Introduction

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 Introduction

Amerasian Dream Music 1 (gender)

To that point about scholarly/authorial methodology, I return to the story of the seeding of this book by its predecessors. After it was planted in my first book, that seed germinated in its new soil of scholar fiction; not-insignificant portions of both my previous books presented expositions on feminist issues. Braxton had devoted much thoughtful speech to such issues in his own interviews and writings about his music and its traditions of influence, which I duly summarized and commented on; I delved into its issues at the substrata and surfaces of the same music and cultural history still further in my second book. In both those contexts, however, as suggestively as it was presented as worthy of further attention, “the woman question” was something gazed at in passing down the path of men black and white, American and European, airing their preoccupations with what each other was doing. It was a real feminism, but still buried in its bed in a surrounding garden of predominantly male social and identity politics.

It sprouted up to light and air with my first contact with the work of Mongolian singer Sainkho Namtchylak during my Ph.D. fieldwork in Berlin, in 1997. Since then, she’s achieved her own worldwide reputation and body of recorded work, but at the time she appeared to me more as a European-local guest artist whom the FMP players of my focus, especially German bassist Peter Kowald, had “discovered” (through her first recordings for Leo Records) and worked with in her native Mongolia (Tuva), and brought to the West to record with them and on her own for their label.

I was immediately struck with how she plied the instrument of her voice to the mixes of lyricism, cacophony, and catharsis I was charting in the (mostly German) music there. She had grown up with her local folk traditions, been trained in Moscow in bel canto operatic style, and had wide exposure to jazz as well; all these strains (folk, composed art music, jazz sound and improvisation, more experimental improvisation), more generally, were in the Western mix of that particular soup as well; the extra dimensions of her gender and different ethnicity clearly widened the orbit and scope of the transatlantic North American-Western European canvas I had started. Again, while I did present her at the margins of that project, I put aside most of the material I collected on her in a “new pile,” with some new notes about a possible new project later.

The part I saw my inclusion of her playing in those margins, however, moves to center here. At first, the sheerly instrumental aspect of her work is what caught my attention. That is, I initially saw it as part of a wholesale revisioning, even revanchement, of the social position of instruments in Western music classical and jazz ensembles brought about by the musical artists and movements I was covering. Thus, as players such as Kowald and drummer Paul Lovens, for example, “liberated” their instruments through so-called “extended techniques” from their conventional roles of slavish harmonic and rhythmic bottom-liners on whose backs virtuoso melody instruments could ride more freely as the “stars,” so did I consider what I heard Namtchylak doing with her female voice a similar breaking free of the bird-in-a-gilded-cage syndrome of the patriarchal positioning of the woman as the “canary” or “girl singer” in front of the real (male) musicians playing their manly instruments in their manly ways.[1] (In fact, her relationship with Kowald was a reversal of those roles. He spoke of her as his “teacher” in a way that called to mind the central role of women from her place and culture in the ancient history of shamanism. He had developed from her influence the guttural kind of singing done by Tibetan lamas, which he did while bowing his bass’s low strings, and which clearly functioned as a kind of musical meditation device to ground and center his energies at the beginning of some improvisations, especially in solo performances.)

Looking around at a few other women in or resonant with this scene—Nina Hagen, Diamanda Galas, Maggie Nichols, Irène Schweitzer, Joëlle Léandre, Julie Tippett, Lindsay Cooper, Urszula Dudziak, Yoko Ono, Björk—I found the vocalists of more interest than the players of instruments, initially, first because they were staking out an area only they could (the female voice), but second because in doing so they were also staking out the wider area of the human voice that men too could have taken on, but didn’t seem to be doing as much as the women, and as much as they were taking on all the artifactual instruments (and making new ones of their own). I wondered if this had something to do with the historical relegation of the voice-as-instrument more to women in a one-down position in the pecking order, below the status of instrumental virtuosi.[2]

I never did run with that idea back then (and therefore will a bit more here), as other aspects of Namtchylak’s art and background diverted my attention from her instrument. I noticed more about what her voice was singing, and who was the person behind the voice, that brought her out of the circle of women standing on the relatively more narrow common ground most patently understood as “avant-garde experimentations in sound.”

My Berlin summer was also the time Lee Harvey Oswald died of brain cancer in prison. Reading about his death recalled to mind the interview he’d done back in 1992 with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, in which he infamously called himself “the father of the modern women’s movement,” to wide public disgust. America was just electing its first woman president after a contentious campaign, itself preceded by the feminist-unfriendly eight years of the Reagan administration. Hillary Clinton was inaugurated a round three decades after Oswald’s bullet took the life of the wife of the man beside her in the car. His poisonous remark was a jab (albeit impotent) at the heart of a movement for equal rights that had had a much steeper and rockier climb than many such in our country’s history, and was still far from over, despite its history-making gain just then. All these reflections stirred up my own mind about my work so as to foreground more clearly the directions it was poised to take in its long run, from then until now.

The strong undercurrent of the theme of race in my first book half-surfaced as a crescendoing wave, reincarnated as “class,” in my second; gender, like race, was, I felt, most properly seen as a biological subset of that transcendent abstraction we call “class” that governed and subsumed it. At that point, however—Oswald’s death, the memory of the women’s movement his heinous act did trigger in 1963, its culmination in Hillary Clinton’s election, and my recent discovery of Namtchylak—I was starting to feel the wave crest and turn in on itself, putting flesh-and-blood gender in the one-up definitive position over what now seemed that more derivatively mental-social construct, “class.”

Intuitively, that revolution in my thought just felt right: the abstract emerging from the concrete to yield up a new concrete in its turn was a notion resonant with theoretical physicist David Bohm’s idea of both an “implicate order” (a subscendent rather than a Platonic transcendent version of a hidden dimension manifesting the one we inhabit) and a “tangled hierarchy” (in which the one-up and one-down positions fluctuate within a dynamic balance, as pictured by the Chinese circle-symbol for yin and yang) at the heart of reality; the undercurrent-to-wave-to-cresting-infurling-back-to-sea (I was picturing Debussy’s choice of the famous Japanese painting The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa by Katsushika Hosukai for the first edition of the score of La Mer) was a metaphor that rang true to how things really seemed to be, truer than any freeze-frame snapshot of the cycle at one or another of its stages (i.e., an eternal stasis of Cartesian dualism, or its counterpart in the unrelenting churn of dialectical materialism).

Yet why was I seeing gender take such primacy of place, but not its cousin in biology, race? “Because,” staying with my gut’s logic to answer my head’s, “in my life and work, as in our society as a whole, we have successfully untangled and cut the knotty snares of race—not least through the discovery by the geneticists in the 1990s that we are all descended from an African ancestral population—and have moved through them to the larger and still lingering ones of class (haves over have-nots) here and abroad. Moving through that, the wars between the sexes, while also won in many important ways in America and elsewhere, are not so easily pronounced as conclusively settled everywhere, or even here, completely, despite the gains.”

