Conference Report: Asian/American Jazz: Past, Present, Future
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.41.1.07
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics
ResumoScholarship on Asian American jazz is often found at the margins of academia. Jazz remains an uncommon object of inquiry in Asian American studies, and considerations of race and ethnicity in jazz studies typically remain fixed within a white/Black racial binary. To my knowledge, there is no “Center for Asian American Jazz Studies” housed in any university music department, and there is certainly not a degree that one can receive in Asian American jazz performance. Yet those who have made this music central to their lives and research have embraced its relative marginality—often letting the silences, absences, and institutional erasures of varyingly entwined “Asian American” and “jazz” mainline discourses act as an operative framework for consideration and problematization. While lacking a nominal institutional home, scholars and musicians who have taken Asian American jazz as a focus have carved out a niche position in their respective specialties and (sub)disciplines, cultivating an interdisciplinary ethos that has become a crucial point of focus within the discourse of the field. Over the past several decades, those housed within departments of English, history, music, ethnic studies, and American studies (to name but a few) have met each other at their margins, opening new spaces for scholarly consideration of different topics, histories, and concerns related to the works and lives of Asian American musicians who play jazz.One such meeting occurred this past February at Columbia University's Center for Jazz Studies, which hosted the day-long symposium “Asian/American Jazz: Past, Present, Future,” which subsequently became the inspiration for this special issue. Collected in an intimate setting were several generations of scholars and scholar-musicians who endeavored to share research and reflect on the state of the field. It was an opportunity to collectively examine the past movements and moments that have shaped the field's inquiry, to dialogue about the current moment of Asian American jazz, and to imagine possible futures at a time when self-reflexive problematization in jazz studies and Asian American studies have called into question previously assumed notions of community formation, affects of belonging, and aesthetic representation. The event's written description gestured to the minor positionality that Asian American jazz occupies within the academy, noting how “higher recognition is a sought-after goal,” and that the day promised “a mix of leading scholars and musicians . . . focus[ing] on a group of musicians and projects that are rarely discussed in jazz studies or Asian American studies.” Acknowledgment of this position notwithstanding, the intention was to forge new pathways of interpreting history, share musical and fieldwork experience, and gesture to the future of what Asian American jazz may entail both within and beyond its place in the academy. It is also worth noting the social aspect of the event, as many of the speakers and attendees had been in conversation with one another for quite some time to engage with each other's work. What is more, it was impossible to view this event without considering COVID-19’s impact on the importance of sociality and physical proximity, so an emphasis was placed squarely on taking stock of the moment and being in each other's presence. Overheard before the event's start time were numerous exclamations that commemorated being in a shared space, embraces between colleagues and friends after not seeing each other in years, and reflections on past interpersonal moments. Temporalities, as the symposium's name might suggest, were a recurring theme throughout the day's program. Such a temporal focus could be gleaned from the title of each panel, which also make up the titles of the following sections in this report. Questions regarding formations of Asian American identity, what “counts” as Asian American culture, and the politics of cross-racial musical aesthetics registered in the historical, contemporary, and future-looking inquiries that were brought into each of the various presentations and discussions. While not a comprehensive analysis, this report addresses the different subjects, themes, and discussions that tethered these panels and talks throughout the day.The morning began with a focus on “Asia” as a site of jazz cultural production and considered histories that extend beyond the United States as the essential center of any jazz discourse. E. Taylor Atkins's paper, “The Story of a People: Toshiko Akiyoshi as Historian of Japan,” engaged the political side of the pianist/composer/bandleader's repertoire. Citing Akiyoshi as “the best-known jazz musician from Japan,” Atkins highlighted pieces like “Kogun” and “Since Perry” as vehicles in which Akiyoshi aesthetically rearticulated histories of Japanese resilience, blending sonorities of traditional Japanese music with jazz instrumentation and arrangements to trace figures and moments that indicate the country's history of transnational engagements. Other pieces such as “Hiroshima” and “Wishing Peace” were offered as a requiem against the backdrop