What's at Stake? Considering the Case for “Asian American Jazz”
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.41.1.02
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
ResumoThis essay brings together my opening remarks as Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University with my concluding thoughts offered as the final speaker on a panel with Hafez Modirzadeh and Jen Shyu at the Asian American Jazz: Past, Present, Future symposium held on February 17, 2023.When I wrote “Silent But Not Silenced: Asian American Jazz” sixteen years ago, there was very little published on Asian American involvement in jazz.1 I drew from Susan Asai's “Cultural Politics: The African American Connection to Asian American Jazz-based Music”;2 Deborah Wong's Speak It Louder, with baritone saxophonist Fred Ho on its cover;3 George Yoshida's Reminiscing in Swingtime;4 and conversations with tenor saxophonist Francis Wong and pianist Jon Jang, among many other musicians, to help me hear the long history of Asian American musicians’ involvement with US-American popular music, and jazz in particular. Since then, there has been a small upswell of writing, authored by some of the speakers assembled here today for this spring 2023 symposium on Asian American jazz at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies.On a day devoted to thinking about Asian American involvement with jazz, I do want to ground our conversations in jazz production in Asia, because this occurs as early as the so-called Jazz Age of the 1920s, as Taylor Atkins and Fritz Schenker will detail for us this morning. Their opening panel is meant to explicitly acknowledge a “parallel” history of Asians performing jazz, wherever they have been located. Asian participation not only indicates the rapid globalization of jazz, particularly through recordings and radio, but it also speaks to the music's articulation of modernity, industrialization, and cultural commodification—concepts that accompanied the music and drew in Asian musicians and audiences who were invested in adopting a cosmopolitan perspective. I do not assume any necessary and organic relationship among the terms Asia, Asian America, Asians, and Asian Americans, as each of these are debatable categories themselves. Nevertheless, if we begin simply on a material, organological level, we should recognize that without Asian drums and cymbals, we would not have the modern trap drum set, as even a cursory look at photographs of percussion batteries gathered together by drummers in the early twentieth century unquestionably proves. In other words, Asians and their instruments have been a part of jazz since its emergence.Here in the United States, there have been and continue to be a number of Asian American (including expatriate Asian) jazz musicians who enjoy international recognition, such as Toshiko Akiyoshi, Jennifer Choi, Susie Ibarra, Vijay Iyer, Mark Izu, Takuya Kuroda, Grace Lee, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Linda May Han Oh, and Hiromi Uehara. Others, such as Tatsu Aoki, Anthony Brown, Ken Chan, John Chin, Masaru Koga, Miles Okazaki, Gerald Oshita, Akira Tana, Deems Akihiko Tsutakawa, and Samuel Yahel are known to a smaller group of jazz cognoscenti. Still others, such as Keiko Matsui, Jeff Kashiwa, and the band Hiroshima, perform the types of jazz that, while perhaps more visible than most of the artists mentioned, are rarely given serious engagement by scholars or journalists.There are older generations of jazz and jazz-adjacent pop musicians like Gabe Baltazar, Paul Higaki, Teal Joy (Elsie Itashiki), Joseph “Flip” Nunez, and Pat Suzuki who have largely sailed under the radar or been forgotten by the wider public. There are the Asian American jazz artists who made their careers in Asia a century ago, such as Alice Fumiko Kawabata (née Fumie Tachibana). Finally, there are musicians such as African American saxophonist Patrick Bartley who leads the Brooklyn-based J-Music Ensemble, a group whose book, or repertoire, consists of Bartley's jazz arrangements of music drawn from Japanese anime, computer games, and J-Pop. Can we say that Bartley's music is Asian American jazz in some way? Relatedly, we might ask about sonic difference. Why, we might ask, does Makoto Horiuchi's eponymous debut album on Quincy Jones's Qwest imprint end its credit notes by stating, “Makoto Horiuchi should not be confused with the fine young Japanese pianist Makoto Ozone”?5 Why would anyone mistake Horiuchi, a fusion (jazz-rock-funk) guitarist, with Ozone, an acoustic pianist who performs bebop-oriented jazz? Do Asians also all sound alike, no matter where they were born, what instrument they play, or what their surname might be?My point in mentioning these artists and asking these questions, some admittedly rhetorical, is twofold. First, I want to explicitly acknowledge