Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam

Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam
Author: Stan BH Tan-Tangbau
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1496836359

Shortlisted for the EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize 2022 Quyền Văn Minh (b. 1954) is not only a jazz saxophonist and lecturer at the prestigious Vietnam National Academy of Music, but he is also one of the most preeminent jazz musicians in Vietnam. Considered a pioneer in the country, Minh is often publicly recognized as the “godfather of Vietnamese jazz.” Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam tells the story of the music as it intertwined with Minh’s own narrative. Stan BH Tan-Tangbau details Minh’s life story, telling how Minh pioneered jazz as an original genre even while navigating the trials and tribulations of a fervent socialist revolution, of the ideological battle that was the Cold War, of Vietnam’s war against the United States, and of the political changes during the Đổi Mới period between the mid-1980s and the 1990s. Minh worked tirelessly and delivered two breakthrough solo recitals in 1988 and 1989, marking the first time jazz was performed in the public sphere in the socialist state. To gain jazz acceptance as a mainstream musical art form, Minh founded Minh Jazz Club. With the release of his debut album of original compositions in 2000, Minh shaped the nascent genre of Vietnamese jazz. Minh’s endeavors kickstarted the momentum, from his performing jazz in public, teaching jazz both formally and informally, and contributing to the shaping of an original Vietnamese voice to stand out among the many styles in the jazz world. Most importantly, Minh generated a public space for musicians to play and for the Vietnamese to listen. His work eventually helped to gain jazz the credibility necessary at the national conservatoire to offer instruction in a professional music education program.

The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies

The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies
Author: Ádám Havas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 649
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040175600

The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies recognizes the proliferation of jazz as global music in the 21st century. It illustrates the multi-vocality of contemporary jazz studies, combining local narratives, global histories, and cultural criticism. It rests on the argument that diasporic jazz is not a passive, second-hand reflection of music originating in the US, but possesses its own integrity, vitality, and distinctive range of identities. This companion reveals the contradictions of cultural globalization from which diasporic jazz cultures emerge, through 45 chapters within seven thematic parts: • What is Diasporic Jazz? • Histories and Counter-Narratives • Making, Disseminating, and Consuming Diasporic Jazz • Culture, Politics, and Ideology • Communities and Distinctions • Presenting and Representing Diasporic Jazz • Challenges and New Directions The Routledge Companion to Diasporic Jazz Studies traces how cultural dynamics related to "race", coloniality, gender, and politics traverse and shape jazz. Employing a cross section of approaches to the study of diasporic jazz as eloquently showcased by the entries, this book seeks to challenge the dominant jazz narratives through championing a more all-encompassing, multi-paradigmatic alternative. Bringing together contributions from authors all over the world, this volume is a vital resource for scholars of jazz, as well as professionals in the music industries and those interested in learning about the cultural and historical origins of jazz.

Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội

Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội
Author: Stan BH Tan-Tangbau
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2022-03-22
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000555682

Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội: Improvisations between Worlds examines the germination and growth of jazz under communist rule—perceived as the "music of the enemy" and "ideologically decadent"—in the Vietnamese capital of Hà Nội. After disappearing from the scene in 1954 following the end of the First Indochina War, jazz reemerged in the public sphere decades later at the end of the Cold War. Since then, Hà Nội has established itself as a vital and vibrant jazz center, complete with a full jazz program in the national conservatoire. Featuring interviews with principal players involved in cultivating the scene from past to present, this book presents the sociocultural encounters between musicians and the larger powers enmeshed in the broader political economy, detailing jazz’s journey to garner respect comparable to classical music as an art form possessing high artistic value. Ethnographical sketches explore how Vietnamese musicians learn and play jazz while sustaining and nurturing the scene, providing insight as to how jazz managed to grow in such an environment. Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội sheds light on those underlying caveats that allow Vietnamese jazz musicians to navigate the middle grounds between "worlds"—between music and politics—not as an act of resistance, but as realisation of artistic expression.