Having told myself that, I mentally reviewed our recent history to corroborate its truth:

·         JFK-Johnson to 1964, JFK-RFK to 1968—a time of spiritual renewal in the way Kennedy the grieving widower turned to the social-justice side of his Catholic faith to help usher the Southern Baptist-grassroots Civil Rights era into the mainstream institutional politics of the country;

·         RFK-King, 1968-76, the full extension of that integration, from local political office through Congress to that of the (first African-American) Vice-President, extending also the widespread reparations and affirmative actions begun in the Stevenson years throughout the country as a whole, winning handily its so-called War on Poverty;

·         King-Malcolm X, 1976-1984, a first in two ways: the first African-American president, and the first co-presidency (also African American), with the revision of the office of second-in-command upward to a position of equal partnership—though still selected as running mate to a primary candidate—offset by alternating as well as joint command functions (written into law as an option to be adopted or not by each new administration; it was not adopted again until 1992, by Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, and has been optioned by each administration since then, first the second Clinton ticket [Bill and Hillary, 2000-08], then the Obamas); also notable for turning America outward from its postwar decades of self-nation-building to effect substantial strides in its rapprochement with the rest of the world, especially the Muslim world contiguous with Israel and the post-Shah Republic of Iran; less happily, its Abrahamic religious consciousness, while more liberal and liberatory than the more racist Eurocentric Judeo-Christian strain within the world of men, was less so toward women within that world;

·         Reagan-Bush, 1984-1992, a conservative backlash of sorts, but largely one more of benign nostalgia than hostile takeover, maintaining and adding to the widespread gains of the Democratic decades with long-marginalized Republican issues and ideas in the areas of the Space Program, Drug Laws, and Immigration; the notable exception pertaining here is, while it had little effect on racial politics/policies, that it encountered much conflict with the Women’s Movement, especially around its Supreme Court appointments and generally threatening posture toward abortion law and other feminist concerns; it was also a resurgence of the white evangelicalism, but not one itself particularly hostile to its fellow patriarchal Afro-Islamic strain of the Judeo-Christian tradition; indeed, it smacked of the white brotherhood of this family pandering like a beta male to non-white alpha-male Islam;

·         Clinton-Gore, 1992-2000, clearly a backlash against the Reagan-Bush years, and our first woman (and a sharp return to a more overtly secular) president. While she proved to be notably effective in improving the overall budget and financial management of the nation’s social services, she was something of a polarizing figure as well, either loved or hated, often irrationally either way, arguably simply because of both her feminism and gender (and more secular affect) themselves. America was still unsettled by the rise of women socially and politically, in a way it had not seemed to be by the integration of its ethnic minorities. (Indeed, many pundits theorized the second Clinton administration was voted in largely in a subconscious desire to put Hillary “in her place,” by forcing her to co-preside with her husband. The satisfying complexity of that idea came in the caveat that voters were also expressing their trust in her as the best one to step into the lead spot if necessary.)  The unease continues as I write, although with the overwhelming mandate granted both 3^rd-Millennial administrations, the winning side of the contentious history seems clear, barring major setbacks unforeseen.

So yes, by those lights, race had receded and gender advanced as the hottest rail of our culture and politics. That larger backdrop certainly accounted for the shift in my focus to it as a public intellectual. While the uplift from poverty created by racial discrimination in our country has been a resounding success over the last 50 years, what social and economic problems that do remain are still thorny issues of gender. Far more dire, however (and more pertinent to this study), are such problems throughout the world as a whole.

Daydream sunnily with me for a moment, based on real visionary details at play in some of our current social forecasts for the new century.[3] The (loosely, generally defined) international movement for women’s rights evokes a vision of its endpoint in justice: ideally, a more or less global consciousness of respect and care that legislates and institutionalizes for women and girls’ equality, health, and wellbeing and against current violations of same. Conflate that utopian vision with some sister dreams: imagine the same enlightened consciousness managing to respect and care for the earth itself in the ways environmentalists have called for, against similar violations of it, ending in a turn from the worse and toward the better end.

Now throw in two more visions in visceral and active play these days: an America that dials back its exorbitantly disproportionate consumption of the world’s resources, and the unsustainable standard of living of its richest at the expense of its poorest players (and those abroad), and settles into a more comfortable balance of a strong and prosperous-enough middle class more in sync with the levels in the rest of the world; and a China and India that do in fact join or even surpass America as economic superpowers, not by outdoing it at conspicuous consumption but simply because their own such middle classes are greater in number, while comparable in the proposed balanced standard of living and ecology.

In short, envision such a world by century’s end: fewer rather than more people, all living much more eudaimonistically, efficiently, harmoniously with each other and the earth—and picture all this coming about through something like a global recalibration from an overactive yang to a homeostatic dynamic between yin and yang. That vision captures the paradigm I find the music suggesting here, both in Asian and Asian-American voices.

More personally, as I pondered my response to Namtchylak and the others studied here as they followed her onto my radar screen, I saw motives and reasons for my new interest in them emerge, apparently, with the process of my aging, and the new perspectives, priorities, and old memories peculiar to my own family profile/history that process seemed to trigger.

The Music/ians, and Aging Memoir/ably

A great musical work is always a model of amorous relations.

                                                                        --Jacques Attali

I have reduced the project of my threesome of books to a mental image of a Mercator map of the northern half of the world, with North America in the center, the European half of the Old World on the (viewer’s) right, and the Asian half of it on the left. I wrote up my take on the American and European parts in my first two books, and am embarking here to finish it up with the Asian part. I’m further imagining that geo-crop of the whole picture as some giant butterfly, or bird, with a North American body and a transatlantic-to-transpacific wingspan.

Americentric, then: the “American Dream” is fed both by dreamers coming into it from those two wings, and by those of us starting here and pumping our consciousness and energies out to them. (We are indeed the world, to borrow from an artist mentioned just ahead. That said, I leave it to others to deal with the Southern Hemisphere; one person can only do so much, and what s/he’s drawn to.)

The “it” our dreamers are entering is the Dream more than the geographical nation of the U.S. itself; the Europeans in my second book didn’t have to emigrate away to enter the music’s dream in their own ways and places, and Braxton didn’t have to become an actual expat in order to ply his American mind and voice to the common Old World legacies living on in the work of the African ancestors and European and American composers who influenced him, or in that of the European colleagues he worked with. The Dream compelling me here is the one such people share for a kind of world- (universal-) music scene that has its center in every part of it and its limiting border in no one part. (Intellectually, I understand the more objective body and cocoon of the butterfly is in Africa, with the wings unfurling through human history northward to a Eurasian center, southward around India to Australia, and out to all directions from there…but my own subjective body and cocoon as American musician and writer has connected with the music where and when it did, so I work from that as my own center in that music whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.)

This book began with less definition and a wider scope. Once my mind had snapped out of its (African-)American/European framework, it took a good look around at all the other branches. My colleague Italian jazz scholar and activist Francesco Martinelli filled me in a bit on his work in Turkey with musicians there; I saw healthy cadres of Iranians in Vancouver, B.C., and in Utah (!), and someone told me about an Iraqi trumpet player I should check out; many connections with Japanese and Indian players, and their hyphenated American counterparts were suddenly on my radar screen—Hindis in Houston, Arabs in Detroit and Dearborn, Somalis in St. Paul and its twin city. Generally, once my eyes were open to it, I just woke up to the proliferation of and access to scenes from everywhere and anywhere within my own country, and on internet sites and radio stations, outlets such as Link TV, my work for Signal to Noise, just to let a few telling examples convey that story.

What reined it in to its central focus on China (flanked by long glances at Mongolia, Korea, and Japan) were the historical narratives, both personal and social, that some of the musicians and music hatched in me more than others. Let’s start with the most easily dispatched social history.