that there is no way that we are going to address the full range of Asian American musicians who have engaged jazz musicking at our gathering today. This leads to my second point that there is a long history and a wide spectrum of musicking and musicians we might label “Asian American jazz” or “Asian American jazz musicians.” The question, then, for me, is not so much “what is Asian American jazz?” or “who is an Asian American jazz musician?,” nor is my project to map out a history or lineage of Asian American jazz musicians.Rather, I want to ask what is at stake when we say that Asian and Asian American musicians have taken part in jazz since its beginnings a little over a century ago. What are the stakes involved for musicians who claim that their Asian American identity informs their participation in jazz musicking? What is at stake in recognizing Asian-ness as a part of an artist's aesthetic palette at all? What is at stake in adopting a pan-Asian American identity (or aesthetics, for that matter) versus claiming a Vietnamese American identity, for instance, or claiming a mixed heritage, including the somewhat controversial category hapa?6 What might be shared or held as unique among the musicians and their musicking in the Asian Pacific, the Asian Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, and the Asian Mediterranean, let alone in Asian America? Are there shared aesthetics? Are there productive discrepancies? Are any of these musicians, with their varied aesthetics and geographies, related in any fashion at all?In bringing together this mix of scholars and musicians for this day of conversation and discussion, I hope to get at some of the issues these questions raise, underlined by an understanding that “Asian American-ness” does not automatically assume an individual's identification with Asia or with Asian-ness as mobilized through dominant US racial discourse. While everyone will be using the term “Asian American” throughout the day-long symposium, individuals will likely be addressing distinct—similar, perhaps, but not identical—cultural formations, identity claims, and aesthetic choices mobilized under the sign “Asian American.” There is also the complication of applying the term to different historical conjunctures, particularly when discussing groups or individuals prior to the term's emergence in the 1960s, as well as in discussions regarding the continuing political or aesthetic utility of the term today.In any case, Asians have long been in the Americas. Filipinos are documented in what is now Louisiana as early as the sixteenth century as members of transpacific trade circuits. When the Chinese were officially excluded from the United States in 1882, it meant that they were a significant enough presence in the US-American political imaginary by the late nineteenth century to warrant congressional action (not to mention the Asiatic Exclusion League of the early twentieth century or the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 between the United States and Japan, which came about as a result of anti-Japanese education policies in San Francisco, California). Still, despite their deep historical roots in this country, Asians do not fit into the normative US-American racial discourse predicated on a Black/white racial paradigm—a notion that also underpins conventional jazz histories. Granted, Asian Americans are not alone in this regard; Indigenous, Caribbean, and Central and South American jazz musicians face similar marginalization in jazz histories or in discussions regarding jazz aesthetics. Additionally, there is the “model minority” stereotype Asian Americans confront in the United States, which has been used to dismiss Asian American creativity, particularly in the arts.In the present moment, anti-Asian racism has exploded in violent physical assaults on Asians and Asian Americans in public spaces. These heinous acts echo the lynchings of Chinese and the attacks on Chinatowns in the nineteenth century, as well as similar assaults in the 1980s in response to fears of Japanese economic dominance. One such attack was the murder of Chinese American Vincent Chin by two white autoworkers, Ronald Ebens and his stepson, Michael Nitz, who mistook Chin for a Japanese individual. However, while I am uninterested in simply cataloging the history of anti-Asian racism in the United States, I purposely scheduled this symposium to coincide with the weekend's Day of Remembrance of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II. The Day of Remembrance was declared by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on February 18, 2022, eighty years after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which “stripp[ed] people of Japanese descent of their civil rights,” to quote from the Day of Remembrance's official statement.7Taking up this era is