moreover, the use of traditional

instruments and approaches must be ‘‘malleable or open enough to really start

to incorporate and start to take on other inﬂuences—in this case, jazz.’’

∑≥

He explains,

I think that in the Asian American community we wanted to express our experi-

ence, not only through African American jazz—and it’s primarily African Ameri-

can sensibilities because of the examples set by Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland

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Kirk, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, these people who also had

invested such a great deal of social justice, social activism, and spirituality in their

music. And so they served as our original models. [But] when we started to create

our own music . . . [it started] to take on another shape because of the inclusion of

Asian instruments and sensibilities.

Asian American jazz, for Brown, is rooted in the struggles for Asian Ameri-

can empowerment and identity. Brown continues, highlighting the self-deter-

mined identiﬁcation that the signiﬁer ‘‘Asian American jazz’’ provides: ‘‘I don’t

like labels but I think it’s a necessary evil. [And] if [the label Asian American

jazz] is going to be used, then I want to be able to deﬁne it. I want to have

something to say about its deﬁnition.’’

The saxophonist Fred Ho also sees his musicking and political beliefs as part

of a uniﬁed aesthetic, merging creative work and political activity. Here is his

summation of his artistic and political activities.

I have been a professional baritone saxophonist, composer/arranger, band leader,

writer, activist and (more recently) producer in New York City for almost two

decades. Some regard me as ‘‘successful’’ because I am able to make a living solely

from my music. . . . I consider my ‘‘success’’ not in mainstream bourgeois terms of

‘‘fame and fortune’’ but in the fact that I have been able to unite my career, my art

and my revolutionary politics.

∑∂

Ho has managed this in spite of—not because of—current jazz discourse

and contemporary cultural industry practices. Moreover, it is his intention ‘‘to

continue mixing African and Chinese inﬂuences in the musical score to be

performed not by a standard Western European-style orchestra, but by my

Afro Asian Music Ensemble.’’

∑∑

Ho sees the importance of the label Asian

American jazz, as it

may very well be cross-cultural, we in the ‘‘Asian American jazz’’ movement saw

as the focus of our music/cultural work to help catalyze Asian American con-

sciousness about our oppression and need to struggle for liberation. The very

identity and term ‘‘Asian American’’ in our sobriquet ‘‘Asian American jazz or

music’’ is a political signiﬁer.

∑∏

Ho states in his article that the decision by Asian Improv Records (air) to

produce more ‘‘accessible’’ works meant for him ‘‘tailing the familiar and

conventional,’’ which caused him to leave air.

∑π

Ho’s and Brown’s insistence on a highly visible political stance, as well as

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the resilience of the label Asian American jazz, may be increasingly anach-

ronistic, however. In response to the political and social contexts in which

Asian American jazz often enunciates itself, Francis Wong declares,

The problem with this whole political thing—which I don’t like—is that some-

how it’s like we’re choosing [that] the primary aspect [of our music] is to express

our political [views]. But it’s not. I’m really into the music. . . . Now I’m also a

political person. I’ve been through the 1960s, so I’m a serious person. . . . I care

about what happens in the world. So a lot of it is like truth comes from the music

and I express my truth.

∑∫

Wong’s reluctance to place his musicking in an explicitly politicized space

may militate against a visible social impact for it. On the other hand, he may

be simply attempting to foreclose a ‘‘ghettoization’’ of his musicking, that is, if

his recordings are labeled Asian American jazz the potential to reach a wider

jazz audience remains minimal given the situation I have been describing. I

also believe Wong wants his musicking to represent more than his political

views and his creative work to speak in the broadly expressive ways other

musicians are a√orded. In fact, perhaps due to an interest in widening the

appeal of his musicking, Wong emphasized how diverse the ‘‘Asian American

experience’’ can be, declaring,

A lot of times, interviewers want to know the stylistic thing, how to put the music

in a bag so that people will buy it. But how we want to express ourselves in our

own context in our own vehicle is more about how we want to bring our culture to

people in our music. We want to bring a sense of the complexities and subtleties

and contradictions of that culture. By saying our culture is not Chinese culture, it’s

the culture that we’ve come up with. It’s a very speciﬁc set of experiences.

∑Ω

In fact, Wong ﬁnds this speciﬁcity of expression to be aligned with an

African American jazz tradition.

How can I make the saxophone play in my image? Part of it is getting [knowledge]

from the masters—certain traditions and sounds. But also, with that sense of

control or mastery of the instrument, be able to have come out what’s inside of

me. Relating that to some sense of self-empowerment with the instrument.

This is one of the basic messages of the African American masters. Be yourself.

Looking at that whole tradition, every player that has come along to develop his

individual sound has had to change the instrument or the way the instrument is

played in order to be ‘‘themself’’ with it.

∏≠

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Wong’s stance addresses the stereotyping of Asian Americans as noncre-

ative types with a ‘‘natural’’ a≈nity for technological and/or scientiﬁc occu-

pations—a view that, as I have mentioned, forecloses the possibility of rec-

ognizable cultural production from Asian Americans. Wong addressed this,

admitting,

Another thing that I’m aware of is that not too many people have seen a Chinese

American play the saxophone, or play anything besides classical music. . . . I’ve

gone on in situations where people don’t think Asian Americans can play this

music, or any music. . . . Still, in this society today, when I walk out into a room of

white people, or whoever, they haven’t heard very much from us as Asian Ameri-

cans. They haven’t seen us do very many things.

∏∞

This ‘‘blindness’’ to—or what I am calling ‘‘silencing’’ of—Asian Americans

in the cultural sphere maintained by scholarly elision and critical reiteration of

a line of ‘‘great men of jazz’’ produces public interest in Asian American

culture that remains voyeuristically orientalist, a scopophilia that reproduces

exoticist fantasy. Being positioned as an exotic object is always the danger of

being among the ﬁrst of a marginalized group to break new ground in main-

stream arenas, and Wong and his peers have been willing to traverse uncom-

fortable new spaces for Asian American artists. However, as I have been argu-

ing, if normalizing Asian American artistic involvement in jazz musicking is to

have any value beyond an insipid color-blind democracy in action, not only do

ideas about real jazz musicians need to change but ideas about Asian Ameri-

cans need to undergo a radical rethinking. This is not just a cultural claim but

also a political one that registers in the ways Asian American jazz musicians

have continued to make claims for artistic legitimacy.

Moreover, there is a linkage between spirituality and politics that Francis

Wong, for one, perceives as missing in contemporary political movements. He

asserts,

I think that part of the trend of the twentieth century has been the separation of

politics and spirituality. Hence you could have political music that lacks spiritual

development. You’ve had politics in the twentieth century—not just in the twen-

tieth century—but certainly in our time there’s plenty of politics from the left and

the right that lacks spiritual depth.

∏≤

The lack of spiritual depth in political movements Wong cites is indicative

of a chasm between various progressive political and social agendas. Jon Jang is

currently a Baptist Christian and stands in stark contrast to the Leninist-Maoist

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orientation of Fred Ho, for instance, marking a break not just politically but

philosophically. Additionally, Jang sees his more normative Christian practice

as another correspondence with African American culture, noting the progres-

sive political, as well as spiritual, role African American churches have per-

formed throughout history.

∏≥

More important, Jang and Wong state that after the signing of H.R. 442 (the

Civil Rights Act of 1988, which allowed for reparations for the internment of

Japanese Americans during World War II), the Asian American movement

went in one direction, and . . . we founded Asian Improv Arts, a non-proﬁt arts

organization in partnership with a non-proﬁt experimental theater company Life

on the Water. Life on the Water wasn’t Asian but it was experimental and they

were very open to working with us and providing resources.

∏∂

Jang’s admission not only indicates his divergence from explicitly politicized

work but also how collaboration with non-Asian organizations signaled a

growing willingness to move outside strict deﬁnitions of what it means to be

an Asian American jazz artist. While all Asian American jazz artists collaborate

across various racial, ethnic, and national lines, these are usually creative

collaborations. Financial ‘‘collaborations’’ engender a di√erent set of concerns,

further troubling the demarcation of a space for Asian American jazz.

Similarly, while many of these early Asian American jazz musicians emerged

from an avant-garde background, performing and composing free jazz, the

ways in which they utilized that background subsequent to the 1980s have seen

some important divisions in their various aesthetic approaches. Wong con-

tinues to perform in a free jazz idiom, his ability to weld Asian folk songs in

this context rooted in a consistent search for an expression of the self and his

belief in music’s ability to use spiritual means toward political ends. Anthony

Brown, while making no public statements about his religious or spiritual

beliefs, has continued to look to the now-canonical works of Duke Elling-

ton, Thelonious Monk, and, in a current project for which he has received

a Guggenheim award, George Gershwin, striking a middle ground between

the highly politicized jazz musicking of Fred Ho and the emphasis on self-

expression that Francis Wong and Jon Jang advocate.