When I titled my second book’s Chapter Five “The Free World Beyond America,” I was signaling two propositions: the American-exceptionalist version of social and political freedom is not so universal—other social/political systems/ideologies can and do deliver more and better personal freedoms, even as they are generally defined in the West—and neither is the West’s brand of musical “freedom” the gold standard, born so reactively as it has been from the historical dialectics between composition and improvisation, and between high “classical” and low “folk” cultures (between, at its root, masters and slaves) engendered by the “Triangular Trade” (to use the current-as-I-write Tea-Partisan revisionist euphemism for the slave trade) of Western Europe, Africa, and the Americas over the last five centuries. Conversely, filing this book (and, retrospectively, my first two) under the rubric of “American Dream” complicates that identity referenced as “Beyond America.”

To the “Beyond” part of the image, I wanted to build on theses only implied in passing in the earlier books, that the so-called “free world” was not always as “free” in practice as it was in theory, and the (by implication, “unfree,” or “counter-free”) Communist and Socialist states of my second book’s alternate dystopian history delivered much more of such freedom to its citizens than did the unregulated market economies that fetishized it. (My fictional “Cold War” was the literary device that helped me critique our post-Peace West’s sore spots, and to heed some lessons from our Russian, East German, and Chinese cousins I thought worth learning.)

Turning my focus (also in passing) to Asia in that book, I thought of examples from the real world to support that thesis, such as Namtchyak’s Tuvan homeland, so much more of which is communally shared than privately owned, like some expanded version of our National Parks, only with free and unlimited camping access; the benign monarchy of Bhutan, where the “Gross National Happiness” of the people is the centerpiece of the king’s “divinely mandated” domestic policy[4]; the so-called “vertical democracy” of China espoused by China scholars John and Doris Naisbitt, in which the one-party rulers are often demonstrably more sensitive and responsive to the masses they rule than are our own two-party leaders, who spend so much energy trying to push each other off our social-political mountain we call “democracy” (and that they seem to think of more as “Gold Mountain,” owned by their Wall Street overlords) that they end up wearing and tearing it and each other down rather than shoring and building it up; and the better model of such dialectical governance, the neo-shamanistic Korean state with its Communist North and Capitalist South, generating one of the strongest economies and healthiest societies in the world with its so-called “cooperative tension,” and the “National Living Treasures” (masters of the various branches of arts and letters) policy after which we designed our own such NEAL ministry.

As were Braxton and the FMP musicians, all presented here are world-famous artists; anyone can Google them, peruse their creds, buy their CDs and download their music from iTunes, Amazon and other such sites, and see them perform in YouTube clips within the course of a week or two. Indeed, apart from my own interviews with some of them, that is what I myself did to get up to speed with them and their work (the internet has brought new meaning to the “armchair ethnomusicologists,” first pegged to the invention of sound recording, of my doctoral discipline’s foundational lore).

Why, then, books such as mine? What is the point of me writing and anyone reading about such well- and easily-known celebrities? Why don’t we all just take in what they’ve put out live and online—some of that including live interviews, and books of their own like mine—and make up our own minds and call that good enough?

Clearly, the bulk of such books about creative people constantly seeking and building their audiences serves to facilitate that project when it needs such help. We journalists/scholars write them largely out of personal interest in, even unremunerated love of, their subjects; those subjects, as largely, cooperate with us writers out of a human impulse to connect, and to share their passion and insights about the work they’ve chosen to do in their own services to humanity. There are other symbiotic aspects to that author-subject relationship too, of course; the professional status and options of each party, from the academic tenure of one to the better product sales and exposure of the other, also as largely stand or fall on the success of their collaboration. My three books are no less such enterprises, with such aspects—but they are also distinct from others of their kind in ways important to note, especially in this most mature third one.

The name Bob Dylan will not ring any bells for most readers; a few more will recognize his somewhat better known stage name once I mention it a couple of sentences ahead. To his small but passionate fan base, however, he is more famous than all I present here, because his music suits that segment’s natural and acquired taste, and what the world celebrates en masse is of no comparable account to them. That said, his insular and idiosyncratic audience’s speck of a spot on the music business’s margins did thicken with the publication of Gail Marx’s What Was It You Wanted? Rob E. Zee’s Quest for an Unmarked Grave. It gave the reclusive singer-songwriter a measure of informed respect in academia, helped Marx get tenure, and, again, widened and connected the artist’s puddles and ponds of local fan bases around his grassroots touring circuit and download sales. Other good examples of such coverage-promotion of the music industry’s amateur underbelly genres of pop, rock, r&b, country, etc., include Bram Brownwell’s Michael: From Jackson 5 to King of Pop, Clifford Caillou’s Beatles, Stones, Elton, Etc., the American Idol Chatter fanzine, The Confessions of Tina Turner and Willie Nelson Unshorn (both “as told to” accounts), among many other such.

Those of us who have dipped into these refreshingly shallow wells for a few hours of easy diversion appreciate them; the world would be less without them and the stimuli and balms they ply to certain yearnings and heartaches, especially those of childhood and adolescence (at whatever chronological age)—but we also shudder to think of a world that would grant them the places of honor, fame, privilege, influence, and the justifiably obsessive interest we grant to our more profound artists and intellectuals, from the musicians I write about to their peers in other fields of the humanities and sciences.

So then—since the names Sainkho Namtchylak, Jin Hi Kim, Wu Man, Mei Han, Min Xiao-Fen, Fred Ho, Tatsu Aoki, Taylor Ho Bynum, Jason Kao Hwang, Miya Masaoka, Pauline Oliveros, and Randy Raine-Reusch  are already close to household words throughout most of the parts of the world my mental Mercator covers, and since all of the information and music that made them so is at the fingertips of all with any of the ever-proliferating wireless devices...why write or read my or any other such books about them?

With all due respect to my colleagues in music journalism/criticism and academia, my niche is clearly a perch of a different order of magnitude and insight than that of a press-release machine hustling up new business for some grassroots talent thinking global only to act local, or that of a career scholar glomming onto a subject just big enough to scratch out a good-enough niche from a steady tickle of transient intellectual itches. While I myself have spent more than my share of pleasant and productive hours-gone-decades paying my dues in such ways, in such fields’ concerts, conversations, conferences and conventions, again...I shudder at the thought of it as the end-all, be-all sum total of a creative and intellectual life.

My more interesting challenge, self-imposed, has been to take the brightest lights of our cultural-historical moments and days and illuminate them even further, with artful applications of my palette’s darkening materials (those that come with age?), from the slightest grays of my charcoals to the blackest holes of my inks; to match in my portrayals and portraits the myxteries and masstories of the music and musicians I portray, to match their genius with mine, thereby showing my readers why my subjects occupy the places they do as our public and private celebrities, why they are such legends in their own time and in our own minds.

My look at this new (to me) Asian part of our improvised/experimental/concept/world-music scene will necessarily (to me) be through the lens of musicians and musical issues that I can claim a legitimate authority of familiarity with, as well as a trustworthy interest of my own in. That fact selected some rather than other players and issues out of my first big “pile,” just as it had done in my other books. I will detail the more personal criteria for my choice of each presently; those dictating the social-historical choices specific to the music I truck in were:

·         the importance of Leo Records to this “free world beyond America”;

·         the importance as an “in-house” link to same of Asian Improv Records (AIR), and the key artists who have moved in and out of its orbit (Mark Izu, Glen Horiuchi, Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Anthony Brown, especially); write them up as summary glances in AIR section, then more in unnumbered chap

·         the importance of these individual artists for becoming both central to the global experimental-and-improvised music discourse and distinctive within it, by virtue of bringing to its primarily (or initially) black-and-white transatlantic table the transpacific Asian traditions, instruments, and voices;

·         the importance of these individual artists, both men and women, for their treatments/embodiments of feminist concerns and gender dynamics.