today's second panel, “Music and Im/mobility: Migration, Incarceration, Remembrance,” in which Susan Miyo Asai, Eric Hung, and Alexander Murphy consider the entanglements between musical performance and the legacies of the Japanese American incarceration during World War II, including Japanese American musicians who chose to immigrate to Japan in order to pursue careers that were impossible in the United States at the time. Asai, Hung, and Murphy will provide a thoughtful reconsideration of this legacy as mapped through intergenerational trauma experienced by those who suffered through the forced removal to isolated concentration camps and the lingering effects of transgenerational material dispossession experienced by Japanese families. Incarcerees were forced to sell businesses, homes, and family heirlooms at fire-sale prices due to the extremely limited time—from as little as four days to a maximum of two weeks—they were given to comply with the evacuation orders. This history is further complicated today by the awareness of Asian Americans’ subject positioning as settlers in the Americas.Beyond this commemorative focus, I encouraged the symposium speakers to highlight the long history of Asian creativity and artistic ambition that has been unleashed beneath the generic banner of jazz and in the service of multiple and varied aesthetic and political perspectives. Many of the conversations throughout the day will engage ongoing debates within Asian American communities and scholarship that have rarely taken place, if at all, even as a side note to larger discussions within jazz scholarship. This begs the question of whether Asian American participation in jazz is simply peripheral. The uneasy social positioning of the Asian American, I want to suggest, is not a niche issue but is fundamental to deciphering race in the United States. One of the central motivations for gathering at this symposium is to point out that the larger issues of cultural inclusion alongside aesthetic pluralism and political advocacy, which have long resounded within jazz, have yet to inquire very deeply about the involvement and contributions of Asian Americans. We hope, in fact, to join those who have been working to raise the volume on Asian American musicians and their musicking, even if limiting ourselves to jazz.To return to the questions I raised above, grappling with race in the United States necessitates an understanding of what is at stake in considering Asian American involvement with jazz, a musical tradition that, since its inception, has held debates largely between Black and white musicians over cultural and material ownership. Even if we can outline a history of Asian American involvement with jazz and speak to contemporary artists or developments as participating in an aesthetic lineage with an audible resonance today, what do we stand to gain from doing so? As mentioned, the discussion begins in Asia before moving on to Asian US-American involvement with jazz (by using the clumsy term, “Asian US-American,” I am calling attention to the admittedly narrow focus on US North America while admitting there is much to discuss about Asian musical entanglements in Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean). After lunch, Loren Kajikawa will lead a roundtable discussion on the 1980s Asian American jazz movement and its continuing legacy with the founders of the still-vibrant Asian Improv Arts record label, Francis Wong and Jon Jang. The final roundtable conversation will revolve around the fundamental question of whether Asian American culture is an always-already-hybrid formation with provocations and considerations from Hafez Modirzadeh, Jen Shyu, and me.As alto saxophonist Charlie Parker has been credited with saying, “If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn.” This assertion speaks to the core relationship between a (jazz) musician's lived experience and their music. The jazz imperative to “find your own voice” puts special pressure on an artist's desire to give fully of themselves in their music as well. For many jazz musicians, taking seriously the dictum to express one's self has meant putting something of their heritage into their musicking. It follows, then, that in making something of one's Asian heritage, one may become a “real jazz musician,” not simply an Asian American jazz musician. Similar to most musicians, Asian American jazz musicians hope their music resonates with listeners across difference. No artist wants an exclusively Asian American audience, after all. To begin evaluating or taking seriously all the “Asians” Hafez lists in our panel's abstract—the West Asian, the Arab, the Indigenous, the non-Asian (someone like Patrick Bartley with his J-Music Ensemble, perhaps)—we might consider “other jazzes” such as Latin jazz,8 which will help us in delineating how