Still, Wong has admitted elsewhere that Asian American jazz and politics

were born in a complex relationship. He recalls,

We were trying to be active with our music and trying to identify with the

Asian American consciousness movement. It was a very positive period. If it

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86 Fellezs

wasn’t for that time we would not have been moved to create a lot of the work in

the context that we did, with the content and substance that it had. We wouldn’t

have been moved to create an organization or vehicle if it wasn’t for that political

context.

∏∑

But the contemporary political landscape has changed, and so have his

‘‘tactics.’’ He explains that he is now

trying to deal with Chinese American spirituality and how it relates to social

action. That’s the direction we’ve gone in the ’90s. The revelations about the

eastern bloc and the Tiananmen massacre did create a crisis of meaning among

people who were trying to make changes in the world. A need to look at other

ways of thinking about things. How do you relate as an individual, and how you

relate to humanity, has a lot to do with the developments of the work we’ve been

creating since 1992.

∏∏

Jon Jang concurs, positing that an increased awareness of the global nature

of Asian communities, particularly the Chinese diaspora, attenuates some of

the purpose of naming a political movement Asian American. He admits that

he has shifted from a political focus to a cultural one, insisting that the link

between politics and music has ‘‘always felt uncomfortable for me.’’

∏π

As I hope is clear, there are deﬁnite clefts within this group of ‘‘ﬁrst-wave’’

Asian American jazz musicians. Normative political activity continues as a

focus for some artists while for others spiritual concerns have superseded

more prosaic agendas. What, exactly, might these artists say about Asian

American identity and the growing fragmentation within the community

sensed by Asian American social activists? Is it, as Anthony Brown asserted to

me, that while ‘‘Asian American cohesion is a myth,’’ it continues to retain

political value in the face of a dominant culture that continues, as it does

within jazz discourse, to marginalize Asian Americans?

For some, aesthetics and politics have been delinked, as, for instance, when

Francis Wong continues to perform free jazz yet o√ers to transcend political

statements through an aesthetic agenda of personal expression or when An-

thony Brown seeks to recontextualize canonical works in a political project of

self-determination and self-deﬁnition. In a brief, and rare, interview in a 2003

Down Beat column, Anthony Brown was one of three artists asked who they

would choose if they were able to schedule artists for the new Carnegie Hall

facility, Zankel Hall.

∏∫

His response addresses the syncretic approach he cham-

pions in his self-deﬁnition of Asian American jazz.

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I’d like to see Carnegie Hall continue its legacy by programming classic music of

all genres as well as presenting contemporary expressions of those traditions. . . . I

received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year to recompose [George Gershwin’s]

Rhapsody in Blue for a 21-piece intercultural, intergenerational and intergender

ensemble, combining Asian instruments and sensibilities with a jazz orchestra. I

would love to present this new version reﬂecting 21st century realities in the U.S.

in juxtaposition with a performance of the original version orchestrated by Ferde

Grofe for its premier in 1924 by Paul Whiteman’s orchestra.

∏Ω

Brown, in his wish to reﬂect ‘‘21st century realities,’’ seeks to root ‘‘contem-

porary expressions’’ within ‘‘classic traditions.’’ No longer can one ascertain a

given Asian American musician’s political beliefs simply by determining which

aesthetic camp his or her musicking embraces. In other words, free jazz no

longer signiﬁes explicit political activism, nor does the performance of canoni-

cal works reveal a reactionary position.

π≠

But what would Brown’s juxta-

position mean for my question: ‘‘What is Asian American jazz?’’

One way of mapping Brown’s wished-for juxtaposition is by noting how

critical discourse about jazz authenticity, particularly in its assumptive ra-

cialized binarism, is linked to the attempt to mark out a space for jazz’s status

as an art object rather than folk art, or, worse, a mass cultural commodity, by

obscuring the relationship between museum (‘‘autonomous’’ art) and market

(commercial) cultures. As jazz writers began to emphasize jazz musicians’ use

of complex thematic and harmonic materials, older ideas about primitivist

black creation receded before the perception of the jazz musicians as artists

involved in projects with markedly modernist tendencies, particularly since

the rise of bebop in the late 1940s.

π∞

While Brown’s juxtaposition seeks to mediate how the American cultural

landscape has been transformed by ‘‘intercultural, intergenerational and inter-

gender [music] ensembles,’’ I mean to note again how normative jazz dis-

course impacts Asian American silencing by instantiating a high-low cultural

divide—with jazz inhabiting a liminal status, mixing elements of the museum

and the market—that reinforces racialized hierarchies of taste even while

arguing for jazz as color-blind democracy in action. To highlight how this

operates, I want to turn to the musicking of an Asian American fusion band,

Hiroshima, as it further complicates notions of real jazz as well as Asian

American jazz. As a telling critical aporia, Bill Shoemaker never mentions this

most successful of Asian American jazz bands.

π≤

Before I turn to Hiroshima, however, I want to note how this shift from the

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88 Fellezs

explicitly political to the spiritual and cultural for some of these now elder

statesmen of Asian American jazz points to the growing fragmentation of an

Asian American political project. With a number of immigrant populations

unfamiliar with the Asian American struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as

a younger generation of Asian Americans that faces a di√erent set of negotia-

tions with the dominant culture, the cultural resonance of a free jazz aesthetic

coupled with a highly politicized ‘‘identity politics’’ may no longer be as

powerful (in many ways, hip hop artists have inherited much of the cultural

capital and progressive political cachet once held by free jazz musicians).

There is also a growing sense, as Jang notes, of the global nature of an Asian

community and diaspora(s). Moreover, an emergent ‘‘hapa’’ (mixed race) con-

sciousness is supplementing, or even replacing, older categories of ethnic

identity internal to the broader Asian American community.

Hiroshima: Between Aesthetics and Politics

While the Asian American jazz artists I have proﬁled share a common political

history (even if it is articulated in quite di√erent ways today), the most success-

ful Asian American musicians in terms of visibility and commercial success—

though ignored by critics and scholars—are the members of the fusion group

Hiroshima. I would like to take the time to consider Hiroshima at some

length, as it is the most successful Asian American musical group, and I hope

to broker its elision both in jazz studies and by Asian American scholars.

Hiroshima’s less trenchant appeal to Asian American issues does not mean its

members are silent about political and cultural issues relevant to the Asian

American community. Their albums have no less political resonance—their

name speaks to the atomic bombing in World War II and the intertwined

historical legacy shared by the United States and Japan—and one must con-

sider the titles of their albums and compositions, the concerns they express in

interviews regarding the political and social world around them, and their

own reﬂexivity about their representative role, which is wider, perhaps, than

that of any of the other artists in this essay.

π≥

More important, it speaks volumes that Hiroshima is the only high-proﬁle

Asian American band built around a speciﬁcally Asian American aesthetic and

yet it has never been the subject of serious and sustained critical investiga-

tion. For instance, Hiroshima’s incorporation of Japanese koto, taiko, and

shakuhachi as integral components of its ‘‘sound’’ is often ignored. Critics,

when they mention the group at all, tend to focus on its status as a ‘‘fusion

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Silenced but Not Silent 89

band’’ rather than taking seriously, for example, the virtuosity of kotoist June

Kuramoto. Yet, while Hiroshima’s commercial success overshadows the strug-

gle for recognition and economic survival of countless other Asian American

artists, it remains glaringly absent in discussions of Asian American aesthetics

and cultural visibility.

π∂

I believe there are reasons for this silence that reach beyond the marginaliz-

ation experienced by other Asian American jazz artists. Chief among them is

Hiroshima’s designation as a fusion band or, worse, a ‘‘smooth jazz’’ or ‘‘world

music’’ band. These genres all face critical devaluation, as they are seen as too

compliant with bourgeois concerns to resonate with progressive political ac-

tivity not only by critics and scholars (many of whom do not worry about a

musician’s political views) but by other jazz musicians, particularly those

proﬁled above, who perform free or avant-garde jazz.

π∑

Jang admits that when

he was studying at the Oberlin Conservatory, other Asian Americans ‘‘valo-

rized Hiroshima, but the music didn’t speak to me. It didn’t have the power or

spirituality [I was seeking].’’

π∏

Is Hiroshima merely processing (multi)cultural

eclecticism for non-Asian consumption? Or is there something behind the

band’s willingness to blend ‘‘contemporary root music, mystical Eastern ex-

otica and melodically rich smooth jazz,’’ as its Web site declares?

ππ

Is it musical

exploration or cultural exploitation? As its Web site also a≈rms, Hiroshima

has a ‘‘larger commitment to global unity on the cusp of the new millennium.’’

Can Hiroshima, then, be more than an exoticized attempt to reach mass

audiences with a self-conscious agenda that blends commercial interests, polit-

ical awareness, and transcultural musicking?