The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender

The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender
Author: James Reddan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 696
Release: 2022-08-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000591514

The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender identifies, defines, and interrogates the construct of gender in all forms of jazz, jazz culture, and education, shaping and transforming the conversation in response to changing cultural and societal norms across the globe. Such interrogation requires consideration of gender from multiple viewpoints, from scholars and artists at various points in their careers. This edited collection of 38 essays gathers the diverse perspectives of contributors from four continents, exploring the nuanced (and at times controversial) construct of gender as it relates to jazz music, in the past and present, in four parts: Historical Perspectives Identity and Culture Society and Education Policy and Advocacy Acknowledging the art form’s troubled relationship with gender, contributors seek to define the construct to include all possible definitions—not only female and male—without binary limitations, contextualizing gender and jazz in both place and time. As gender identity becomes an increasingly important consideration in both education and scholarship, The Routledge Companion to Jazz and Gender provides a broad and inclusive resource of research for the academic community, addressing an urgent need to reconcile the construct of gender in jazz in all its forms.

Global Jazz

Global Jazz
Author: Clarence Bernard Henry
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 437
Release: 2021-08-30
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000430995

Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography that explores the global impact of jazz, detailing the evolution of the African American musical tradition as it has been absorbed, transformed, and expanded across the world’s historical, political, and social landscapes. With more than 1,300 annotated entries, this vast compilation covers a broad range of subjects, people, and geographic regions as they relate to interdisciplinary research in jazz studies. The result is a vivid demonstration of how cultures from every corner of the globe have situated jazz—often regarded as America’s classical music—within and beyond their own musical traditions, creating new artistic forms in the process. Global Jazz: A Research and Information Guide presents jazz as a common musical language in a global landscape of diverse artistic expression.

The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century

The Global Politics of Jazz in the Twentieth Century
Author: Yoshiomi Saito
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2019-08-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0429594070

From the mid-1950s to the late 1970s, jazz was harnessed as America’s "sonic weapon" to promote an image to the world of a free and democratic America. Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington and other well-known jazz musicians were sent around the world – including to an array of Communist countries – as "jazz ambassadors" in order to mitigate the negative image associated with domestic racial problems. While many non-Americans embraced the Americanism behind this jazz diplomacy without question, others criticized American domestic and foreign policies while still appreciating jazz – thus jazz, despite its popularity, also became a medium for expressing anti-Americanism. This book examines the development of jazz outside America, including across diverse historical periods and geographies – shedding light on the effectiveness of jazz as an instrument of state power within a global political context. Saito examines jazz across a wide range of regions, including America, Europe, Japan and Communist countries. His research also draws heavily upon a variety of sources, primary as well as secondary, which are accessible in these diverse countries: all had their unique and culturally specific domestic jazz scenes, but also interacted with each other in an interesting dimension of early globalization. This comparative analysis on the range of unique jazz scenes and cultures offers a detailed understanding as to how jazz has been interpreted in various ways, according to the changing contexts of politics and society around it, often providing a basis for criticizing America itself. Furthering our appreciation of the organic relationship between jazz and global politics, Saito reconsiders the uniqueness of jazz as an exclusively "American music." This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, the history of popular music, and global politics. The Introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora

The Genesis and Structure of the Hungarian Jazz Diaspora
Author: Ádám Havas
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2022-05-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000590631

In Hungary, jazz was at the forefront of heated debates sparked by the racialised tensions between national music traditions and newly emerging forms of popular culture that challenged the prevailing status quo within the cultural hierarchies of different historical eras. Drawing on an extensive, four-year field research project, including ethnographic observations and 29 in-depth interviews, this book is the first to explore the hidden diasporic narrative(s) of Hungarian jazz through the system of historically formed distinctions linked to the social practices of assimilated Jews and Romani musicians. The chapters illustrate how different concepts of authenticity and conflicting definitions of jazz as the "sound of Western modernity" have resulted in a unique hierarchical setting. The book's account of the fundamental opposition between US-centric mainstream jazz (bebop) and Bartók-inspired free jazz camps not only reveals the extent to which traditionalism and modernism were linked to class- and race-based cultural distinctions, but offers critical insights about the social logic of Hungary’s geocultural positioning in the ‘twilight zone’ between East and West to use the words of Maria Todorova. Following a historical overview that incorporates comparisons with other Central European jazz cultures, the book offers a rigorous analysis of how the transition from playing ‘caféhouse music’ to bebop became a significant element in the status claims of Hungary’s ‘significant others’, i.e. Romani musicians. By combining the innovative application of Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural sociology with popular music studies and postcolonial scholarship, this work offers a forceful demonstration of the manifold connections of this particular jazz scene to global networks of cultural production, which also continue to shape it.

