Asian jazz diasporas: performing jazz in Pacific port cities, 1920-1945

While this paper cannot answer all of these questions in exhaustive detail, it constitutes a first attempt by the author to tackle a few and offer some initial answers. Many scholars and popular writers, including this author, have produced comprehensive book-length studies of the initial rise and spread of jazz in specific cities and countries, including Bombay, Shanghai, the Philippines, and Japan. Others have written articles about jazz and popular music in South and Southeast Asian countries and cities, particularly India, yet until now the vectors and networks by which jazz spread around Asia as a whole have remained somewhat mysterious.

One key observation is that the spread of jazz throughout Asia was carried out mainly through the vehicle of passenger liners that cruised along networks of port cities. The passenger liner was the ideal vehicle for jazz, since it brought the musicians themselves to far flung ports throughout the Asia Pacific. These musicians were sometimes given jobs on the liners entertaining passengers, and they could disembark at any port and explore and sometimes even settle in port cities where they might also find an audience for their music. In this sense, the spread of jazz in this world region is best understood through the oceanic networks of trade, commerce and culture that emerged through the forces of western colonialism and imperialism, but which were far more deeply embedded in the history of oceanic trading networks in Asia. Similarly, jazz was a modern western invention, and yet as it spread across the globe, it took on the trappings of local musical cultures, which often played a mediating role in bringing jazz to ‘native’ peoples in these countries and cities.

Throughout this period, certain cities served as fundamental nodes in the distribution of jazz throughout Asia. Among those cities were Shanghai, Tokyo, Manila, and Bombay. These cities boasted the largest concentration of spaces that regularly hosted jazz performances, keeping in mind that most if not all performances during that period were accompanied by partnered dancing. Playing key roles among these spaces were international hotels, which invariably featured ballrooms, as well as dedicated jazz cabarets and nightclubs for dancing. Shanghai arguably had the highest concentration of such spaces for jazz musicians in Asia between the 1920s and 1940s and was the primary node for the spread of jazz in Asia. Other port cities also served as important nodes for the concentration and distribution of jazz performers throughout Asian port cities. In addition to bringing American jazz artists, arguably the most influential and important of all, to Asia, these establishments also nurtured ‘native’ jazz movements, even if the musicians themselves were sometimes trained in other countries (as in the case of Japanese musicians learning jazz in Shanghai).

Even so, jazz was being performed in a much larger number of cities and countries throughout Asia. In China, jazz bands could be found in Beijing, Qingdao, Weihai, Tianjin, and other treaty port towns. Hong Kong also boasted its own lively jazz scene. In Japan, cities such as Osaka, Kobe, and Yokohama had jazz clubs. In India, Calcutta and Delhi both featured jazz, as did Goa. Jazz could also be heard in clubs and hotels in other Southeast Asian countries. Kuala Lumpur and Penang in present-day Malaysia had jazz bands, as did Batavia and Surabaya in what is now Indonesia.

Wherever there was a steady presence of westerners (i.e., Europeans or Americans), there was an appetite for jazz, which meant that nearly every trading port and capital city in Asia featured at least one hotel with a ballroom and jazz band. Yet because jazz music and its associated dances spread so rapidly and became popularized so quickly, native elites also learned the dances and became fans of jazz, and in many cases, natives (and in some cases Eurasian or Anglo-Indian musicians) took up the jazz idiom and invested it with local musical cultures and meanings. Because of its tendency to be re-shaped by local cultures, jazz thus plays an ambiguous role as both a a prop for western colonial imperialism and as a mode of resistance to colonial authority and power. The fact that jazz was first and foremost an African American cultural form further complicated the dynamics of jazz as a product of western colonialism and imperialism in Asia.

In order to flesh out the story of how jazz spread into Asia and what this transmission meant to Asian societies and cultures, it is essential to follow the threads of the stories of those who contributed to that spread. Probably the most important carriers of jazz into Asia, as mentioned above, were African American jazz musicians, who began to arrive in Asian port cities in the 1920s along with the growing craze for jazz music. Some of them were hired directly from the United States, while others came to Asia via Paris. Most of them made their way first to Shanghai, though by the 1930s Bombay became a popular destination as well. While there were some influential white musicians, including both American and Russian jazz artists, the African Americans were by far the most sought after and exerted the greatest influence on local jazz scenes including both fans and musicians. Yet it is important to also acknowledge the vital role that Filipino jazz musicians played in carrying jazz across the Pacific and Indian Ocean.

The single most important figure in the history of the spread of jazz in Asia during this period was unarguably Teddy Weatherford, an African American stride pianist. Between his arrival in Shanghai in 1926 and his death in Calcutta in 1945, Weatherford contributed more than any other jazz musician to the popularization of this form of music in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition to playing for many years in the best clubs of Shanghai, he also traveled to many other cities in Asia and performed in hotels and clubs, before settling in India for much of WWII (although he continued to travel then as well). Weatherford was also responsible for recruiting Buck Clayton and his Harlem Gentlemen from the USA to China, which was undoubtedly the best jazz band to perform in Shanghai during the 1930s. Weatherford educated many ‘native’ musicians in Japan and India as well as (presumably) other countries. Though his story is still fairly obscure, we can trace its outlines, focusing on his travels around Asia via the passenger liners using period newspapers and personal archives left by other musicians such as Buck Clayton and Roy G. Butler.

Andrew Field is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs at Duke Kunshan University (andrew.field@dukekunshan.edu.cn).