Before discerning whether or not Hiroshima’s aesthetics can be connected

to a progressive social agenda, I would like to touch on how the devaluing of

fusion bands and musicians has its roots in otherwise antithetical soils. Main-

stream critical jazz discourse views any musicking that is performed without

acoustic instrumentation, a ‘‘swing’’ rhythmic sense, and an obvious resonance

with blues musicking as illegitimate, inauthentic, and simply ‘‘not jazz.’’ While

free jazz artists face some of these same critical barbs from mainstream critics

(they neither swing nor pro√er many blues ri√s in their performances, to their

detriment according to dominant jazz discourse), free jazz advocates’ criticism

of fusion bands rests on more subtle—and elitist—stratagems. The alignment

of free or avant-garde jazz with progressive politics, as well as an aesthetic

approach more closely mirroring the art music world (although much of what

passes for ‘‘new’’ in free jazz even today positions it ﬁrmly in the avant-garde

scenes of the 1950s and 1960s), allows free jazz apologists to decry fusion’s

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90 Fellezs

willing, even eager, embrace of popular musicking’s rhythms, electronic in-

strumentation, and production techniques. For this reason, Hiroshima, for all

the Asian sensibilities it brings to its musicking, fails to achieve the same critical

assessment that Jon Jang received for his ‘‘Two Flowers on a Stem.’’

Might some of the criticisms stem from a perception of Dan Kuramoto’s

assertion—that Asian American culture is ‘‘between black and white’’ instead

of a dynamic culture in its own right that can be envisioned as equal to African

American and European American culture—as politically naive or even dan-

gerously complaisant with the status quo? Seen in this light, Dan Kuramoto’s

conception of Asian Americans’ positioning implies a passive acceptance that

is highly problematic. Dan Kuramoto has publicly expressed how he sees

Asian American culture as being ‘‘between black and white,’’ the title of

Hiroshima’s 1999 Windham Hill recording.

We create musically a cross-commentary about a multitude of cultures that comes

from our backgrounds as Asian Americans growing up in a racially diverse Amer-

ica. The album title grew from the idea that as people of Japanese heritage, we are

ethnically in the middle of black and white, drawing from the traditions of both

races yet also creating an identity that is unique to our heritage.

π∫

But what does he mean when he accepts the ‘‘in the middle of black and

white’’ racial paradigm? What can he mean by the assertion that Japanese

Americans ‘‘are drawing from the traditions of both [black and white] races’’?

Is he speaking of Japan or the Asian and U.S. cultural mixture or is he position-

ing black and white as subordinate and dominant cultural positions? His state-

ment, then, would seem to position Hiroshima’s music in a racialized liminal

space, quietly celebratory but problematic.

Thought of in another way, however, this positioning allows Kuramoto to

remain outside of partisan struggles over authenticity. As a hybrid subject,

Kuramoto’s claim about how Hiroshima’s fusion is ‘‘bridging cultures and

music . . . with our message of peace and multiculturalism’’

πΩ

acts as a way of

destabilizing the black-white binarism of not only jazz criticism but also public

discourse about American racial politics. In this light, Kuramoto’s elaboration

positions Asian American culture and identity as disturbing the crudely con-

ceived racialized dialectic between black and white. He continues,

Between Black and White is not only a natural reﬂection about being in the middle,

it’s also a perfect metaphor for the subtleties of grays in everyday life, moderation

and balance summed up in the Yin and Yang ideas of Eastern philosophy.

∫≠

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Silenced but Not Silent 91

Hiroshima’s ability to create music that appeals to mainstream audiences

yet promotes values such as ‘‘peace and multiculturalism’’ may seem contra-

dictory to the avant-gardists proﬁled earlier in this piece. Jang’s comment

about the group’s music lacking ‘‘power and spirituality’’ speaks to this antag-

onism. Yet, as a counterexample of the easy conﬂation of commercial success

and political acquiescence to dominant values, June Kuramoto insists that

there were times when, in all honesty, you might think of quitting, when times get

hard, the business gets hard, whatever the situation, and yet [well-known jazz

artists such as the pianist Chick Corea] told us we can’t quit. We owe it to our

community, our people, our culture, ourselves and for everyone, to continue . . .

which is pretty heavy.

∫∞

Hiroshima’s sense of connection to its community also drives a strong

social awareness, and Dan Kuramoto emphasized this in the same interview

with Baldwin Smith.

We did the Isley Brothers—we did ‘‘Caravan of Love’’ because those are the

messages that people have forgotten. . . . It is a song about brotherhood. It’s the

kind of thing that June talked about growing up with, like Marvin Gaye and

people like that, whose message was, we need to bring people together. With 9/11

and the madness of war that’s going on, we thought it was really important to

make that statement. And so that’s why we went back and tried to ﬁnd the songs

that did it for us and that song of brotherhood to us is really key.

∫≤

Why is Francis Wong’s desire to seek a spiritual connection to a progressive

political agenda received so di√erently than Dan Kuramoto’s similar ambi-

tions? Does commercial success necessarily compromise artistic and political

integrity? While I would be extremely wary of drawing a direct correlation

between commercial success and the lack of a progressive social vision, it is

almost a truism in the aesthetic discourses surrounding popular culture that to

be too popular is to be politically or spiritually compromised. The ‘‘under-

ground,’’ as opposed to the ‘‘top of the charts,’’ serves as a site of authenticity

and/or radical political orientation for some, and to sell well is to sell out.

∫≥

However, I think we should take seriously Dan Kuramoto’s assertion that he is

a√ected by social situations and seeks to address them in his musicking. As he

told an interviewer, Paula Edelstein,

I’m also very much inﬂuenced by the times and the people around me. On

[Hiroshima’s newest release] The Bridge, the song ‘‘Manzanar’’ (which I co-wrote

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92 Fellezs

with June [Kuramoto]) was inﬂuenced by the whole epoch of World War II and all

the Japanese-Americans being imprisoned for no reason. The direct inspiration

was a story my mother told me about how strange it was to be an American one

day, and then to be treated like an enemy the next. To be forcibly evacuated to a

desolate place in the desert, to live behind barbed wire—and to hear the mournful

wind at night. The song starts with me trying to replicate the sound of that wind

on my shakuhachi, and then weaves the sound of the koto into those nights.

∫∂

Here he not only indicates a politicized aesthetic but addresses Brown’s

deﬁnitional criteria for ‘‘Asian American jazz,’’ namely, Asian American musi-

cians using Asian instrumentation in ‘‘traditional yet malleable’’ ways—clearly

demonstrated by June Kuramoto’s classical koto pedigree coupled with her

willingness to perform in a modern fusion band—and the reﬂection of Asian

American sensibilities as evidenced by Dan Kuramoto’s statements. Moreover,

Hiroshima’s album, LA (Qwest, 1994), was released in the hopes of utilizing

music to ‘‘heal the wounds and try to bridge peoples’ di√erences’’ after the so-

called Los Angeles riots.

∫∑

The song ‘‘One World,’’ uses a blend of genres ( jazz,

rhythm and blues, rock, Latin, and traditional Japanese music) in order to

signify the uniﬁcation of various ethnic groups, ironically positing the music

industry’s racialized genre schematic against itself. Hiroshima’s positioning of

traditional Asian musicking not as a static repertoire of gestures but as a

dynamic source of soundings interacting with jazz and rhythm and blues

(r&b) elements integrates seemingly disparate musical elements into a unify-

ing vision. Dan Kuramoto a≈rms this aesthetic rationale, insisting,

Some people say we’re di√erent, we’re weird. Record labels have told us for 25

years we don’t ﬁt in anywhere, necessarily. There’s no bin in the record store that

makes sense for us. We’re jazz, but we’re not. We are world music, but we’re not.

We’re rock, but we’re not. We’re r&b, but we’re not. If you grow up on the Paciﬁc

coast, you get everything. If you grow up in Los Angeles, you’re exposed to

everything all the time. We took our background as Japanese Americans and we

started to bring things together, and it’s always a journey.

∫∏

Or, as he explains the choice of the photograph that graces the cover of the

band’s latest release, The Bridge (Heads Up, 2003),

That’s why the cd cover is a picture of the First Street Bridge in Los Angeles[; it] con-

nects East Los Angeles, which is the main immigrant community, with downtown,

where everybody goes to work. My dad used to drive that every day when he went

to his gas station. I have all these cultures in me that created the music that we do.

