Acknowledgements, Made Up and Not

First thanks go to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, specifically to the anonymous gatekeeper(s) overseeing the category (Folklore) of my application, for its prestigious fellowship, in 2006. Its generous acknowledgment of my past work and of my proposal of this one with an equally generous grant showered me with the kind of respect, trust, and freedom that inspires the best possible work. I hope these results prove worth the Foundation’s longer-than-usual wait for the product proposed.

As for that, next and most profound thanks go to the National Endowment for the Arts and Letters (NEAL). Then-NEAL Director Barack Obama’s conferral of iMaginal Treasure (iMT) status on me in November of 2008 both moved and enabled me to take the turn I took with this book, after its more conventional beginning, into what it has become. Even though iMT status doesn’t become active until national retirement age (May of 2018, for me), just knowing it has been granted and awaits me has had the positive and energizing effect its early announcement intends. What the Guggenheim Fellowship started by pushing has come to term and a life unforeseen by the deliverant pull of that brand new future.

I thank my mentors and colleagues for their endorsements that led to the Guggenheim Fellowship, which in turn led to the iMT award: Yale Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, American Studies, & African American Studies John Szwed; Wesleyan Professor Emeritus of Music, 1994 MacArthur fellow and 2014 NEA Jazz Master composer-reedsman Anthony Braxton; and Wesleyan Associate Professors of History and Music, respectively, Cecilia Miller and Su Zheng.

I also thank some of those same colleagues and others for keeping me busy and in that part of the public eye most professionally meaningful to me during the years of research and writing that might have otherwise isolated me uncomfortably until the NEAL award kicks in: Dr. Szwed for publishing two of my papers on Columbia University’s Center for Jazz Studies’ Jazz Studies Online, which he edits, and for recommending me as a peer reviewer of manuscripts to academic presses; Professor Braxton for his recommendation of me to record producer Michael Cuscuna for the plum gig of writing the liner notes for the latter’s Mosaic Records reissue of his 1970s recordings on the Arista label; Columbia University Professor of American Music and master trombonist-composer Dr. George Lewis, for soliciting a paper from me for the Journal of the Society for American Music when he guest-edited an issue; fellow music scholar Bob Gluck, for recommending me as peer reviewer of two of his manuscripts for University of Chicago Press; Journal of American Musicological Society editor Daniel Goldmark at Case Western Reserve University, for soliciting a review of Dr. Lewis’s book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008); master composer and komungo player Jin Hi Kim, for inviting me to edit her Korean-language memoir for English-language readers, in press at University of Michigan Press; flugelhornist and composer University of Michigan Professor of Jazz and Contemporary Improvisation Dr. Ed Sarath, for inviting me to present papers at two of the International Society for Improvised Music’s (ISIM’s) annual conferences, in his role as ISIM director; Dr. Ajay Heble and associates at Canada’s Guelph Jazz Festival Colloquium, for inviting me to present a paper on some of my research for this book; Dr. Daniel Fischlin and Dr. Eric Porter, for accepting my proposal for a chapter on five of the musicians studied here in their two-volume edited collection for Duke University Press’s Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice series, Sound Changes: Improvisation, Social Practice, and Cultural Difference (in press); The Grove Dictionary of American Music Editor-in-chief Charles Hiroshi Garrett, for soliciting my entry therefor on bassist Charlie Haden; University of Minnesota Professor of Asian Languages and Literature Dr. Michael Molasky, for including an abridged chapter from my book Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz (Yale University Press, 2005)—the chapter that sparked this book, as it happens—in the first-ever Japanese-language anthology of English-language jazz scholarship, which he edited (Kirara Shobo Press, 2010); University of Padua Professor of African-American Music Luca Cerchiari for inviting me to contribute a paper to an anthology of 15-20 European and American scholars that he co-edited (with Laurent Cugny [Paris/France-Sorbonne University] and Franz Kerschbaumer [Graz/Austria Arts and Music University]) and published through Northeastern University Press/University of New England Press in 2012, called Eurojazzland; and last but most personally gratifying, Lewis & Clark College Professor of Ethnomusicology (and Portland neighbor and friend) the late Dr. Franya Berkman, for also inviting me to share some of my research for this book at the Northwest chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s annual conference when she hosted it in Portland, Oregon, in 2009.

Most specifically to this project, many thanks go to Pete Gershon, editor of Signal to Noise magazine, for publishing a steady stream of my CD reviews of the musicians of my focus here. His award-winning journal is pre-eminent in the field of experimental and improvised world music, and I have felt honored and been kept supremely well informed and updated by my associations with it.