of twentieth-century nuclear anxiety, centering affects of Japanese remembrance as a mode of listening to global dynamics of war and power. These “programmatic” compositions exemplify Akiyoshi as a historical interpreter for contemporary Japan. She constructed a new space of reflection in her music that resists normative categorizations of genre and style by connecting her unique aesthetic with pivotal moments of the country's history. Notably, Atkins complicated any potential positivist imagery of these historical representations by considering the “persistent controversies about Japan's past” that remain a part Akiyoshi's messaging.In his paper “‘Filipino Seekers of Fortune’ and the Foundation of an Imperial Jazz Economy in 1920s Asia,” Fritz Schenker reconsidered the emergence of jazz in the Philippines and the formation of transnational jazz musicians coming out of Manila under an economic framework of “imperial labor.” Such a framing accounts for the valuation, reception, and possibilities for Filipino jazz musicians under American colonial rule, as well as their relative absence from contemporary jazz historiography. Schenker argued that while having to adhere to “racialized hierarchies” embedded within the United States’ colonial efforts in the Pacific that directly impacted local economies, these musicians operated with a level of mobility both economically and transnationally in ways that allowed them to establish routes of jazz musicking across Asia and into the United States. Imperial labor by Filipino musicians during this period was thus subjected to the contradictory racial logic of American empire in the Pacific: their value across Asia was a result of their musical prowess and willingness to accept lower wages, yet they were not afforded the same kind of artistic merit as American jazz musicians and were even derided by some non-Filipino jazz musicians for their prevalence in the market. Despite this, Filipino jazz musicians during this time, like trombonist Nicanor “Nick” Amper, were able to negotiate a musical identity abroad that resonated with Filipinos back home who saw them as ambassadors of possibility for the country's independence efforts. Both Atkins's and Schenker's talks problematized the notion of jazz music's implicit American rootedness and encouraged thinking beyond the normative assumptions of a fixed locale from which discourses of music, race, and global circulations may emanate.The next panel featured a roundtable discussion centered around the histories of Japanese incarceration in the United States during World War II. To approach the complexities of this subject, the three discussants introduced different musical performances by Japanese Americans across generations who were directly impacted by or who echo their racialized migration and forced displacement. These performances construct legacies similar to the National Day of Remembrance (追憶の日), which happened to coincide with the weekend of the symposium. Alexander Murphy highlighted how three American Nisei performers, Betty Inada, Helen Sumida, and James Araki, navigated anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States by establishing careers in Japan around the time of World War II, ultimately helping to shape the direction and sound of jazz that was bourgeoning in the country. Murphy's historical rendering showed how the ethnic “otherness” of being Japanese in the United States for these performers was compounded by being regarded as American in Japan, forming a liminal immobility unique to their Nisei identity. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, recordings from these performers now circulate with newfound mobility in contemporary listenership and study.Susan Miyo Asai highlighted Kay Shelemay's community models of descent, dissent, and affinity1 as ways to conceptualize jazz music-making by Japanese American youths who were incarcerated within US internment camps. Jazz music, Asai argued, served as a “spiritual and cultural renewal” for Japanese American youths who were denied their humanity during World War II, offering them a potential avenue of resistance. In response to their wartime incarceration, the teens’ enjoyment of jazz music-making and listening was a kind of “symbolic mobility” that allowed them to imaginatively construct selfhoods that gestured toward their American identity and its associated social and physical mobility. The “descent” model highlighted shared ethnicity as the basis of forming a musical community; “dissent” communities were based around sounding resistance against subjugation and forced assimilation; and those who based their community around “affinity” formed their sense of belonging on shared cultural and aesthetic tastes. Though the three models describe different motivations for Japanese American engagements with jazz and music-making more broadly, Asai suggested an interrelatedness between these communities that allowed for a flexible and agentive membership despite their forced immobility. Engagements with jazz music, such as the dance bands that were formed in all but one of the internment camps, facilitated and engendered socialities across difference within camp life.Rounding out the panel, Eric Hung detailed how the last ten years of music made by Japanese Americans in