∫π

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The recognition of Asian American social realities is the same for the

members of Hiroshima as it is for the other jazz artists proﬁled here (Brown,

Ho, Izu, Jang, and Wong), but their status as members of a fusion band and

their enormous commercial success preclude them from a serious engage-

ment by critics and scholars. This silencing is, in some signiﬁcant ways, detri-

mental to the larger project of ‘‘making audible’’ the musicking of Asian

American jazz artists. For instance, the high-proﬁle engagements (e.g., the

Playboy Jazz Festival) Hiroshima is able to acquire provide a much higher

plateau from which to evaluate Asian American musicking in general, but the

band’s ‘‘exceptionalism,’’ while speaking to Asian American cultural disen-

franchisement writ large, is undermined by critical neglect or dismissal. Hiro-

shima, in many ways, can provide an entry point for subsequent Asian Ameri-

can artists to ‘‘become audible,’’ yet the critical focus on Asian American jazz

musicians whose aesthetic choices tend toward either the avant-garde or a

somewhat exoticized ‘‘mainstream’’ places restrictions on the public percep-

tion of Asian American jazz musicking. Audiences that think of Asian Ameri-

can jazz and avant-garde as coeval and not simply one element in a large

spectrum of jazz musicking by Asian Americans limit Asian American creativ-

ity (again note Bill Shoemaker’s focus on free jazz musicians).

Finally, Hiroshima challenges racialized conceptions of music genres by

utilizing a syncretic approach to its musicking. The band members’ focus on

synthesizing or fusing various types of music in order to present ‘‘another

place’’ (the title of their 1985 Epic recording) articulates a fundamental shift in

the racial politics at the heart of critical jazz discourse. As there is no space for

Asian American jazz artists in normative terms, the search for another place

takes on not a utopic sensibility but rather an acknowledgment of the need to

move ‘‘beyond black and white,’’ blurring the deﬁnitions that support and

instantiate a black-white binarism inherent in such an articulation and ‘‘gray-

ing’’ the space between black and white. This graying—or blurring—recog-

nizes the di√erence in terms of both power relationships, heard in the high-

lighting of the koto alongside the saxophone, as well as the fact that Hiroshima

has ‘‘no bin of its own’’ in retail record stores.

Hiroshima ably sifts through a wide spectrum of musical traditions while

pushing them toward new soundings. Insisting on performing multicultural

fusion, Hiroshima opens the door to the possibilities such a cross- and trans-

cultural movement has for sound artists today and in the future. It performs,

through the use of a diverse array of Asian instrumentation, a syncretic blend

of Asian, Latin, and African American musicking, and a willingness to risk

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94 Fellezs

artistic criticism and even critical alienation in the arguably more populist

desire to reach a broad audience.

The band’s success also points to the broad a√ective resonance its particular

blend of Asian and ‘‘American’’ musicking evokes, which more explicitly politi-

cal Asian American musicians choose to ignore or denigrate. Jon Jang’s cross-

cultural musicking, for all its high cultural cachet (as evidenced by arts council

commissions and the like), fails to resonate with a broad public. This ‘‘failure’’

is read as an asset for Jang by many critics and scholars, who see Hiroshima’s

commercial success as a liability.

∫∫

The public may be the better judge in terms

of sensing the promise of a sounding out of another place beyond the black-

white racial binary, as well as recognizing that di√erence and respect need not

be mutually exclusive.

Conclusion: The Many Faces of Asian American Jazz

The encounter between Asian American jazz musicians and normative critical

discourse (popular and scholarly) ranges, as we have seen, from Brown’s pro-

active engagements with self-deﬁnition to Wong’s active e√orts to position his

cultural work within a broader framework than the label ‘‘Asian American

jazz’’ might indicate in the present social and cultural atmosphere. Ho, on the

other hand, actively embraces ‘‘an Afro Asian new American multicultural

music,’’

∫Ω

seeking not to privilege any racialized notion of musical aesthetics

but formulating an egalitarian approach through a broad dialectic between

each signiﬁer in his self-described multicultural music. Hiroshima fuses con-

temporary rhythms with ancient instruments, respectful of tradition yet ener-

gizing them with modern production techniques and aesthetic sensibilities.

While I have been concentrating on the ‘‘ﬁrst wave’’ of Asian American jazz

artists, artists such as Toshiko Akiyoshi have been integrating Asian musicking

with jazz for quite some time. Her ﬁrst rca releases in the early 1970s preceded

those of Wong, Ho, and Brown in her use of the Japanese shakuhachi, Noh

singing, and other Asian instrumentation and musical practices. Akiyoshi’s

2001 bmg recording, Monopoly Game, featured Miya Masaoka on koto, linking

the two generations of musicians.

Ω≠

A number of young musicians, such as the pianist Vijay Iyer, who has

produced avant-garde works that utilize South Asian musicking as well as

‘‘new music’’ aesthetics, and the Filipina drummer Susie Ibarra, who is actively

involved in improvised ‘‘new music’’ groups, have also emerged, contesting, in

some ways, the older generation’s ideas about the relationship between Asian

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Silenced but Not Silent 95

Americans and jazz. On her album Songbird Suite (2002), Ibarra highlights the

ways in which ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ merge in nonoppositional ways

with her use of non-Western drums alongside Ikue Mori’s computer manipu-

lations. Iyer’s recordings, particularly Blood Sutra (2003) and In What Language?

(2003), display a sensitivity to both global routes and personal roots, question-

ing the displacement of either in any e√ort to locate a particular musician’s

aesthetic and political concerns. The pianist and keyboardist Hiromi Uehara,

born in Japan but currently based in the United States, performs an eclectic

program of self-penned compositions ranging from stride piano to fusion,

straight ahead jazz, and experimental musicking. Her eclecticism is indicative

of young artists whose musical visions correspond to new ways of represent-

ing and expressing contemporary Asian American positionalities.

The spectrum of attitudes toward Asian American jazz that these artists

voice across generations, aesthetics, and political perspectives indicates the ex-

pansive range of ideas that reﬂect and express the wide di√erentiation within

the space demarcated Asian America. As Fred Ho asserts, ‘‘The failure of the

discussion of race in jazz stems from an ideological conservatism that only

sees color and race, one that does not really understand that the very concept

of America is one of hybridity and multiple identities.’’

Ω∞

Ho’s assertion under-

lines my nondeﬁnitive answer to the question, ‘‘Is there such a thing as Asian

American jazz?’’ Obviously, the movement involved in Asian American jazz

across cultural and ethnic lines is more complex and multivalent than either

unalloyed celebration of ethnic fraternalism or pessimistic perspectives about

the status of Asian Americans allow.

With the presentation of Anthony Brown’s music in one of the concerts

presented under the 2001 San Francisco Jazz Festival banner, the sensibilities of

Asian American jazz musicians may be gaining wider acceptance. If the ap-

plause at the end of Brown’s set is any indication, there is an audience ready to

recognize the e√orts of Asian American jazz artists, even if normal circuits of

music production and distribution seem deaf to Asian American jazz.

Ω≤

Asian American jazz enunciates the tenuous relationships both back in

time and space toward former patterns of immigration and forward in time

to as yet unrealized social and political equalities yet embedded in present rela-

tionships of unequal power and normative racialized conceptions of jazz mu-

sicking, Americanness, and Asianness. As the musicking—however named—

performed by Anthony Brown, Francis Wong, the members of Hiroshima,

and other Asian American jazz musicians attests (whether publicly identifying

with the moniker or not), the movement toward acceptance of their art is not

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96 Fellezs

only the recognition of their aesthetic value but also an indication of a broader

recognition of the unique qualities that the cultural work of Asian Ameri-

cans possesses due to their distinctive position in American cultural and po-

litical life. Moreover, as their di√erent views about the label Asian American

jazz imply, the ‘‘Asian American experience’’ is a highly contested space that

inhabits the politically salient e√orts to formulate a pan-Asian identity. In

other words, there is no single answer to the question ‘‘Is there such a thing

as ‘‘Asian American jazz’’? as Asian American jazz musicians will contradict

any strict deﬁnitional guidelines, especially through racial or ethnically deter-

mined parameters.

As David Palumbo-Liu attests,

Modern Asian America should be read within a context of multiple subjectivities

whose multiplicity can be depathologized through a close and critical reading of

Asian, American, and Asian/American history, and that the unity presumed to be

enjoyed by ‘‘America’’ is in fact better read as a set of adjustments and reforma-

tions that disclose the fact that America is always in a process itself. And a large

part of this process in the twentieth century has particularly involved Asian

America.

Ω≥

In looking at Asian American jazz, one encounters the same multiple sub-

jectivities that Palumbo-Liu describes while also engaging the historical aporia

that Asian American jazz inhabits. Asian American jazz has only operated as

such since the 1970s, when Mark Izu, Francis Wong, Fred Ho, and Jon Jang,

among others, began to coalesce around their interest in jazz—particularly

free jazz—and their political awakenings regarding an Asian American cultural

heritage. Asian American jazz, especially as it moves throughout the globe,

anticipates as well as generates the tensions that lie between pan-Asian sen-

sibilities and the heterogeneous makeup of Asian America by sounding out

various grapplings within that tension. By positioning their musicking in a

jazz context, Asian American artists not only transform jazz but also introduce

a new way of musicking that addresses Asian American issues and perspec-

tives. In doing so, Asian American jazz musicking ‘‘makes audible’’ the silenc-

ing that has attempted to keep Asian American jazz musicians mute.