Less limelit but more grassrooted, I am indebted to the University of Phoenix, for entrusting an ivy-league research scholar with the instruction of its hardworking, high-hoping students in the basics of literacy both functional (courses in writing) and cultural (humanities survey courses), to try and realize their dreams and potential for the best lives for themselves and their families. My Reed College colleague and Phoenix founder the late John Sperling’s visionary (albeit as plagued with much the same problems in the end as the broken system to which it was conceived as better alternative) enterprise’s gamble on this effete-elite old dog’s ability and willingness to learn the hot new tricks of populist distance learning matched my own hunger to breathe the fresh air with everyday people outside the ivory tower I’d been toiling in for decades, and to do them some good, to share some hard-won knowledge and wisdom with those in most need of it, in my almost-emeritus years. Supported by part-time wages three times the amount of the Guggenheim stipend over the years following its award, I’ve been able to better the educational lives of hundreds of students in the stress-free comfort of my own home or anywhere else my laptop can get online, on my own schedule, allowing me to live well, stay on my teaching toes, and work regularly and substantively on this book. Similar thanks go to Baker College in Flint, Michigan, for similar reasons.

Next round of thanks go to the musicians, all luminaries in their talents and accomplishments: Chinese pipa masters Wu Man and Min Xiao-Fen, Korean composer/komungo master (and fellow Guggenheim Fellow) Jin Hi Kim, Mongolian vocalist Sainkho Namtchylak, Chinese zheng master Mei Han, bassist and taiko drummer Tatsu Aoki, all Asian-born; Asian-American masters composer-reedsman-scholar the late Fred Ho, violinist-composer Jason Kao Hwang, cornetist-composer Taylor Ho Bynum, composer-koto master Miya Masaoka; and multi-(Asian-)instrumentalist Randy Raine-Reusch and legendary composer-improviser-accordionist Pauline Oliveros, both European Americans thickly entangled with the mix of Asian-traditional and improvised and experimental music in my sights.

Thanks go also to a few who didn’t make my subjective final cut, but are equally significant artists and/or scholars whose interviews, music, and writings added to the knowledge and discussion here. Trombonist-composer-scholar Associate Professor of Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology Michael Dessen; pianist-composer-scholar Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts Vijay Iyer; and (another) fellow Guggenheim fellow reedsman Doris Duke Performing Artist Awardee, and 2013 Downbeat International Critics Poll Alto Saxophonist of the Year Rudresh Mahanthapa contributed much of value to the project’s initial research, Dessen and Iyer for their Ph.D. dissertations on Asian Improv Records and musical time, respectively; and Iyer and Mahanthapa on Indian and Indian-American issues. It is only because my focus narrowed in on China and countries more directly influenced by China, including Chinese-American communities, that their Indian-American voices and profiles are on the margins here. Those margins suggest another book ripe to be written.

Saving the best for last, the personal thanks: to those who have served me with living quarters and/or neighborly/familial relations during the writing, daughter Geneva Heffley, fellow author Jay Hutchins, Steve Olson, (my late) father Wayne Heffley, colleagues/friends/neighbors Franya Berkman, Kris Wallsmith, and their much-loved children Sadie (9), Max (7), and Sonja (3); Greta Binford, Eva Marcotrigiano. A peaceful, pleasant daily environment is essential to the work I do, and dependent on the sensitivities, considerations, and mercies of others who contribute to it.

Having written an Acknowledgments section such as this for my two previous books, this is the first time I’ve thought to thank all the authors listed in my bibliography—yet they really have been my most valued secondary sources, not only of disembodied intellectual stimulation but of human fellowship and motivation (perhaps this is a function of aging into the increasingly hermetic life of a single writer living alone, and closer to my own mortal uncoiling). Living and dead, they’ve participated in the conversation beyond cradle and grave that has drawn me in, on both sides of my own fleet life. Dead or alive, knowing them only through their books and engaging them only through mine, I cherish and revere them as “the ancestors” so hallowed in both African and Asian traditions.

I give a special nod to two of them, very much alive as I write. The first married couple ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, for their combined coverage of China for The New York Times,[1] Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn ignited the passion that motivated, sustained, and guided me through this work, in a way that no such single source did for my earlier books. Their Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) spotlit what they call “the issue of our time”: the horrific neglect, oppression, and violence women and girls continue to suffer throughout much of the world. While my own book is on its face my usual hybrid of music scholarship and creative imagination, its greater reach will be measured by the number of readers who see in it a light shone over that particular darkness—much as my first book, about Anthony Braxton’s body of work, was in spirit also a burning screed against American-style racism; and my second one, about the Berlin-based label Freie Musik Produktion, also an epic rant against Western classism in both its free-market/democratic and totalitarian-statist guises. The public personae of (fellow Oregonian) Kristof and Wu Dunn, both as professional colleagues and as a married couple devoted to the same noble work, have presented a sustained inspiration through every step of this long and often bewildering work of my own. Why and how that is so will become increasingly clear to the keenest of my readers.

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[1] Their reporting culminated in the books China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (1994, Random House) and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia (2000, Alfred A. Knopf).