Cultural Politics: The African American Connection in Asian American Jazz-based Music

Introduction

The incipient period of Asian American jazz-based music is a compelling site for studying the African American influence on Asian American politics and culture more broadly in the 1970s and 1980s. The cultural politics of Asian American musician–composers on both the east and west coasts present a view of this Afro-Asian connection. In particular, Asian American jazz-based music in the 1970s and 1980s demonstrates the strong pull both politically and musically of Black Nationalism and its attendant art form, Free Jazz, at a time when Asian Americans were beginning a process of reinventing themselves. The early music of Glenn Horiuchi and Mark Izu of the San Francisco Bay Area's Asian Improv Arts Collective and New York musician–composer Fred Ho narrate the rise of a politicized music. All three artists, well known within the Asian American music world, share a sociopolitical stance, a penchant for improvisation, and an approach that explores the nuances of traditional Asian music.

The political viewpoints and performative practices of African American jazz musicians in the 1960s did initially inspire and shape Asian American politics and creative music, but starting in the late 1970s into the 1980s a number of musician–composers began to chart new musical territory that embodied their own political and cultural consciousness. Asian Americans identified with jazz because it served as a collective voice of urban African American communities, and it played an important role in the development of a Black aesthetic. The aesthetic revolution in Free Jazz, resulting from a sociopolitical shift in African American communities in the late 1950s and 1960s, proved particularly appealing (Kofsky 1970:137). Thus began the journey toward creating an Asian American jazz-based music that would express the shift of Asian American communities toward social and political empowerment.

The Politics of Culture

In her book Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), Lisa Lowe is persuasive in identifying U.S. national culture as the dominant political force shaping American citizenry.² This premise reinforces Franz Fanon's assertion that culture is linked to nation: "The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity" (Fanon, quoted in Palumbo-Liu 1999:307). Lowe (1996:2) defines the role of culture as not only a means for one to identify and connect to a "national collective," but a site through which one reconciles one's past history, and in the case of Asian Americans, ruptures the universals of that national collective. In the United States, a unified national culture serves to gloss over past inequities and to mold its citizens within a culturally pluralistic agenda that supports economic goals. What negates Asian American assimilation into the national culture is a complex and ambivalent relationship of the U.S. nation-state to its Asian immigrants, owing to the history of labor exploitation of this population within the economic sphere of American capitalism and to its victories in three wars in Asia in the twentieth century—in the Philippines, against Japan, and in Korea. This ambivalence, coupled with "orientalist racializations" of Asians as inassimilable due to basic differences of physique and intellect, the imagined threat of economic competition by the "yellow peril," and attitudes of "Anglo-Saxon" or "Nordic" racial superiority gave rise to Asian immigration exclusion acts and laws against naturalization in 1882, 1917, 1924, and 1934 (Lowe 1996:5; Kitano and Daniels 1988:13).³ Repeals of these exclusionary laws, passed between 1943 and 1952,⁴ granted Asian immigrants the right to citizenship, however the almost one-hundred-year period of racist restrictions have scarred the political landscape for Asians making their home in this country.

The Alien Land Acts in 1913 and 1920 in California, and similar statutes in twelve other states, prohibited first-generation Japanese immigrants from owning land due to their racialized status as "aliens ineligible for citizenship." Asian immigrants also endured social segregation in the form of anti-miscegenation laws, such as Section 69 of the California Civil Code, finalized in 1880, which forbid Asians...