we can think about the stakes of Asian American participation in jazz.How do we decide whether or not a specific performance is “Latin jazz”? The language, instrumentation, ethnicity, or race of the performers? Perhaps we prefer pointing to musical criteria such as the clave, the use of certain musical figures imported from Afro-Caribbean spiritual or religious practices, certain musical forms and structures such as the montuno? All these well-trodden means of deciphering musical meaning have long been used by ethnomusicologists, cultural critics, music journalists, and fans. Even if one answered, “Well, yes, all of those things in combination would indicate that a performance is a Latin jazz performance,” I want to push things a bit further to tease out how complicated it seems to actually hear something we might call “Asian American jazz.” Even if we elucidated all of those same factors—language, instrumentation, ethnicity and race of performers, or a listing of musical elements such as an attention to the concept of ma (literally “space,” but in music contexts meant to indicate the “space or silence between the notes”), for instance, or sawari (a “buzzy string” sound timbre used in shamisen and biwa music), the use of Buddhist or Hindu texts for inspiration—“Asian American jazz” does not resonate recognizably in the same way that “Latin jazz” does for audiences, including critics and scholars. Many jazz fans can suss out a bossa nova or salsa performance from a swing or bebop performance and still think of all the performances as a type of “jazz.” Replace those congas, timbales, and güiros with tsuzumi, tabla, and a gong, however, and many folks would think they were simply listening to an Asian piece of music, even if a swing rhythm section were providing the accompaniment. Or they might hear it as an odd hybrid, a one-off experiment rather than part of a style or tradition.For an example of how this has played out in the past, I turn to Shakti,9 the acoustic fusion band cofounded in 1974 by guitarist John McLaughlin and Indian violin player L. Shankar, who were originally joined by tabla drummer, Zakir Hussain (North Indian, Hindustani) and ghatam percussionist T. H. “Vikku” Vinayakram (South Indian, Carnatic). Fusing jazz and Indian music, Shakti also merged the Hindustani and Carnatic music traditions. Criticisms of the band came from all sides: Hussain's father, tabla master Alla Rakha, was ambivalent about Shakti's fusion of what he called “American jazz” and Carnatic music,10 while many jazz critics sided with Down Beat's Michael Rozek, who wrote that he “couldn't hear any sweeping fusion—the Indian influence predominated.”11Like blood quantum and indigeneity, does employing aesthetic approaches or instrumentation from Asia automatically dilute the “jazz-ness” of a musical expression? George Lewis has offered another approach to this issue in his well-known essay, “Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” in which he describes the two terms as referring “metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior which, in my view, exemplify particular kinds of musical ‘logic.’” For Lewis, this approach to music-makingHeeding the admonition that concludes Lewis's comments, what might be considered Asialogical? What sort of logic has emerged from Asian American musicking that might help us here? Again, how does living as an Asian American come out of a given musician's horn? How does a musician face the logic of a musical tradition “squarely and honestly”? By demonstrating an ethics of reciprocity and respect for that tradition? One response has been to do what Hafez Modirzadeh and Jen Shyu—as well as Francis Wong and Jon Jang—have accomplished, which is to study deeply with musicians trained in Asian musical traditions, merging their personal training and musical backgrounds with musicians such as Jiebing Chen and Wu Man. Admittedly, my examples could be interpreted to suggest an organic connection between Asian Americans and Asians, so allow me to confess, I am agnostic about who anyone studies with or what musical tradition anyone studies. For instance, Jang, Modirzadeh, Shyu, and Wong have also studied jazz and European art music with older, expert musicians steeped in those traditions.Another of the provocations Hafez asks us to consider are Asians who are not in the so-called Far East, South, or Southeast Asia—the dominant spaces in which jazz is recognized as having a long history. As Hafez reminds us, what of West Asia? Relatedly, how might we better accommodate Central Asians such as Mongolians and Tibetans into the mix? Obviously, adding Tibetan throat singing or a qawwali singer to a performance or composition might be heard as merely adding orientalist window dressing, at best. Where Lewis is concerned with the role of improvisation in constructing a musical