Thus Sainkho Namtchylak is my one-artist entry point into the parts of the Leo label’s universe beyond the part occupied by Braxton and other artists whose work I’ve known well; since my discovery of her in 1997, she has gone on to widen her audience through the New Age and World Music rubrics/markets, without compromising her art, in ways that get to my own concerns here with ancient Asia and Native America, as well as both pre- and post-Soviet Russia, as we will see.  I argue here that Namtchylak has done and is doing for the field of international improvised music and the female voice what, by way of analogy, Louis Armstrong did for America’s early jazz and the trumpet: establishing her instrument as a central generative channel of such music, in from whatever margins Western art music, jazz and other male-dominated (including her own Tuvan) tradition she herself has trained in had consigned it to (again, as Western music had consigned brass, saxophones, and drums to the more vulgar military and working class entertainment roles of its tradition in the choral/orchestral aesthetic). I want to ground that preeminence of hers in the ancient one of women in Central Asian shamanism (again again, just as, analogically, we came to frame jazz as Afrocentric more deeply than Americentric at its core).

Jin Hi Kim

Korean komungo master and composer Jin Hi Kim will take us from my (and her adopted) home turf of both experimental-composed and post-jazz improvised (originally Western) music scenes to the ancient Korean-traditional shamanistic folk music that she’s championed against the heavy Western-classical/pop domination of her country’s music scene. Wu Man, Min Xiao-Fen, and Mei Han, while wearing as elegantly and lightly the laurels of their own country’s classical music tradition as those of international celebrity for their work with their Western counterparts in the contemporary concert music community, are similar champions of their country’s ethnic-minority compatriots’ music, and of the folk and minority musics of America and other countries, including spontaneous and unstructured improvised music. Tatsu Aoki, Miya Masaoka, and others will help me touch on Japan in the same way, and on Asian-American cultural/political cousins to the parts of musicultural African America I know best; and senior master composer-improviser Pauline Oliveros will help me air and illuminate the women’s issues at the core of my project here, along with male musicians with feminist/family sensibilities in Asian-identity contexts Fred Ho, Jason Kao Hwang, Taylor Ho Bynum and Randy Raine Reusch. All—the Americans reaching back to Asian roots, and the Asians reaching out to the world beyond them—will give me a rich variety of today’s increasingly common sense of dual or multiple identities and/or citizenships as the world’s cultures interlink and circulate more fluidly.

Spelling them all out in that way, for those social-historical aspects, begs the natural next question: what personal-historical significance do they have, and how is such significance relevant here?

I prided myself in my first two books for what I considered the insider’s voice and authority they brought to their discursive tables. I wrote the first one on the heels of several years of working with Braxton as a musician, both in his large and small groups and as leader of my own. (Indeed, one of my similar collaborations with a comparable giant of the music, pianist-composer Andrew Hill, will figure a bit in the fabric of this book too, just ahead.) I felt myself to be much more the musician who wrote about music than the writer who made it, and was confident and driven by that self-image in my choice and development of the things I wrote.

Likewise, though a step removed, I favored the musicians and issues of my second book for their personal and philosophical proximities to Braxton—people he’d worked with, and/or shared influence, agendas, and aesthetics with—over those at more of a remove. Not only was this natural, in that I too was most drawn to those parts of the music, but it was also most politically conducive to the richest and deepest interviews and access to the people and world I was entering and re-presenting to my American readers. While I never performed professionally with any of the players my second book portrayed, I did feel myself moving among them as part of the same family of such players, by virtue of my work with and recommendation from Braxton and others, and my status at the time as a still-public working musician.

I bring a different kind of personal voice and authority to this study, one I’m gambling will be more rather than less compelling and interesting both to the same and even to more readers, despite its clear break with some of my earlier ties and passions. I no longer am or fancy myself to be a public musician who writes about the scene he plays in; I still make the kind of music I write about here, but mostly for my own private meditation, like the Chinese-historical figure of the Confucian “literati” playing his “scholar’s instrument” (the qin) at home alone (the piano, for me). I no longer live in the Northeast in close and working contact with (most of) the musicians I write about here, among other colleagues in academia and journalism doing the same; I no longer go out much to hear live music now that I’m back in my native Pacific Northwest, after more than a decade on the East Coast where I wrote my first two books. I am very much more the semi-retired person reflecting back on action he’s seen than the journalist-scholar dispatching from the front lines and inner circles of my previous loops, and am writing about new (to me) action and actors from a more detached and subjective-reflective perspective. I’ve made this change by choice, going with the natural flow of my own changing interests and aging. At my stage in life, I prefer this less stressful distance, this homier contemplative contentment with my simpler, more personal pleasures and life. That said, the thread of a different kind of personal connection to my subjects remains an important motivator, shaper, and still, I think, value-adder to the writing here.

I mentioned in my second book that Namtchylak’s appearance and life story reminded me of my Native American daughter and her mother’s family and tribe (notable reminder: Native Americans are classified by geneticists as “Asian”).[5] Once I was hooked into her by that visceral association, I became more alert to the other aspects of her music and profile that seemed of such interest. What made her music seem so fresh and familiar at the same time, then, lay in its delivery of her Mongolian identity, material, and inflections in the improvisational gumbo I’d come to know so well as an African-American-European dish. Instead of thinking of what I was then calling “new-and-improvised music” as a post-jazz/Western-art-music amalgam—something cooked up mostly by black and white Westerners between their cultural histories—I started re-conceiving it more as, let’s say, a post-world-music scene: all the hegemonies of the West, both the Eurocentric art music and the Americentric jazz, chewed up, swallowed, digested and reconstituted in the bellies of the Rest, in much the same process that produced 20^th-century African-American music, only in the more global macrocosm. (I recalled the 1955 Bandung Conference, where the notion of a “Third World” was born, and re-envisioned it as a kind of global version of the Black Velvet Revolution in our own country, only born a little later, after that brief postwar Korean military kerfuffle.)

Once I had my head and arms around that idea, I took closer looks at the instances of it I had seen only peripherally before. (It dawned on me as I did that I was finally, circuitously, turning to the more traditionally conventional purview of the academic discipline I was about to take my terminal degree in. The institutional watchdogs of Ethnomusicology would never have allowed me to specialize in the Western [and jazz-commercial] arenas of my first two books a few decades earlier, nor even then in the ‘90s in many other schools besides the most progressive and prestigious-enough-to-get-away-with-it Wesleyan, especially when Anthony Braxton chaired its Music Department.) Those Asian outliers who chanced across my research radar screen at the time made it into my dissertation and its book version, and suggested in turn longer and closer looks at themselves for this book, along with a wider cast of my nets in a more or less neutral sweep and survey of all points falling within their field of “The Rest”: India, Indonesia; the Turkic (Namtchylak’s group), Arab, and Persian countries (all favorite fields for Western ethnomusicologists); along with the countries I had the best sense of at that point (Japan, Korea) and the one I sensed so and knew about and understood least (China).