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Notes

A clip of her appearance can be seen in a ﬁlm documentary about Akiyoshi

entitled Jazz Is My Native Language (dir. Renée Cho, Counterpoint, 1983).

There have been brief mentions of Asian American jazz artists in mainstream

popular jazz magazines. I will quote later from a Down Beat article about the jazz

band United Front. There have also been a handful of recording and concert

reviews, but there have been no feature articles, nor has there been a cover story

on an Asian American musician or band in any major jazz publication.

See, for instance, Adam Shatz’s article, ‘‘New Seekers in Jazz Look to the East,’’

where, after quoting a dour comment by the South Asian American pianist Vijay

Iyer to the e√ect that the music industry ‘‘just doesn’t know how to shop around

black music played by someone like me,’’ he optimistically predicts that as ‘‘the

Asian-American jazz scene blossoms, it could well become as hard to ignore as

today’s Asian-American literary renaissance.’’ Unfortunately, the events of the

years since his prediction have not borne this out.

Shoemaker, ‘‘East Meets Left,’’ 83.

Unfortunately, I am also leaving out a large number of Asian American jazz art-

ists, including, but certainly not limited to, the drummer Akira Tana; bassist

Steven Hashimoto; pianists Flip Nunez and Glenn Horiuchi; saxophonists Rudresh

Mahanthappa, Melecio Magdaluyo, and Hafez Modirzadeh; trumpeter John Wor-

ley; and violinist Jason Hwang. This essay focuses on Asian American musicians

located primarily on the West Coast of the United States. There is a vibrant Asian

American jazz scene in Chicago, for instance, as well as Asian American jazz

musicians throughout the United States, who I am unable to give more atten-

tion here.

Shoemaker, ‘‘East Meets Left,’’ 83. Shoemaker also notes that in 2001 Asian Ameri-

can jazz musicians were absent from a three-day symposium sponsored by San

Francisco Jazz entitled ‘‘Jazz and Race: Black, White, and Beyond.’’ I attended on

all three days and was also distressed to note the absence of any discussion of the

‘‘beyond’’ category. One participant, Angela Davis, attempted to address Latin and

female jazz artists, but in each instance her comments received no response from

the other participants.

Ibid., 87.

Canon in jazz discourse refers to a core repertoire reﬂecting as well as obscuring

the critical positionality and biases of its builders, similar to other critical dis-

courses. Jazz critics and scholars debate various inclusions and exclusions to this

core repertoire, but it can be loosely deﬁned here as the popular songs of Broad-

way shows and Tin Pan Alley (also known as ‘‘jazz standards’’), as well as the

compositions of central jazz ﬁgures such as Edward Kennedy ‘‘Duke’’ Ellington

(notably a majority of these artists date from the swing era of jazz, ca. 1930–45). A

sizable minority of critics would also include popular music composers who have

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98 Fellezs

arguably continued the songwriting traditions of Tin Pan Alley in contemporary

terms, such as Henry Mancini and Burt Bacharach. Still others might include non-

U.S. songwriters such as the bossa nova artist Antonio Carlos Jobim. As one can

readily see from this short list, the jazz canon, like its literary brethren, is an

elusive creation.

Musicking is a term I borrow from Christopher Small, who deﬁned his neologism

as a way of indicating how music is an activity (composition, performance, and

audience participation in terms of listening and critical analysis) as opposed to its

reiﬁcation, especially in terms of notation and recorded objects (compact discs,

cassette tapes, etc.). See his Musicking.

Clive Davis, describing jazz’s inclusion at Lincoln Center, pronounced it ‘‘an

indigenous classical music’’ (‘‘Classical Jazz,’’ 60). See also Sales, Jazz; and Murray,

Stomping the Blues, for similar assignations that support the idea that jazz is an

‘‘indigenous’’ American (and, for Murray, African American) music capable of

sharing the ‘‘art space’’ of the European concert music tradition.

Ansermet, ‘‘Bechet and Jazz Visit Europe, 1919,’’ 742. Pointedly, Ansermet made

no mention of the fact that Bechet was a ‘‘Creole of color,’’ a racialized position

that also complicates a simple black and white binary.

Hodeir, Jazz, 241. André Hodeir’s seminal text laid the foundation for normative

jazz historiography, and many of his ideas (e.g., his analysis of jazz through

‘‘objective’’ musicological methodology) became the basis for ‘‘modern’’ jazz

criticism. Hugues Panassié’s The Real Jazz, as its title suggests, sought to demar-

cate ‘‘real jazz’’ and built its argument through a line of ‘‘great men of jazz.’’

Gunther Schuller’s Early Jazz and The Swing Era are both notable for bringing a

stringent musicological analysis to argue for jazz’s status as a music tradition on a

par with European concert music. While laudable, Schuller’s reliance on a series

of great men (all African or European Americans) and his teleological bias toward

jazz history, make his contributions problematic. Moreover, he has been criticized

for wielding musicological tools forged in analyses of European concert music

that are insu≈cient for appraising African American music.

DeVeaux, ‘‘Constructing the Jazz Tradition,’’ 529, emphasis mine.

Lees, Cats of Any Color, 246.

See Richard Sudhalter’s Lost Chords for an example of a writer arguing for white

male inclusion in histories of early jazz formation. Sudhalter struggles to demar-

cate a space for early white jazz musicians, countering what he calls ‘‘the black

canon’’ (xvii). His misguided attempts to carve out such a space reveal the conten-

tious ﬁeld called jazz history.

Race has been a major theme throughout the history of jazz with writers

commenting on its racial dynamics from its early years. Reading Jazz, edited by

Robert Gottlieb, provides a survey of early writings on jazz, as does Andrew

Clark’s Ri√s and Choruses. See also, LeRoi Jones’s Blues People and Black Music;

Gene Lees’s Cats of Any Color; and Jon Pannish’s The Color of Jazz. There are nu-

merous others, but my point is that jazz is often written about in black and white

masculinist terms, excluding women and musicians who are neither ‘‘white’’ nor

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Silenced but Not Silent 99

‘‘black.’’ I might add that Pannish’s book is a nuanced counter to much of the

racial politics found in jazz writings, though he, too, concentrates on a black and

white jazz world.

See Sherrie Tucker’s Swing Shift for an important investigation into how gen-

der and sexuality operated in popular jazz discourse during the 1940s. Unfortu-

nately, many of her insights can be used to illustrate the continued patriarchal

bent of contemporary jazz discourse. Tucker also ruptures the black-white binary

by introducing the saxophonist Willie Mae Wong and cogently describing the

liminal space between black and white that she inhabited.

While I view with some amount of incredulity Sudhalter’s discursive inter-

vention into the ‘‘black canon’’ with his project of demarcating a space for white

musicians, particularly in the early formation of jazz, I do not desire to enter

into the polemics surrounding the black and white racialization of jazz discourse;

rather, I hope to break the black and white binarism that has overshadowed

much of jazz discourse by opening up a space for Asian American musicians and

their contributions to jazz musicking. I do not wish to merely perform an ‘‘addi-

tive’’ history to the normative jazz historical project, either. This essay is not

meant to provide a broad, revisionist history, although it may be aligned with such

a project.

DeVeaux, ‘‘What Did We Do to Be So Black and Blue?’’ 415, emphasis mine.

An essay by Mia Tuan, ‘‘On Asian American Ice Queens and Multigeneration Asian

Ethics,’’ investigates the ‘‘forever alien’’ status of Asian Americans through the

ways Michelle Kwan and Kristi Yamaguchi were publicly ﬁgured in contrast to

their white counterparts. For instance, Tuan begins her article with this telling

anecdote: ‘‘I was working at my computer . . . when I ﬁrst heard the news. The

internet headline read, ‘American beats Kwan,’ a reference to Tara Lipinski beating

out Michelle Kwan for the 1998 Olympic gold medal in women’s ﬁgure skating. . . .

The faux pas on msnbc’s part (both skaters, after all, are American—Michelle is

second generation) illustrated so well . . . how deep the foreigner stereotype runs—

Americans look like Tara, while foreigners look like Michelle’’ (181).

I recognize that other Asian male representations may speak to more masculinist

perspectives. There is the Fu Manchu stereotype of the power-obsessed Asian

male, as well as the skillful martial artist whose physicality is embodied in highly

masculinized ways. However, both of these representative tropes place these

males in an Asian location that is farther away (in temporal as well as spatial

terms) than, for example, the Charlie Chan image, whose marginalization re-

quires other discursive tactics.