logic, I am concerned here with the role of musical traditions.13 If the Asialogical is discursive, performative, and aesthetic, as Lewis describes the Afrological and Eurological, why isn't the musicking of Asian Americans recognized in the same way as Latin jazz? Has the discourse failed to keep up with the performative and the aesthetic?In Philip Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino's anthology, Jazz Worlds/World Jazz, Laudan Nooshin's essay on Iranian jazz and Niko Higgins's chapter on Indian fusion are illuminating studies, but the collection is focused on non-US jazz, so Asian Americans are nowhere to be heard.14 I bring up the anthology, however, because one reason for the muting of Asian American jazz artists is that Asian Americans retain the “forever alien” designation in both the United States as well as in Asia. They are not really Americans, and they're certainly not real Asians. Yet, to return to the comparison with Latin jazz, it's not as if Hispanic/Lusophonic Americans are exactly welcomed to the United States, either, as the crisis at the US-American–Mexican border underlines, nor do they represent a homogeneous population. But, again, such sociopolitical realities do not get in the way of understanding Latin jazz as embracing a wide variety of musics, from the rumba to the mambo to salsa to the bossa nova, as a kind of jazz tradition (or set of traditions) while remaining distinct from other kinds of jazz. There is simply no “Asian American jazz” equivalent.I mean to open up our discussion even more provocatively to ask, why the need to demarcate “Asian American jazz” from other kinds of “jazzes” at all? I ask this, even after being moved by Francis Wong and Jon Jang, who gave us inspiring testimonies to the political and historical reasons for announcing themselves as “Asian American” and as “jazz musicians.” But is it still something necessary? Some musicians, such as drummer Akira Tana, have long questioned the need for designating themselves as “Asian American jazz artists,” arguing, quite reasonably, “Why can't I simply be a ‘jazz musician’?” Is there, in fact, still a rationale for adhering the term “Asian American” to jazz? Perhaps the first question should be, “Is ‘Asian American jazz’ even valuable to Asian Americans?”Consider two high-profile Asian American jazz case studies: Hiroshima and saxophonist Jeff Kashiwa. For their part, Hiroshima fully embraces an Asian Pacific aesthetic, cloaking it in an R&B-influenced smooth jazz. Kashiwa, however, makes no overt gestures to his Asian heritage, while also performing an R&B-influenced smooth jazz. While Hiroshima employs June Kuramoto and her koto (zither) as part of its core sound, along with other band members such as Johnny Mori on the taiko, the band also layers in sonic, musical, visual, and representational elements borrowed from their Japanese/Asian heritage. Kashiwa, for his part, has never recorded with a Japanese or Asian instrumentalist, for instance, nor taken an Asian folk song as inspiration for a jazz composition, nor taken to wearing a hapi coat in a public performance.Like many artists in smooth jazz, however, both Hiroshima and Kashiwa enjoy a large and diverse audience, consisting of African American, Latin American, and Asian American concert attendees and merchandise purchasers (recordings, concert paraphernalia, t-shirts, etc.). What these artists do not garner is critical acclaim or widespread acknowledgment of their connection to jazz. In pursuing the smooth jazz market, their musicking will never be a critical favorite. Beyond their designation as smooth jazz artists, moreover, Hiroshima and Kashiwa face the conundrum of Asian American musicians working in any genre: they are caught between self-orientalizing (wearing a kimono or cheongsam, performing on a koto or erhu, singing in an Asian language) and self-erasure (making no overt signals to an Asian heritage). Hiroshima and Kashiwa have taken two distinct strategies in confronting that choice.To conclude, I would like to offer two anecdotes that register how ignoring or belittling Asian American musicians’ long involvement with jazz reveals larger issues regarding Asian American exclusion in the broader US-American popular music culture and, by extension, the body politic. Both anecdotes also highlight Asian American audiences, which have been largely absent from the day's discussions. The first anecdote describes the insularity of the Asian American community caught within a social world in which they have been marginalized and how it troubles the inclusiveness often attributed to jazz musicking. While the first anecdote suggests a self-segregating aspect to Asian American participation as audience members, the second anecdote is a reminder that Asian American jazz fans can be found within the wider jazz public, dancing