The next artist who made it into this study to cross my path was Jin Hi Kim, more or less simultaneously with Namtchylak, since she too had collaborated with Kowald, and his Wuppertal neighbor guitarist Hans Reichel. Meeting and getting to know Kim served to reinforce and magnify with its personal contact the same feelings and memories Namtchylak ignited sheerly through her music and Kowald’s photos and stories about her. (I just missed meeting Namtchylak in person in 1997, not long before she was savagely attacked by criminals and hospitalized with a serious head injury, when I failed to make it to a party for FMP people at reedsman Wolfgang Fuchs’ Berlin apartment, much to my subsequent regret.)

Kim had a trio with alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, and was/is partners with reedsman Joseph Celli, both musicians I had worked with as a musician myself, in my own Northwest Creative Orchestra (Lake) and in some of Braxton’s projects (Celli). In the mid-‘90s, I was serving on the committee that booked artists into Wesleyan’s Center for the Arts concert series. Also on the committee was one of my professors and Ph.D. degree committee members, China-born ethnomusicologist Su Zheng. Kim had a performance-workshop package built around her solo and trio work on her traditional Korean zither, the komungo, that was perfect for Wesleyan, with its rich postmodern mix of the Western avant-garde composition, post-jazz improvisation, and ethnic traditional. I pushed for the committee to book her, motivated myself as much by a desire to connect my Western world rooted in jazz and modern art music to Su’s Asian and transnational professional ethnomusicology world.

From that Wesleyan concert and workshop Kim gave, and over the years since, I acquainted myself with Korean-traditional music history and culture through our gradually growing working relationship. She had written a manuscript about her life in Korean traditional folk and court music, and in new and improvised music in the West, and wanted me to help her refine its English and help get it published (mentioned in Acknowledgments).

Kim’s work, then, not only as a musician but also as a scholar (with a specific focus on “female energy in music”[6]) will figure large in Chapter Eight. What I want to say about her here, though, is that she took that spark Namtchylak had ignited in my inner personal life and fanned it into a solid fire the others studied here could then most easily feed. Although Kim and Namtchylak are two very different artists and people from two cultures and backgrounds as different (thought sharing the same ancient root of Tungusic shamanism), the common chords they struck in my own open and even more different soul were several:

·         like me and a few others presented here, both had done professional journalistic and scholarly work on the music they also created and performed professionally;

·         both of their traditions had a thick root system of primal female shamanism, from the part of the world genetically ancestral to Native America, as Africa is genetically ancestral to all the continents;

·         both evinced musical vestiges and influences of the orbit of Chinese history still then drawing me to it that I had yet to engage directly;

·         most to the point here, both women radiated traits that came into clearer focus for me when I saw them up close and personal in Kim’s flesh-and-blood personality, and in her life story and writing about it and her music: a certain pluck that signaled a deeper courage and hunger, and need to go beyond all things native to them and out to all things not so, by going through and with the soul of all those things native, rather than suppressing, denying, compromising or leaving them behind.

I see this last trait more generally as driving to their optimal states both our increasingly networked, interdependent world and its entrepreneurial-immigrant-bolstered America. It also impressed and seduced me on several personal levels, for its resonance with aspects of my own life at the time. As the author of my previous two books, I compared that trait they shared to its counterparts in my work. Pluck and courage in the quest to be true to one’s deepest self in the face of various historical, cultural, social adversities were certainly themes driving my portrayal of Braxton and the Europeans, and their postwar African-American and European music communities, more generally—but both of those sets of actors had been kicking around together in close quarters, by comparison, for a good half-millennium. Neither had far to go away from much they didn’t already know pretty well about each other and themselves; their challenge was rather to make the most creative and self-respecting choices vis-à-vis themselves and each other in a context historically hostile to doing so.

Namtchylak and Kim, like my Professor Zheng and the three Chinese women I will get to momentarily, by contrast, had to leave their worlds behind and take on a new one entirely (in the professional and largely personal realm, although their most primal personal connections have remained unsevered, naturally enough, unlike those of previous generations before globe-trotting got so easy). The import of that dawned on me more than it would have earlier after my own much less radical experience of learning a new language and moving to a country only slightly more “foreign” than my own (Germany, where most of the people I dealt with also spoke English well) for four months to do my Ph.D. fieldwork. Growing out of one’s birthplace to become equally or even more at home with some new place and people radically removed is, of course, not an uncommon experience for much of humanity throughout its history, and especially so these days, but, that experience told me, it is also nothing to take lightly.

The sight of it in these women on my mind over these last years of research and writing has concurred with my daughter coming into her own as an adult, with friends and loves her own age drawing her into an adult life and marriage beyond the nest we’d shared, and the prospect of a new home once again, possibly, far from me. It’s also coincided with my own gradual transition from a man who had long looked on women short of middle age as potential mates or generational peers to one whom time was forcing (allowing?) to see more through an older brother’s, father’s, even grandfather’s eyes. (To those of you who have yet to think of that transition as akin to a traumatic uprooting from a loved and familiar homeland to one frighteningly alien and disorienting, at first, then slowly but painfully surely more like home itself...check with me later.) that images our species’ transition from Edenic to catastrophic world, marked by VG’s power-of HBC/HMC’s bottleneck thru Toba to more power-over cultures; wrk in somewhere, as akin to the trauma/excitement of diaspora? It has also unfolded with my own initiation and graduation into a discipline built on that very outreaching impulse, first through modern anthropology as the wide path to my narrower one of ethnomusicology (then widening again, through folkloristics, more on which ahead), both enterprises premised on fulfilling one’s destiny as son or daughter of a particular place by considering it a springboard to all other such places, more than as a home in which to stay and settle, and stray from only recreationally again, like HBC in P/B as opposed to the HMCs who got traumatized into power-over. Like Namtchylak, Kim’s work has taken her much farther down that path than when I first encountered it (culminating in her own Guggenheim Fellowship, incidentally, as I write), and that distance for both we will map and mark in their chapters.

Once I got this far into my “research” (in quotes, because the best of that for me has always been, as here, the gems that fell into my lap more than anything I went prospecting and sweating for; and, given the proper incubation time and process, has also fairly written itself up), it had pretty much won me over to the idea of writing a book that centralized women and gender issues. I had never thought in terms of centralized-v.-marginalized genders in my previous work, nor, particularly, about the fact that most books about men and women of the sort I wrote were typically written by authors of their own gender. It seemed like an unwritten rule proven by exceptions to it, but an odd one, now that I thought about it.

My default m.o. with my fellow male subjects was always to write like an equal, a friend, a peer, not too beta-to-alpha fawning, not too alpha-on-beta overbearing or condescending.  To write that same way about a woman did seem qualitatively more challenging—the danger that I would either sentimentally idealize or abusively patronize was clearly greater—but the payoff for rising to that challenge might lie in successfully doing the kind of homage and recognition that could come only through a man whose manhood was most fired up and inspired at the sight of a woman being her own best self. I started wondering about what I might write about Namtchylak or Kim as the man I am that my hypothetical female feminist version would never think or feel to write...or what I might write about their music and persons that would be different if they were men doing roughly the same things. (Again, all this goes to the tradition of the “girl singer” among the “more serious” male instrumentalists in jazz that I came up in. When women did come to assert themselves, it was almost inevitable that they’d do so from a support base of sisters against, or despite, men, or by mannishly manning manly instruments, rather than as the yin wings to our yang winds.)