memorialization of the Day of Remembrance have begun to articulate this history differently from prior generations of musicians. Whereas the use of “grand historical narratives” had been the normative framework for these kinds of commemorative works in the 1980s and 1990s when the reparations movement was still quite fresh, Hung noted how fragmented stories have become an emergent method of representation since at least the 2010s. Hung expanded on this by noting how artists like No-No Boy and Kishi Bashi utilize lyrics that tap into dimensions of familial connections to convey an understanding of Japanese American life under internment, affectively inviting listeners to explore for themselves how these individual subjectivities and histories may cohere within a broader politics and history of power. As a roundtable, the speakers engaged the audience in discussing the ethics of archival research, the use of quotidian narratives to derive interpersonal meaning with broader resonance, and the possibilities of contemporary coalition-building through historical engagements. Their interventions highlighted these different musicians as active participants in constructing part of the tapestry of Japanese American history, self-fashioning the terms of their remembrance through their musical practice. Murphy, Asai, and Hung articulated a need for these foundational histories of resistance and collaboration to face contemporary subjugations, which music can uniquely signal and help to combat.At the midpoint of the day, Loren Kajiwaka moderated a discussion with Jon Jang and Francis Wong on the history of Asian Improv aRts (AIR), the San Francisco-based artist collective and record label that Wong and Jang originally formed in 1987 under the name Asian Improv Records. For many in the room, the music of Wong and Jang and the albums released under AIR were the first entry point into the realm of Asian American jazz and its entwined history with the Asian American consciousness movement from the 1970s. Kajikawa conveyed how the stream of Asian American jazz made within this space did not simply reflect an already-present Asian American “essence,” but that AIR's musical explorations and community investment allowed for new formations, conceptions, and possibilities of what Asian America can sound like against the dominant racial-cultural schema of the United States, which typically maps onto musical production.Answering questions and dialoguing about their initial contact with jazz music, Wong and Jang highlighted the deep political impulse that informed their musical trajectories. They noted how their shared affinity for jazz musicians from the 1960s who were associated with the avant-garde, like John Coltrane, coincided with their exposure to Black revolutionary politics during the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly the writings of Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka. They recounted the stories of their development within the Bay Area against the backdrop of higher-order jazz institutions like SFJAZZ, which they argued embodied an institutionalization of the music and its racialized associations that effectively boxed them out. For many, including myself, Wong's and Jang's music and the formation of AIR is a kind of starting point for the political and social landscape that much of Asian American jazz has come to embody. Indeed, much has been written on their lives and music, mostly by scholars who were present at the symposium. One might argue, then, that the music of Wong and Jang and the musicians associated with AIR has an outsized representation within the discourse of Asian American jazz, given their seeming omnipresence. Nevertheless, this setting made apparent that the rearticulation of their formation in their own words offered a moment to collectively “hold space” for the music, activism, and community that AIR has engendered.In discussing the formation of AIR, Wong elaborated that “[o]ne of the reasons we formed Asian Improv is because we didn't see ourselves in the music as leaders . . . the idea that Asian Americans can take that space for solidarity, could take that space for creativity, and could take that space of wanting a new society . . . it's about creating that space where particularly Asian Americans can feel comfortable and confident that their own creativity can be expressed, and that it can be a part of the change that society needs.” Wong and Jang likened AIR's discography to an archive, one that has constructed a “social space” where Asian American musical expression can flourish. Such an archive has produced common cultural material for discussions and inquiries into the notion of Asian American involvement in jazz, as well as a route for bourgeoning Asian American jazz artists to find community. Reflecting on the history of AIR in many ways mirrored the broader retrospection of the field and encapsulated the purpose of the symposium; the ability to construct a space for themselves and other like-minded musicians resounded throughout the room.The final panel of the symposium took a critical look at some of the issues that continue to haunt or “grip” what the panelists called “the Asian American jazz question.” The discussion's abstract identified five common problematics recurrent in Asian