and clapping along with the rest of the audience. Asian Americans, in other words, are active participants in the jazz world, both on and off the stage.I attended the annual San Francisco Jazz Festival fairly regularly from its inaugural season (including going to multiple nights throughout any given festival), so I had gained a sense of the typical audience. Whenever Toshiko Akiyoshi performed, however, it would be a largely Asian audience, if phenotype can be trusted, who were not present at other festival offerings. They only seemed interested in Akiyoshi performances. In fact, on bills Akiyoshi shared, many in this Asian audience would come just before her set and/or leave immediately at the end of her set. It must be said that, especially for her solo piano performances, non-Asian audience members were largely absent. Was Akiyoshi's jazz somehow more relatable to Asian-looking listeners? And how did non-Asians know this as well?My second anecdote not only addresses the “problem” of Asian American jazz but also takes aim at a question that continues to haunt (mainstream) jazz discourse, namely, where are the audiences of color for jazz? A family member, who is a country music fan, won a ticket to a jazz concert from a radio contest. Having no interest in jazz, this person offered me the free ticket. Since it was to a jazz club I had not attended in some time—Carnaval, formerly Kimball's East, in Emeryville, California—a free ticket seemed a good sign to check it out again. The ticket lacked a band name, and my generous family member did not know anything about the concert.When I arrived, the band was just about to start its set, and I noticed immediately that the only white individuals in the entire venue were on stage. The audience was a mix of predominantly African and Latinx Americans, with a fair amount of Asian Americans mixed in as well. At the time, saxophonist Kashiwa was a member in the band performing that evening, the Rippingtons, and he contributed a number of outstanding solos throughout a rather intense musical set. It not only changed my mind about smooth jazz bands’ live performances—at least this band's—but it also clued me into what audiences of color had decided to enjoy as jazz, regardless of what jazz journalists and scholars decided counted or did not count (smooth jazz is dismissed by most “serious” jazz fans, journalists, and scholars).Notably, they were listening to and deeply engaged by music they were calling “jazz,” attending an event advertised as a jazz concert at a venue well-known for its largely jazz offerings. Overheard conversations among the audience were peppered with descriptions of the concert's music as jazz. Moreover, they responded to the music the way my father and his generation of jazz fans/friends did—viscerally and often vocally, both in approbation and denunciation. Even more outwardly expressive, many in the audience, including many of the Asian Americans, were enthusiastically dancing to the Rippingtons. While we have been more interested in speaking about musicians than audiences at the symposium today, this anecdote should remind us that when we talk about “Asian American jazz,” we need to remember the Asian Americans who are listening and dancing as well.To conclude (and, I hope, as a fitting prelude to Deborah Wong's keynote), the discussions we have participated in today demonstrate unequivocally that Asian American jazz and its artists have been shaped both by their lived experiences in the United States and their Asian heritages, merging these into a unique cultural formation and inspiring creative artistic expression. Still largely unheralded both collectively as well as individually, Asian American jazz musicians’ recognition, authorization, and respect—the stakes at play—are important and significant enough to claim and defend, given these musicians’ long history of participation as performers and composers. We must also never forget to include Asian American listeners and dancers, who cocreate jazz spaces (Asian American and otherwise) alongside the musicians. The question for scholars, then, is how we can make their efforts more audible and visible, especially beyond Asian American and jazz spaces. As our conversations today have firmly established, there is far too much at stake.I want to thank everyone who lent their voice to the Asian American jazz symposium: Susan Miyo Asai, E. Taylor Atkins, Eric Hung, Jon Jang, Loren Kajikawa, Hafez Modirzadeh, Alexander Murphy, Fritz Schenker, Jen Shyu, Sumi Tonooka, Francis Wong, and our keynote speaker, Deborah Wong. I am grateful for their willingness to add their unique perspectives to the discussion, sharing their work and energy to a day focused on the contributions of Asian American musicians to the music we know as “jazz.”
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