The Men

The chronology of this book’s evolution did then turn to some of my more familiar male peers, before resolving itself with their yang force on the yin side of things. Fred Ho, Taylor Ho Bynum, and Jason Kao Hwang moved through my Wesleyan world and gradually morphing consciousness during the same time Kim did. Each made it into the gestating gestalt Namtchylak and Kim had engendered, each from different angles.

Fred Wei-han Houn’s (a.k.a. Fred Ho’s) reputation preceded him to Wesleyan during those years. I was playing trombone fairly regularly with several musicians who had played in his bands: drummer Royal Hartigan and saxophonist Chris Jonas, in my own gigs, and cornetist Bynum, in the Braxton groups. Fred too, like Kim, brought a performance/workshop package to Wesleyan back then, and I got to meet and hang out with him over meals and drinks over the course of the week or so he was there. I was already vaguely aware of him as a player with a history of leftist activism in Asian-American identity and cultural politics, and as a published scholar in that discourse, and in the music as an integral part of it; when I got to know him a bit, and saw him in action as a player, I connected through our common ground of the post-1960s music born of collectives and activism on the model of Chicago’s AACM with the first real taste of specifically Chinese tradition that I’d encountered since turning my attention toward Asia (Mongolia and Korea having come in first).

To sum up that thread, Fred’s body of recorded music and writings makes up another main pillar of this study’s edifice. Delving into them opened up the discourse of the Afro-Asian intellectual and cultural history underpinning the American Dream music of my own life and times; led me into the Asian Improv Records (AIR) story’s primacy of place in that history, an early part of Fred’s ongoing story; and ushered me through the American into the motherland Chinese Dream as dreamed by a Chinese-American man, through his Chinese-themed operas and other programmatic work. Such projects also led me to two of the three Chinese women I feature here, pipa masters Wu Man and Min Xiao-Fen, who were his guest artists on some of them. They and zheng virtuoso Mei Han would finally give me my direct access to that big core piece at the missing heart of the puzzle-picture of my Mercator map’s Asian wing.

Jason Kao Hwang is a New York-based violinist and composer I worked with on several of Braxton’s gigs in the ‘90s. (As with the others I’m touching on here, details of his work come in the pages ahead.) One of them made it to CD, a 10-tet at a Wesleyan concert, released on Francesco Martinelli’s Splas[c]h label. We shared the opening moments of our track as an improvising duo thickly busy in the foreground. I relished the chance to match and dance with his fluid, edgy playing on my much less naturally facile slide tenor trombone. That and other such experiences as fellow musicians gave me easy access to a quality interview with him, and led me to his ongoing work as leader and composer, including his chamber opera The Floating Box, A Story in Chinatown (New World Records, 2005), named one of the top ten opera recordings of that year by Opera News.

Bynum is included among the others here for slightly different reasons than they. While, as his middle name signals, he too is of Chinese ancestry, and has played with the elder Ho (no relation) in explicitly China-themed projects, has been a regular member of Hwang’s popular quartet EDGE, and has recorded often with another Asian-American musician and his longtime friend Thomas Fujiwara, such material and ethnic identity markers don’t figure overall as large in his music and public persona as in the others here. I include him more because he was just such a kid starting out as one of Braxton’s young students when I first met him, and has gone on to be one of the hottest new players in this music’s scene. As a former fellow brass player who’s followed his work closely from those school days until now, I feel uniquely positioned to be uniquely insightful about it. (One of the pleasures new to me through aging is the chance to do such service to one coming up a generation behind me, after a lifetime of doing it for older heroes I looked up to, or those more or less in my own age group.)

What made all three of these Chinese-American colleagues in the music so perfect for my purposes here has been the “American” part of that descriptor. Across their generations, they are all so like me and my white and black brothers in the music—in speech patterns, American cultural comings of age, musical training and influences—that everything they had to teach me about the Chinese side of their experiences and psyches went down on my end in that same continuum of “family affair,” just as my initiation into the self- and roots-explorations of black Americans had gone down, by virtue of growing up around and into those same musical and cultural explorations in our shared San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods in the 1950s and ‘60s. Also, as it happened: their (especially Fred’s) cultivated and family-based feminism were (as Braxton’s was) so much like my own—as, for example, was the earthshaking, soul-shaping influence of John Coltrane on us all, including his wife Alice’s role in that history—that they enabled my transition from familiar to new territory as much as fellow males engaging the cosmic female force as fellow Americans engaging the world’s Chinese identity and spirit.

That said, my initial exposure to Namtchylak and Kim left me with the feeling that I was taking a step backward into familiar territory I was wanting to move beyond. Even the most sensitive, well-meaning men attending to and writing about women are still just that—not the same as the women telling their own stories, their own way. Of course, as already noted, I was wanting to be just such a man in this project—to tell their stories from my own feel for them—but, somehow, getting as far into those as I already had with the two women, and then going back to that home turf with the three men, left me feeling that I had to work deeper and differently than I had before. It would not be a matter of writing in the same way I’d been writing about men all my life, only changing the subject to women; some kind of more radical change in my psyche and creative imagination had to take place...and, actually, was in the process of taking place...only not quite there yet.

I found myself conflating this still-missing piece called “China” with that other one called “woman” in my mind. (I say so in full awareness of the late Edward Said’s cautionaries about Orientalism, specifically those critical of the colonialist posture of feminizing/infantilizing the “Asiatic” cultures in order to dominate them like a proper patriarchal power. My own conflation, I counter, was both more personal and more positive: personal, because, again, my own history as a man with women was itself marked centrally by some Native American and Chinese and Chinese-American women [we’ll get to that in pages to come]; and positive, because I was longingly pondering the presence of the female in culture and society as an ascendant power, one almost overseeing, coming to the world’s rescue as Mother spirit, not one to be male-managed and governed.) Both these personal stirrings of memory and that larger public yearning were paralleled by dramatic changes in my life beyond Wesleyan that would, over the decade just passed, collude to bring this inchoateness to full consciousness, and thence to my clear and complete agenda here.

When I had this much under my belt, I saw that I had more than half a beginning in place. Not only the information itself, but the personal relationship to it all that I had accrued had become important to me. Somehow I would get back to it later, after the second book was done, and fill in the big missing China piece, and work in the Japanese and Korean voices of the Asian-American music culture of my concern, would get to that big missing China piece through the Chinese-American musicians, specifically through their China-themed work and collaborations with Chinese musicians, and would dig for the deep connections and significance of Asian/Asian-American cultures both in my own aging American life and in those that were now, with world music globalization, reconnecting in new living people.

I took my Ph.D. in 2000. Over the five years following, I turned my dissertation into my second book, out in 2005. By that time I had been on the East Coast for 12 years, working more or less steadily on first book, dissertation, and second book. My mother passed away in 2002; I had passed her last 12 years far removed from her daily life, and that fact hit me and bothered me when she died. The rest of my family and some longtime close friends on the West Coast suddenly felt too neglected, and important to reconnect with. I needed to move back and reconnect so in a serious way. I felt that the work that had drawn me to the East Coast was done, and that I could do whatever came next from anywhere.

As soon as I returned to Oregon, in 2005, I felt it to be the right move not only for the family relationships, but, surprisingly powerfully, for my reunion with that Pacific Northwest environment itself. I had been born and raised near San Francisco, and had chosen to start my own adult life as a man with women and children in Oregon as the favored part of the West Coast, and had raised my daughter happily there until that nest was empty and the East Coast professional promises beckoned. Now I was starting yet another chapter, coming full circle, back to the geographical womb.