American jazz formations and discourses: 1) non-Asian musicians who have contributed to understandings of music that can be called “Asian American jazz”; 2) Asian Americans who do not want to participate in any “identity politics” that may relate to the kinds of music they play; 3) marginalization of non-East Asians within representations of “Asian America”; 4) younger Asian Americans who strategically utilize their identity as an entrepreneurial practice; and 5) the negotiation of authenticity between Asian Americans and Asians who are from the continent itself. Rather than addressing each point directly, the first two panelists foregrounded their own experiences in constructing for themselves ways of thinking, embodying, and performing Asian American musical practices that resist being subsumed by these five markers.Haffez Modirzadeh began his talk by proposing an “indigenous pulse” contained within Afro-Asian musical expression. His talk, titled “Afro/Asian Jazz Consciousness—From the Field,” connected recent field recordings of Iranian musicians with video and audio recordings of John Coltrane, Fred Ho, Ornette Coleman, and Malcolm X, among others. In placing these asynchronous recordings, speeches, and interviews side by side, Modirzadeh conveyed how systems of identification in Western musical discourse are akin to the systemizations of ethnocultural belonging that are commonly articulated in the Western world. He argued that this had been the dominant mode of constructing and validating notions of belonging, which he problematized as bound up in distinctions and quantifications that are ostensibly universal in application but rely on modes of transmission that are inherently hierarchical, such as the reliance on blood quotient as a means of justifying one's background and purity. Modirzadeh suggested ways of listening that do not seek to overdetermine through categorization of peoples and their respective musical systems. Rather, he invited attendees to cultivate what he calls an “Afro/Asian Jazz consciousness” by listening to ways that African, Indigenous, and West Asian musicians transmit and transpose their cultural particularity into jazz idioms, allowing for cross-cultural thinking without implicitly constructing order across difference.In her talk “Projecting Tradition into the Future in Three Solo Works,” Jen Shyu gave an in-depth look into her musical background and the research that went into the composition of three of her solo “ritual-theater-music works”: Solo Rites: Seven Breaths (2014), directed by Garin Nugroho, and Nine Doors (2017) and Zero Grasses: Ritual for the Losses (2019), both directed by Alexandru Mihail. Shyu began by recounting her initial exposure to Taiwanese folk and indigenous music, the fieldwork she eventually conducted in various Taiwanese villages, and the process of translating this music into her own musical sensibilities and modes of expression. She detailed learning the Taiwanese moon lute under several different musicians over the course of numerous trips during her graduate studies and subsequent performance career. Through a practice-based approach, Shyu articulated how different styles of tuning and virtuosity signposted different regional belongings, conceptions of modernity and tradition, and political nationalisms in the contemporary context. A later fieldwork project in East Timor revealed ritual practices that sounded out the country's long colonial history wherein animist practice and Catholic iconography seamlessly integrated with one another, yet Shyu highlighted how the East Timorese managed to “retain their song” despite the country's colonial influence. Incorporating these experiences and teachings into her own expressive performance style became an experimental and resistive practice for Shyu, allowing her to foreground her rootedness in Taiwanese and East Timorese traditions without essentializing their virtues. Integrating and interpolating the music she learned during her fieldwork into her solo shows thus became a mode of personal Asian American articulation, one not based on predetermined conceptions of what “counts” as Asian American cultural formation.To conclude the panel, Kevin Fellezs brought the two previous talks into conversation to critique the delimitations of Asian American music into style, technique, and easily identifiable or presentable cultural presentation. Considering how improvisatory styles and processes have been historically constructed under what George Lewis has termed “Eurological” or “Afrological” belief systems and behaviors such that they maintain an ethnocultural association beyond the performing body,2 what can one make of the musical traditions and sonic signifiers that hypothetically construct the “Asialogical” in jazz music? While “other jazzes” such as Latin jazz maintain an identifiable sonority and rhetoric as well as codified musical technical components that mark their recognizability, this is not the case for Asian jazz musical formations, despite similar types of aesthetic and cultural-historic signifying markers. What, then, is at stake in thinking about Asian American jazz and its artists as a unique formation, especially when it is not afforded the same classification as a “kind of jazz” when compared to other localized forms? Fellezs