David Ake describes these tendencies as a sense of competitiveness among jazz

musicians that privileges an ability to ‘‘play faster, higher and louder while incor-

porating more intricate lines and complex harmonic substitutions than their ad-

versaries did,’’ noting that ‘‘as far back as the early New Orleans innovators, jazz

musicians remained highly conscious of displaying a hearty and unambiguous

heterosexual masculinity’’ (Jazz Cultures, 67). Noted jazz scholar Krin Gabbard,

discussing the signifyin(g) tropes surrounding the jazz trumpet player, writes,

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Louis Armstrong was only the ﬁrst of many African American jazz artists to attract

international attention by establishing phallic authority with that most piercing

of instruments, the trumpet. Dizzy Gillespie, a celebrated musical descendant of

Armstrong who frequently spoke of the ‘‘virility’’ of black jazz, may have been

Signifyin(g) on the phallic nature of his instrument when he bent the bell upward as

if to simulate an erection. (‘‘Signifyin(g) the Phallus,’’ 105)

The feminization or emasculation of Asian American males is a subject that I

can only brieﬂy touch on here, but it is evidenced in media representations such as

the nerdy geek whose social inhibitions provide comic bathos to many ﬁlm

narratives. Or think of the Chinese laundryman whose occupation, once gen-

dered notions regarding domestic labor became naturalized, emasculated him, as

Robert G. Lee points out in a short conclusion to the chapter ‘‘Third Sex’’ in his

book Orientals.

My main point here is to establish how both musicians and scholars have

normalized heterosexual masculinity in jazz musicking, foreclosing the possibility

that musicians external to such a construct will be heard as real jazz musicians.

Asian American female musicians, moreover, confronting the submissive fe-

male stereotype that is antithetical to normative constructions of the jazz artist,

also remain external to normative jazz discourse. I am thinking here of dominant

cultural representations of Asian females, particularly in popular culture. Laura

Hyun Yi Kang’s ‘‘The Desiring of Asian Female Bodies,’’ confronts this issue in a

close reading of the ﬁlm Come See the Paradise.

For instance, the cover photograph on The Tokyo Blues album by the pianist

Horace Silver (1962) shows him sitting uncomfortably between two Japanese

women in kimonos, suggesting once again the discursive opposition between

American jazz musicians and exotic Asian women. Further, composition titles on

the album such as ‘‘Sayonara Blues,’’ ‘‘Cherry Blossom,’’ and ‘‘Ah! So’’ contribute

to dominant projections of Asian exoticism back into the popular imaginary,

underlining my argument regarding the vast distance jazz discourse has created

between ‘‘American’’ jazz and Asia(ns). The musicologist Ingrid Monson addresses

this issue, writing,

The symbolic intersection of masculinity, music, and race perhaps explains the per-

sistence of jazz as a fraternity of predominantly male musicians. While many women

have successfully crossed the gender barrier, many cite their technical musical

prowess as having compensated for the symbolic liability of their gender. Mary Lou

Williams, for example, has remarked, ‘‘You’ve got to play, that’s all. They don’t think

of you as a woman if you can really play.’’ (‘‘The Problem with White Hipness,’’ 405)

The overlapping strains of race and gender reveal a discursive project antitheti-

cal to the inclusion of nonblacks, nonwhites, and ‘‘nonmales’’ as real jazz musi-

cians. Williams’s willingness to erase her gender, subsumed under the sign of

virtuosity, pointedly reveals the way in which she recognized the stakes at play in

the jazz world.

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For a closer examination of this issue, see Timothy P. Fong’s The Contemporary

Asian American Experience; and the anthology A Look beyond the Model Minority

Image, edited by Grace Yun. See also Lee’s Orientals, particularly the chapters ‘‘The

Cold War Origins of the Model Minority’’ and ‘‘The Model Minority as Gook.’’

As noted elsewhere in this essay, other nonwhite and nonblack groups, such as

Latin musicians, while clearly subordinate to black and white jazz musicians in

dominant jazz discourse, can be heard as legitimate jazz musicians.

Wong, ‘‘The Asian American Body in Performance,’’ 67–68.

As this essay is concentrating on Asian American musicians, I will not spend time

on Asian jazz musicians such as the Japanese trumpeter Terumasa Hino, the

Filipino alto saxophonist Tots Tolentino, the Korean tenor saxophonist Lee Jung

Shik, or groups such as Shakti (whose members include the well-known South

Asian Indian musician Zakir Hussain), the Japanese fusion band Casiopea, and the

internationally known smooth jazz artist Keiko Matsui.

The sites I mention are ‘‘origin spaces’’ for di√erent developments in normative

jazz history, and I am using them here somewhat ironically. In formal musical

terms, jazz has also managed to incorporate a broad range of nonjazz musicking,

including atonality, the use of ‘‘extended techniques,’’ and even elements of al-

eatorism, without completely becoming another type of musicking. Jazz musi-

cians’ expansive ability to retain ‘‘jazzness’’ in their musicking, however, is not

always compatible with critical or scholarly discourse.

I understand the reasons why African American scholars and artists would sup-

port a historiographical project that valorizes the accomplishments of African

American jazz musicians and their notable contributions to world culture, and I

fully support the recognition of those artists and their creative work. I ﬁnd the

exclusion of Asian American jazz musicians problematic, however, for the reasons

I outline in the text.

I use the term Brown Paciﬁc in reference to Paul Gilroy’s naming of Afro-diasporic

musicking in his Black Atlantic. I used the term in an unpublished paper, ‘‘Chants

for Change: The Music of Sudden Rush and Hawaiian Sovereignty,’’ as a way of

describing the diasporic musicking of Hawai’ian rap artists in their engagements

with Afro-diasporic musicking as expressed in hip hop and reggae. I also mean to

draw attention to the diasporic nature of Asian American jazz.

Francis Wong, interview with the author, October 4, 2001.

As one of many examples in George Yoshida’s Reminiscing in Swing Time to at-

test to this situation, tenor saxophonist Masao Manbo articulates the tension of

occupying this position.

After the day’s show . . . a kid—a solitary schoolboy in a somber black uniform—

approached me as I was leaving the theater, thrust out an autograph book and said

in good English, ‘‘May I have your signature?’’ I signed with a ﬂourish for my only

fan, adding ‘‘Hollywood, Calif.’’ after my name. I had lived in the movie capital

before coming to Japan and was proud of it. But I didn’t want to return there to my

old occupation, which meant pushing a lawn mower. (108)

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102 Fellezs

Clearly, the employment options in Japan were greater for Asian American musi-

cians than in the United States—and the ‘‘glamour’’ attached to American citizen-

ship granted these musicians some additional cultural capital in their new home.

For a compelling historical investigation of jazz in Japan, see E. Taylor Atkins’s

Blue Nippon. While concentrating on Japan, Atkins also reveals the impact of

Japanese Americans on the formation of jazz musicking there. He also takes a

look at the provocative maneuvers Japanese jazz artists have used in order to

formulate ‘‘Japanese jazz.’’ Even more central to this article, however, are the

many instances of Japanese artists, especially before the 1970s, making claims for

their own authenticity as jazz musicians in relation to their ﬁrsthand access to

American jazz artists, particularly African Americans.

More work needs to be done in unveiling the ways in which Filipino musicians

fashioned ‘‘western’’ musical idioms into expressive mediums of their own. One

also sees this in other Asian countries, particularly with hip hop culture in the

contemporary moment, but there is a long history of this activity that deserves

recognition.

Interview with the author, 4 October 2001.

I realize I am using problematic categories here that deserve more scrutiny than I

can provide in this essay, but I deploy them as shorthand descriptions, begging the

reader’s indulgence.

Quoted in Hutnyk, ‘‘Hybridity Saves?’’

Gonzalo Rubalcaba is a Cuban pianist who has recorded for Blue Note, a pres-

tigious jazz recording company, and received a substantial amount of critical

praise. Django Reinhardt is an iconic ﬁgure in jazz. A Gypsy guitarist who even-

tually became a highly esteemed jazz guitarist, despite the mutilation of his left

hand in a ﬁre, Reinhardt formed a legendary quintet with violinist Stephane

Grappelli in the 1930s in Paris. His status as a non-American jazz artist provided

the origin story for Gypsy jazz. Jon Jang is a Chinese American pianist who has

performed with the legendary African American drummer Max Roach, as well as

many other well-known jazz musicians, yet remains relatively unknown to the

general jazz public. Bassist Mark Izu is a Japanese American who was, as a

member of United Front, one of the ﬁrst explicitly Asian American jazz musicians.

He continues to pursue cross-cultural musicking with Asian musicians such as

the tabla master Zakir Hussain and gagaku (Japanese art music) master Togi

Suenobu. Yet Izu remains even less well known than Jang to the average jazz

aﬁcionado.

There is documentation suggesting that Asian musicians engaged with American

popular music prior to the 1920s. See Yoshida, Reminiscing in Swingtime, par-

ticularly the ﬁrst chapter.