As soon as I set up house in Portland--my 30-something daughter nearby after a decade-plus of our long-distance relationship, my aging father and four sisters and aunt all just a couple of hours away by plane down the coast--I felt like the prodigal son returned. Just looking out my window, and walking around my neighborhood, and feeling once again close to all this family who had never left our West Coast home turf, relieved me of a loneliness and isolation and restlessness I’d been too busy to notice. I felt I could live until I died here, happily.

The dawning of that reconnection brought a new cast to the mindset with which I turned back to my work. When I had proposed my book to the Guggenheim Foundation, I had conceived it as far as I’ve recounted here—meaning the Chinese women I mentioned in Fred Ho’s projects were still only names to me, not yet studied or contacted; and the knowledge I had of China itself was still limited to its influence as America-filtered myth on Jason’s and Fred’s work and words as Chinese-American artists. My book proposal sought funds to support the next phase of the research, into Chinese music and history and current life themselves, for that fellowship year. I thought being back on the Pacific Rim might even position me well to travel to China at some point.

Reading about Fred’s history and Jason’s association with AIR had drawn my focus to it as a key part of the picture I wanted to paint here. That focus made all the more sense as I learned of AIR’s proximities to both the Chicago and San Francisco scenes my formative years had led me to—the AACM in Chicago, through both Braxton’s recorded work as it came out in real time and my own coming of age as a young musician in San Francisco in the shadow of one of that Chicago scene’s players who had moved there, bassist-reedsman Donald “Rafael” Garrett. Waiting for the results of my proposal, from late 2005 to April 2006, that part of my research most fresh on my mind then, with the three men, combined with my move to remind me of the last such fellowship I’d had with a fellow male in the music just before I’d moved back East in 1993, with another Chicago native, and his own musical romance with Asian Americana.

Andrew Hill’s Nikkei Symphony

In 1992, I had the great good fortune to work closely with the late legendary pianist-composer Andrew Hill. Our project together as musicians was a collaboration between my Northwest Creative Orchestra, his composition Nikkei Symphony, and the Japanese-American cultural community in my home state of Oregon. This was in the heyday of multiculturalism as a fresh thing in the arts, after the rise of a commercial “world music” scene in the ‘80s, and I wrote a grant to commission Andrew’s piece for concerts in Eugene and Portland, a tour of solo piano “informances” at campuses around the state, and some community panel discussions and receptions with Japanese-American community organizations in Portland about their history in Oregon and America.

When I recall the six weeks or so of working and traveling around the state more or less daily with Andrew, a few memories branded on my brain forever come up:

·         meeting him for the first time at his Portland Willamette Riverfront condo, after months of phone conversations to plan and propose the project to the relevant parties. It was the day before our first rehearsal with the Orchestra and the Japanese and Japanese-American musicians, and we were to work together on his rough score to develop and refine it more specifically for the particular players I’d managed to assemble. We ended up pulling an all-nighter to orchestrate improvisations, copy parts, and even do a bit more composing and arranging;

·         taking a walk with him in the nearby Riverfront Park into the then-two-year-old Japanese-American Historical Plaza. It is a memorial garden with a series of plaques and sculptured artwork that “tells the story of the Japanese people in the Northwest - of immigration, elderly immigrants, native-born Japanese Americans, soldiers who fought in US military services during the war, and the business people who worked hard and had hope for the children of the future”.[7] (Andrew’s “symphony” was a similarly sequential musical “plaza” that narrated programmatically, starting with the ‘40s big band swing sound, the innocent Americanism of Japanese-American citizens, moving through increasingly ominous images of militarism, chaos, enmity, the darknesses of dispossession and internment, Japanese identity sounds rising to displace the American ones, and, finally, survival and liberation, albeit irrevocably more jaded.)  Andrew told me about a childhood playmate he’d had in Chicago, a Japanese-American boy, whose family had just disappeared one day, and how puzzled he was at the time over that. He talked about his friendship with Oregon jazz bassist and poet Lawson Inada, who had also been interned with his family as a child. Lawson seemed to be Andrew’s main contact with the local Japanese-American community organizations that helped us fund and produce our project. Later to become Oregon’s poet laureate, he wrote these lines on one of the Plaza’s plaques:
            With new hope.
            We build new lives.
            Why complain when it rains?
            This is what it means to be free.

·         driving around the rainy state with Andrew, talking for hours in the car about anything and everything—mostly about women, love, death, being alone versus being with a woman, because his wife of 30-some years, Laverne, had died just a year or so before, and he was still very much a grief-stricken and shattered man trying to heal the pieces back together, slowly and unsurely. Lawson and a few other friends in the music and in academia were taking him under their wing; he got a teaching gig at Portland State University, and was playing a bit, getting by, doing what he had to and could. His playing and general communications were uneven, as a result. He’d be playing something, or speaking, then instead of resolving it coherently would break off midstream, as though someone had just turned off the juice. Then he’d have to start again, some new thought or line...only to hit the same brick wall, sooner or later. It made for some awkward-to-mortifying moments during his solo performances and workshop interactions, but those of us who knew him picked up on the situation and carried him as best we could. (Things went best in the big-band context; there he could stop and start all he wanted or needed to; we made up a big family energy that he could just bob and drift in, and take the reins and the floor when he felt up to it. That was quite the lesson for me about the real power of the collective as opposed to, say, the Glenn Gould-ish approach to music-making as a solitary art form);

·         him meeting and getting to know my daughter, who was going through a rough spot with an abusive man in her life at the time. He immediately picked up on that with a fierce and proactive grandfatherly protectiveness with his own brand of dispatch that helped me help her get out of that briar patch.

Andrew came through his mourning time, including some painful dead-end dating, to marry again and have a few happy years of love- and music-making before succumbing to cancer in April, 2007. I got an email from him when we were both back East, and went to see him perform at Birdland with another large ensemble of all-stars. We talked about working together again, but...

This was the last music-related project I had done on the Pacific Rim before moving to Wesleyan in Connecticut for 12 years. Almost the first such when I moved back was also Asian-tinged, and would put the cap on the research blueprint recounted here. It was not as a musician, but as an interviewer and reviewer of musicians and their work, begun immediately after receiving the Guggenheim in April 2006.

Cut ahead to 2007, April, the last month of that Fellowship. It had not produced quite the manuscript I’d expected. Andrew’s death in that month recalled to my mind our time together. Like him then, I seemed to be going through some kind of rearrangement of the psyche’s furniture, only triggered by the opposite of trauma and loss. My life had been a smooth sail, after decades of stresses and struggles, for a good decade-and-a-half to that point; the Fellowship was like a Sabbatical year on top of that, one big golden breathing space that allowed me to do nothing but ponder, reflect, and go and grow with the flow. The result was a completion of the research, as I’d proposed—interviews with most of the musicians, and a thorough immersion in their online materials and action, and recorded work—but the notes and initial drafts that research triggered had taken a strange new turn.