Jazz Diaspora

Jazz Diaspora
Author: Bruce Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019-10-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1351266667

Jazz Diaspora: Music and Globalisation is about the international diaspora of jazz, well underway within a year of the first jazz recordings in 1917. This book studies the processes of the global jazz diaspora and its implications for jazz historiography in general, arguing for its relevance to the fields of sonic studies and cognitive theory. Until the late twentieth century, the historiography and analysis of jazz were centred on the US to the almost complete exclusion of any other region. The driving premise of this book is that jazz was not ‘invented’ and then exported: it was invented in the process of being disseminated. Jazz Diaspora is a sustained argument for an alternative historiography, based on a shift from a US-centric to a diasporic perspective on the music. The rationale is double-edged. It appears that most of the world’s jazz is experienced (performed and consumed) in diasporic sites – that is, outside its agreed geographical point of origin – and to ignore diasporic jazz is thus to ignore most jazz activity. It is also widely felt that the balance has shifted, as jazz in its homeland has become increasingly conservative. There has been an assumption that only the ‘authentic’ version of the music--as represented in its country of origin--was of aesthetic and historical interest in the jazz narrative; that the forms that emerged in other countries were simply rather pallid and enervated echoes of the ‘real thing’. This has been accompanied by challenges to the criterion of place- and race-based authenticity as a way of assessing the value of popular music forms in general. As the prototype for the globalisation of popular music, diasporic jazz provides a richly instructive template for the study of the history of modernity as played out musically.

Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism

Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism
Author: Sally Banes
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0819571814

Drawing of the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Banes’s Writing Dancing documents the background and developments of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements. With a sure grasp of shifting cultural dynamics, Banes shows how postmodern dance is integrally connected to other oppositional, often marginalized strands of dance culture, and considers how certain kinds of dance move from the margins to the mainstream. Banes begins by considering the act of dance criticism itself, exploring its modes, methods, and underlying assumptions, and examining the work of other critics. She traces the development of contemporary dance from the early work of such influential figures as Merce Cunningham and George Balanchine to such contemporary choreographers as Molissa Fenley, Karole Armitage, and Michael Clark. She analyzes the contributions of the Judson Dance Theatre and the Workers’ Dance League, the emergence of Latin postmodern dance in New York, and the impact of black jazz in Russia. In addition, Banes explores such untraditional performance modes as breakdancing and the “drunk dancing” of Fred Astaire. Ebook Edition Note: Ebook edition note: All images have been redacted.

Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival

Tallinn '67 Jazz Festival
Author: Heli Reimann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-08-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1000440540

Tallinn ’67 Jazz Festival: Myths and Memories explores the legendary 1967 jazz gathering that centered Tallinn, Estonia as the jazz capital of the USSR and marked both the pinnacle of a Soviet jazz awakening as well as the end of a long series of evolutionary jazz festivals in Estonia. This study offers new insights into what was the largest Soviet jazz festival of its time through an abundance of collected materials – including thousands of pages of archival documents, more than a hundred hours of interviews and countless media reviews and photographs – while grappling with the constellation of myths integral to jazz discourse in an attempt to illuminate ‘how it really was’. Accounts from musicians, jazz fans, organisers and listeners bring renewed life to this transcultural event from more than half a century ago, framed by scholarly discussions contextualizing the festival within the closed conditions of the Cold War. Tallinn ’67 Jazz Festival details the lasting international importance of this confluence of Estonian, Soviet and American jazz and the ripple effects it spread throughout the world.