While there are many approaches one can take to ‘‘jazzing’’ an Asian folk song,

there are generally two main ones. The ﬁrst is to state the folk melody with jazz

instrumentation in place of traditional instruments and/or reharmonizing the

melodic theme with ‘‘jazz harmonies’’ (extended harmonies as well as ‘‘blue’’ so-

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

Silenced but Not Silent 103

norities, for example). The second method uses traditional Asian instruments

within harmonic and rhythmic movement idiomatically identiﬁed with jazz mu-

sicking. The primary approach, however, is most like the ﬁrst, which consists

of a jazz rhythm (swing or some sort of Western dance rhythm, i.e., foxtrot,

waltz, etc.) attached to an Asian melody performed with Western instrumenta-

tion. The primary function for early fusions of this sort was the performance of

dance music, while contemporary fusions tend to downplay this aspect of jazz

musicking.

Interview with the author, October 4, 2001.

For a recent exception, see Jones, Yellow Music. Chinese music, Jones explains, was

initially ‘‘denied the epistemological status of music’’ (19) by Western commenta-

tors. His concern to ‘‘trace the contours of the trajectory through which Chinese

music entered into a relationship of commensurability with that of the West’’ (20)

corresponds to my attempt in this essay to illuminate a similar relationship be-

tween Asian American jazz musicians and normative jazz discourse.

Andrew Jones, in Yellow Music, attests to substantial sales of jazzed Chinese songs,

if only in Asia. Circuits of distribution and sales, however, also run along racialized

sensibilities, and such recordings’ marketability was thought to be constrained by

language and other cultural concerns. Are audiences and culture industry per-

spectives di√erent today? What, for instance, does the popularity of so-called J pop

( Japanese popular music) with non-Japanese-speaking audiences indicate?

Interview with the author, October 4, 2001.

There is every reason to celebrate African American musicking and its consider-

ation as one of the United States’ primary contributions to world culture. Black

culture’s hard-won status as a culture is noteworthy for the overcoming of racism

and racist laws, ideological constraints, and social disparagements. However, as I

hope to make evident in the body of the text, if jazz’s cultural position comes with

its own set of exclusionary practices, particularly those aligned with a black-white

binarism, it comes at too high a price. Moreover, Asian American inclusion does

not dilute African American creativity, nor does it work to keep African Ameri-

can artists from their much-deserved compensation (similar arguments were used

by capitalists to prevent cross-racial union organizing in industrial workplaces).

Rather, Asian American exclusion demonstrates how the culture industry, in

demarcating markets racially, notes, among other things, the small population of

Asian Americans and targets their interests accordingly. The ideology of a cultur-

ally inferior race—at least when it comes to jazz musicking—works to support the

economic development of markets away from such groups. Additionally, as a

group marked ‘‘forever alien,’’ Asian Americans are foreclosed from participating

in ‘‘America’s classical music.’’ Again, this orientalist construct, created for entirely

other purposes, has been shaped to accommodate the culture industry’s unique

requirements. Audience reception, while not entirely determined by the culture

industry, feeds from the same ideological trough that the advertising and publicity

juggernauts exploit. In Asian American terms, their exoticized positionality is re-

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

104 Fellezs

inforced by popular culture imagery, ﬁlm depictions, and other narrative (mis)rep-

resentations. Mainstream audience apathy toward Asian Americans who do not

resemble these (mis)representations, then, should not be surprising.

Oliver Wang notes how popular music discourse is formulated in such a way that

Asian Americans are silenced in his ‘‘Between the Notes.’’ He describes excep-

tions, such as vocalist Pat Suzuki, in the popular music culture of the early 1960s

while noting the di≈culty in contextualizing her ‘‘exceptional’’ status. His article,

in seeking to describe a historical genealogy for Asian American popular musick-

ing, concentrates on music consumption rather than production. However, it is

important to keep in mind his admonition that ‘‘Asian American music, like Asian

America itself, comes about from the willful e√ort of people to imagine new

spaces of being, new ways of living’’ (463).

For more on the formation of a pan-Asian identity, see Pei-Te Lien’s The Making of

Asian America through Political Participation and Yen Le Espiritu’s Asian American

Panethnicity: Bridging Institutions and Identities. There is also a sizable amount of

reportage on the links between African American social movements and the ways

they modeled protest and progressive politics in the 1960s and 1970s for Native

Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others. Those links are even recog-

nized in popular culture, as evidenced in A. magazine’s 1999 feature article ‘‘Com-

mon Ground’’ by Jungwon Kim.

Jon Jang and Francis Wong, interview with Nic Paget-Clarke, 1997.

Ibid.

Auerbach, ‘‘Proﬁle,’’ 46.

Interview with Nic Paget-Clarke, 1997.

See Takaki, Strangers from a Di√erent Shore, for an overview of many of these strug-

gles and individuals. For a look at the Asian American movement in the period

under discussion at this point in the essay (1970s and 1980s), as well as examina-

tions of current Asian American struggles, see Ho et al., Legacy to Liberation.

Jang, ‘‘88 Keys to Revolution,’’ 35.

Ibid., 35. I would also like to note that political activity and musicking have a

longer history in Asian American life than might be ascertained from this essay.

Folksingers such as William David ‘‘Charlie’’ Chin and folk groups such as A Grain

of Sand and Yokohama, California, predate the Asian American jazz movement by

a decade or more.

The history of Western musicians ﬁnding inspiration in Asian musicking deserves

its own book, but I will just mention brieﬂy that in the art music world composers

such as Henry Cowell and Lou Harrison were inspired by Indonesian gamelan

and Japanese gagaku, as well as Native American musicking traditions. In the

popular music world, musicians such as Martin Denny and Alfred Apaka drew on

non-Western musicking—albeit problematic and crude notions of it—but were

not taken seriously by critics or jazz musicians due, in large part, to the highly

commercialized strain of their musicking.

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

Silenced but Not Silent 105

All of the quotes attributed to Anthony Brown come from an interview with the

author, conducted on December 19, 2001, unless otherwise noted.

I would like to remind the reader that John Coltrane’s a≈nity and exploration

of South Asian musicking predates the Asian American jazz movement. There

are other Asian-jazz fusions such as Joe Harriott’s 1966 Atlantic recordings Indo-

Jazz Suite and Indo Jazz Fusions. The drummer Buddy Rich recorded an album

with tabla master Alla Rakha, Rich à la Rakha, for Liberty Records in 1968. There

are other examples, but my point is that jazz artists had been ‘‘looking East’’ for

some time before Asian Americans began to think of themselves as Asian Ameri-

can jazz musicians rather than simply jazz musicians who happen to be Asian

American.

Ho, ‘‘Beyond Asian American Jazz,’’ 45.

Ibid., 49.

Ibid., 47.

Asian Improv Records was founded by Jon Jang and Francis Wong to produce

Jang’s early recordings. It later became a nonproﬁt organization devoted to pro-

moting Asian American musicians in a wide range of genres.

Interview with the author, 4 October 2001.

Interview with Nic Paget-Clarke, 1997, n.p., emphasis added.

Ibid., emphasis added.

Ibid. One can also point to the orientalist (mis)representations in ﬁlm and tele-

vision that feature, for example, exoticized and hypersexualized female Asians and

emasculated Asian males or, conversely, submissive females and/or hypermascu-

linized martial arts ﬁghting machines. At any rate, none of these ﬁgures are able to

provide images worthy of the title cultural worker or artist.

Ibid.

See Jang’s and Wong’s comments on this topic in ibid.

Ibid.

Ouellette, ‘‘The Question Is . . .’’ Notably, Brown was the only artist without a

photograph accompanying his brief statement.

Ibid., 26.

Free jazz’s discursive connections to black nationalist politics have linked it to

activist political sensibilities and have often been counterposed to mainstream

jazz musicking. This opposition is often framed within a progressive-reactionary

binarism, but, as is noted with regard to Asian American jazz, it is an outdated

connection that may have only tentative historical veracity. For a reading of free

jazz’s politics that complicates this simple conﬂation, see Anderson, ‘‘Jazz Outside

the Marketplace.’’ It should also be noted that a revisioning of a particular jazz

composition is not necessarily going to reﬂect a progressive sensibility, for one of

jazz’s dominant aesthetic suppositions is the creative reworking of given materials

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

106 Fellezs

and jazz artists of every political stripe are compelled to ‘‘reinvent tradition’’ in

some fashion.

See DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, for a complication of the notion that bebop

musicians were simply seeking art status for their musicking. DeVeaux argues

that beboppers were also savvy about placing their musicking in new market

spaces for jazz, especially as jazz became less popular in mass audience terms than

it had been during the immediately previous swing era.

There are jazz writers, critics, and scholars who ignore Hiroshima on the grounds

that fusion is not real jazz, and I do not mean to tackle that debate here. I do not

know what Shoemaker’s reasons were for Hiroshima’s exclusion—or if, indeed, it

was an editorial decision in which he had little input—but it remains an interesting

‘‘moment of silence.’’