proposed several provocations regarding the contemporary need for designating the term “Asian American,” as well as its problematics and limitations as a formation, especially regarding West, Central, and South Asians who are typically left out of mainline Asian American cultural formations. For Fellezs, both Modirzadeh and Shyu, as well as Jang and Wong, present avenues for an Asian American jazz expression that is embedded in a deep historical, aesthetic, and political milieu that forms the basis of each of their performance practices. Yet the “Asian American jazz question” is an open one, and the need for further problematization along these lines of questioning remains.Closing the symposium was a keynote address delivered by Deborah Wong, who encapsulated much of what was felt, presented, and discussed throughout the day. Despite the “outsider position” that Asian American jazz may have in both jazz studies and Asian American studies, Wong noted the collegiality and personal relationships that scholars and musicians have forged through the shared desire of giving voice to Asian Americans and constructing a “jazz studies without borders.” Addressing the audience, Wong invited everyone to name out loud the ancestors of the music and the field who are no longer with us, as well as those who could not make it to the day's event but are still present within scholarly and musical circles. The long call-in of artists, musicians, and scholars past and present signaled the growth and development that has occurred in the collective consciousness-building around the notion of Asian American jazz over the past decades in tandem with the Asian American movement. Immediately following this, however, Wong posed the question: Is the Asian American movement over? Such an inquiry put focus on an orientation toward the future of Asian American studies by focusing on emergent issues, rather than remaining stuck in past discourses that have historically been associated with Asian American studies and the Asian American movement. Wong reemphasized the need to conceive of musical expression as cultural work and not merely an object of inquiry, asking those present to consider whether their research serves to further contemporary discourses or tether them to the past.Wong offered “standards” as a final point of reflection in her closing remarks. While many avant-gardists may think of jazz standards as the representation of a limited or conservative articulation of the music's potential, Wong underscored performances of standards by Asian Americans that took on a mode of resistance and self-making. Standards provide a “level playing field” for self-expression heard within spaces that recognize the sociocultural power in their performance, a hegemonic dynamic where their rearticulation by Asian Americans carves out new areas of meaning and identification. Going further, some pieces by Francis Wong, Jon Jang, and the late Fred Ho and Glenn Horiuchi have even become standards themselves that are exemplary within the broad formation of Asian American jazz—though the aim of these compositions is not to produce an alternate canon. Rather, performing standards becomes a process of navigating the institutional limitations placed on formations of collectivity and identification, nurturing a sense of “home” in the face of precarity, which Wong maintained was not unlike the current state of Asian American studies and scholarly inquiries into Asian American jazz.The broad topic of Asian American Jazz remains vibrant, as was demonstrated throughout the symposium's panels, talks, and conversations. New research that pushes against normative histories and totalizing frameworks were collectively engaged by those determined to find space for what they know to be work that matters, further lifting the voices of Asian Americans past and present who sound out their own sense of identity and belonging. Marginality remains an ever-present factor and source of tension, whether that of Asian Americans, Asian American studies, or Asian American jazz. In the immediate aftermath of the symposium, the question “what's next?” propelled the afterglow of the event into action and planning, searching for ways to keep the conversation going into the future.3However, replicating institutional formations was not an outright goal of the symposium, as the efficacy of such an endeavor remains a point of cautious skepticism. Instead, “anthemic utterances that literally speak and play us into being,” as Deborah Wong phrased it, were put into practice within this shared space among musicians, colleagues, and audience members in community with one another. Whether by rearticulating transpacific histories, configuring stories of incarceration into a constellation of remembrance, or sharing musician testimonies as a means of generating activism and community, the day's talks demonstrated the possibilities that jazz offers for imagining Asian America beyond institutional limitations, as well as the need to broaden the scope of our collective efforts. “Asian/American Jazz: Past, Present, Future” was a rare chance for this topic to take center stage, and the inquiries discussed throughout the day will continue to be developed, even if at the margins.
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