For instance, the cover of their eponymously titled debut recording features a

photograph of a female Noh mask on a gray beach with the eyes and lips black-

ened, a sneer or growl beginning to form. The eyes have slit irises, like those of a

cat, further adding to the ominous character of the mask. A bright red ribbon, like

blood, spills from the mask onto the otherwise black- and gray-toned photograph.

The photograph, with only the word Hiroshima in the upper-left-hand corner,

evokes a postapocalyptic setting. Given the context—an Asian American band led

by Japanese American musicians who chose the name Hiroshima—the resonance

of a critical politic is unavoidable.

In response, I would like to quote Akira Tana, a mainstream drummer, at length,

as he notes the overarching dilemma faced by artists such as the members of

Hiroshima.

What is [Asian American jazz]? What does it represent? Because when you hear the

music, you pretty much see the same group . . . or the same people that are always

presented and are always presented under this umbrella, under this name of ‘‘Asian-

American jazz.’’ Is it the people or is it the music? For example, there are a couple of

musicians who are Asian or Asian-American, but they haven’t really taken the

initiative to become part of this scene, and I wonder why. Is it because they play a

di√erent kind of music that will not really let them become identiﬁed with the kind

of music that is being presented by these kinds of groups? So it’s an interesting

question.

For example, [pianist] Kei Akagi isn’t really a part of that scene. And I’m not

involved so much, maybe because we’re geographically separated from the scene,

but maybe it’s because the music that we play and the projects we’re involved in,

isn’t really part of that scene.

[Say] you’re involved in the community, the Asian community, the Asian-

American community. Do you stay within that realm and become part of it, or do

you venture out of it, and try to explore di√erent possibilities with di√erent, other

kinds of groups or other kinds of people that may not have any connection with

that core group, ethnically speaking? Or culturally speaking? (quoted in Feng,

‘‘Akira Tana’’)

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

Silenced but Not Silent 107

The jazz writer Will Friedwald voices the opinions of many critics of fusion, and

the equivalence given to ‘‘commercial success’’ and ‘‘lack of aesthetic integrity’’ in

his remarks is clear. He states unequivocally,

I accept the basic notion that jazz itself, even in its purest form (whatever that may

be) is a fusion; jazz was already a mixture of a million other musics even by the time

it had left New Orleans. . . . I think the reason jazz-rock is such a big deal . . . is

economic. [The fusion band] Weather Report could easily be Financial Report. Jazz

musicians added electriﬁcation to their bands [in order to] expand not just their

musical horizons but their economic base. (Quoted in Taylor, The Future of Jazz, 63)

Jazz critic Stanley Crouch, writing of Miles Davis and his fusion turn, notes

contemptuously, ‘‘Desperate to maintain his position at the forefront of modern

music, to sustain his ﬁnancial position, to be admired for the hipness of his

purported innovations, Davis turned butt to the beautiful in order to genuﬂect

before the commercial’’ (‘‘On the Corner,’’ 166).

Pointedly, regarding Hiroshima’s self-description as a smooth jazz group, Mark

Gridley writes in Jazz Styles, a much-used textbook on jazz, that smooth jazz ‘‘is

background music with a beat,’’ continuing with a discernibly critical tone, ‘‘Most

styles of jazz have had their easy-listening variants, and this is fusion’s’’ (357).

Interview with Nic Paget-Clarke, 1997.

Although I would argue that the conﬂation of smooth jazz and fusion is done in

error, the Hiroshima Web site uses the now-accepted radio and marketing ap-

pellation smooth jazz, which stands in for a broad range of musicking that encom-

passes adult rhythm and blues, urban contemporary, and New Age, as well as

what I call fusion. These genre nominations are loosely applied terms, but in my

other work I am attempting to mark a ﬁner distinction between fusion (or jazz

rock or jazz funk) and later developments such as smooth jazz. I am also ex-

tremely wary of using radio and marketing terms to distinguish musicking forms.

Quoted on the Hiroshima Web site, http://www.hiroshimamusic.com (accessed

October 10, 2006).

Edelstein, ‘‘An Inventive Fusion of Music and Culture Has Hiroshima Building the

Bridge.’’

Quoted on the Hiroshima Web site.

June and Dan Kuramoto, interview with Baldwin Smith, 2003. http://www.the

jazznation.com/Spotlight/hiroshima/hiroshima2.htm (accessed August 10, 2003).

Ibid.

This truism is not applied strictly. Although, for example, the hip hop group

Public Enemy enjoyed commercial success, its political agenda was never ques-

tioned. This di√erence can be arguably attributed to Public Enemy’s explicit

expression of political ideals and positions on a variety of social issues.

Edelstein, ‘‘An Inventive Fusion of Music and Culture Has Hiroshima Building the

Bridge.’’

Quoted on the Hiroshima Web site.

Breest, ‘‘Bridging Music.’’

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

108 Fellezs

Ibid.

At any rate, there is little antagonism between what can be seen as opposing

camps, though I admit I have presented it in a way that would make such a

conclusion reasonable. For example, the Hiroshima koto player June Kuramoto

performed with Mark Izu and Anthony Brown for a production of Kuan Yin: Our

Lady of Compassion, a recent performance work by Mark Izu and Brenda Wong

Aoki. Again, the complex relationship between ethnic, political, and aesthetic

a≈liations in the Asian American jazz community complicates easy analysis.

Ho, ‘‘Beyond Asian American Jazz,’’ 47.

Kotoist Miya Masaoka performs experimental works that incorporate jazz, art

music, and the traditional koto repertoire in ways that blur generic designations.

Her recordings with artists such as the African Americans Steve Coleman, George

Lewis, Reggie Workman, and Andrew Cyrille testify to the linkage between Asian

American and African American artists. The title and musicking on her album

Monk’s Japanese Folk Song (1997), created with the bassist Reggie Workman and the

drummer Andrew Cyrille, are sly comments on this cross-cultural collaborative

e√ort.

Quoted in Shoemaker, ‘‘East Meets Left,’’ 84.

As Anthony Brown remarked to me in a conversation about his recording of Duke

Ellington’s Far East Suite, ‘‘Well, we got nominated [for a Grammy], so some-

body’s listening!’’

Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 389.

From Alien Encounters by Nguyen, Mimi Thi. DOI: 10.1215/9780822389835

Voracious Souls

Chapter

Full-text available

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Kevin Analu Fellezs

Naamyam , Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Article

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Ho Chak Law

Jon Jang, an American composer, bandleader, and activist of Chinese descent, begins his five-movement Island: The Immigrant Suite No. 1 (1995) with a musical setting that is sonically and stylistically unconventional. He introduces a curious adaptation of naamyam (“southern tones”)—a Cantonese genre of narrative singing that originated in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong—into this musical setting of Genny Lim’s Chinglish poem “Burial Mound” so as to make audible the politics of representation concerning Sinophone Americans of particular ancestries, generations, and immigration histories. Not only does he associate this setting with Chinese laborers of the transcontinental railroad and naamyam in American Chinatowns, he also demonstrates in this setting his embrace of “creative music” as an American framework of cultural performance.

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Falling through the Net: Defining the Digital Divide

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Jun 2001

National Telecommunications and Information Administration

This book presents data supporting the existence of a gap–along racial, economic, ethnic, and education lines–between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not. The Digital Divide refers to the perceived gap between those who have access to the latest information technologies and those who do not. If we are indeed in an Information Age, then not having access to this information is an economic and social handicap. Some people consider the Digital Divide to be a national crisis, while others consider it an over-hyped nonissue. This book presents data supporting the existence of such a divide in the 1990s along racial, economic, ethnic, and education lines. But it also presents evidence that by 2000 the gaps are rapidly closing without substantive public policy initiatives and spending. Together, the contributions serve as a sourcebook on this controversial issue.

58 ‘Soft-soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising’

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Anne McClintock

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Lauren Berlant

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31 INDOLOGY, POWER, AND THE CASE OF GERMANY

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Sheldon Pollock

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Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory

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Proust’s famous madeleine captures the power of food to evoke some of our deepest memories. Why does food hold such power? What does the growing commodification and globalization of food mean for our capacity to store the past in our meals – in the smell of olive oil or the taste of a fresh-cut fig? This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. Sutton challenges and expands anthropology’s current focus on issues of embodiment, memory and material culture, especially in relation to transnational migration and the flow of culture across borders and boundaries. The Greek island of Kalymnos in the eastern Aegean, where Islanders claim to remember meals long past – both humble and spectacular – provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Despite the growing interest in anthropological accounts of food and in the cultural construction of memory, the intersection of food with memory has not been accorded sustained examination. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in speciality cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the ‘anthropology of the senses’. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations.

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