In short, that year-long gradual infusion of this final core piece of my puzzle’s picture called “China” and “woman” triggered not mere creative nonfictions, metaphors, poetic imagery and other such devices in my music-scholarly toolkit; instead, it tipped me over fully and irresistibly into a fullblown autobiography of my own early life, ca. 1948-1965. That is, what began with Namtchylak and Kim as relatively vague but also strong (dreamlike) impressions of my own young first loves, and marriage, and fatherhood, came on stronger and more defined as the whole first part of life that led me to all that, as I took in the persons and music of these other artists that year. Meeting them, talking with them, but especially listening to their music just triggered these associations and memories; that came out in my notes, as my usual stream-of-consciousness gropings toward some way to invoke and theorize about the music in language...so that by the time I had processed that year’s worth of interviews and listening I had a rough draft of a virtual memoir. It grew, deeper and wider, over the next three years, all similarly personally significant: 2008, when I moved to LA and took care of my ailing father for the last five months of his celebrated life; 2009, when my daughter met her husband and finally took the turn from “grown child” to woman with her own solid man and plans; 2009-10, when I gradually developed an emotional bond as a kind of surrogate grandfather to the toddler daughter of a close and longtime friend and colleague, also a Portland neighbor since 2005, whose own father—whom we had often compared to mine in our love-hate reminiscences of them both—had also recently died.

Blame it on my age, my second childhood, what you will...it was not something I could control or repress, or wanted to. I knew the creative process well enough to know that even to try to do so would be disastrous. I had no choice but to weave in the music scholarship with the memories of my beginnings and the increasing reminders of impending mortality, just as I had done with the “scholar fictions” of my first two books.

Two Final Sets of Three

To represent the “scholar” part of that equation into the same pithy summaries describing the other artists, above:

·         Wu Man, Min Xiao-Fen, and Mei Han are all conservatory-trained celebrities and masters of Chinese classical repertoire on their respective instruments; their work as artists-cum-scholars provides a grasp and glimpse of that world through its most authoritative hands and eyes. Their personal stories reflect the general insulation from Western music, especially postwar American jazz, relative to countries such as Japan and Korea, which had more contact with American military forces. They are also all three such masters who chose to turn outward from that Chinese-parochial path to the engagements with more grassroots, experimental, and “other-traditional” parts of the music world they preferred to gamble on as more interesting and fulfilling; this path has included serious engagements with their own country’s rich array of ethnic minority music and cultures—traditional “folk”—not something on the typical career track of the Han state-shepherded child prodigies they were. As with Namtchylak and Kim, my own home turf of Western (African-American, European-American, European) current and experimental music is where I meet them here, and connect with their traditional roots;

·         Randy Raine-Reusch, Miya Masaoka, and Pauline Oliveros are all fellow Americans whose equally important artistic projects have their own thick connections with these Asian-traditional roots and Afro-Asian resonances, through their mixes of ancestry, marriages, and sheer aesthetic attractions. My research into their work and their colleagues in AIR, especially their collaborations with their Chinese, Korean, and Japanese counterparts, ignited the spark of a meditation on the Asian-American experiences and identities that began to match my much longer and deeper meditation on their African-American counterparts. Especially fascinating to ponder is their dawning relationship with their “motherland” as it rises to its “Chinese century” in the world—recalling the similar emergence of interest in Africa among black Americans of my generation, begun in the Black History movements of the ‘60s and still going strong in projects such as Henry Louis Gates’ genealogy specials on TV, replete with new DNA technology. (Also fascinating: to recall Native Americans, again, as part of this Asian genealogy...and to muse over the absence of institutionalized slavery in the histories of any of these peoples and my own European ancestors, whatever else went down.)

So: there you have the whole picture of the cast of characters here as the actors they’ve been in the plot, set, and setting that constitute my own outer and (more pertinent here) inner life. Recounting their development as such in real time has been important here to establish the depth, breadth, and length of their weave into the fabric of that life as it has proceeded through said “real” time. Because, as we all know, such time doesn’t really live up to its unreflective reputation as “real” until it moves into its own destiny as surreal, super-real timelessness. So has it begun in my own life as an elder looking back and reflecting on the maya of it all, and inward and forward to its soul and spirit in nirvana, death, and myth.

Accordingly, I depart here from my more youthful adventuring as a “creative scholar-fictioneer”: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but will seize the new day of this book. The scholar-fiction conceit will still drive the musician profiles, for the same reasons as before: to remind us all just why we celebrate them and their work as universally as we do. The book as a whole, however, unlike my first two, will drive us down this new real-world line, of creative nonfiction (“scholar memoir”?). As one who has passed his whole life in the public spotlights of fame for half a century now—first as the son of a Hollywood legend, then as performing artist and published author in his own right—the time for such an autobio is ripe, the record finally to be set straight.

That said, my relationship with the music itself and my singular responses to its musicians have dictated something about the scope and focus of that memoir. I’ve been writing for my readers long enough to read their thoughts: “Heffley is covering his usual ground here, with his usual thorough care...but he is also walking and stalking it much more personally than ever before.” They knew what to make of my marriage of words of fiction and truth about the music, but they aren’t so sure if they are so ready to take on my personal story’s facts and truths on the same plate as such words.

The truth, however, is that my previous fictions were of such great interest to them precisely because they were my own personal truths and facts, all dressed up as those of my subjects. Such florid livery is simply that of youth’s bloom en route to more seasoned age. Now its petals have come and gone; in this season’s still farther phase, nothing but the truth, straight up and cold, no bloom or chaser, will do.

I have been enjoying my American music dream as long as I can remember, first through listening to my mother’s and aunt’s old 78s and 45s and piano playing at home, then through my own playing of it from age 10, starting with guitar. It has moved with me through my decades of making it, listening to it, studying it and writing about it. It has taken me far and served me well, into and up to health, wellbeing, power, and wisdom. Now, past sheer survival, it is likewise leading me to this next leg of my journey, moving past all the life and light of the day and into the dusk and dark falling as night. I have no use, interest, or patience for anything less than an embrace of that onset as open and full as were my trysts with the day.

Wandering in some nearby woods the other day, as is my habit in this glorious forest state, I took in the musky smell of death always there in the life of leaves and trees, of mostly hidden creatures coming and going through their own little lives and deaths. I recalled one of my state’s poet laureates William Stafford’s words to the effect that nature becomes of increasing interest the closer our bodies come to returning to it. Counterintuitively, life itself incandesces more the closer to its end our steps take us, through spirit or time, or both. This music I’ve walked and stalked has always been more about that nature than about culture; nature is its ground, culture its transient epiphanies, at best, its morbid mausoleum, too often.

In my previous books I spoke with impeccable scholarly detachment about abstractions evoked by the music such as “Muse,” “Eros,” “Holy,” “War,” “Religion.” Here I go straight to my own life’s fleshly invocations of such things, provoked in memory by the music in real time and mind (and I add my two new ones to the list: “Death” and “Peace”). Along with the tales and truths of the music and musicians, you’ll get those of a seasoned Peace Baby’s memoir, starting from his birth in 1948 (along with that of what we call The Peace, as well as that of the long-playing record, or 33, to stay with the inch-numbers begun above) and culminating in the long, slow erotic heavens-past-hells of his first time with a woman, in 1965 (when humans walked in space for the first time, soon to step on the moon). You’ll flash with me back and forth from one world and time to another, and then another, and marvel with me over the ways the music has to give voice to both, and then to all three, even while always sounding only in one.

References:

Attrep, K.A. (2008). Review of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation. Retrieved from http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/970/1406

Bok, D. (2011). The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Bok, S. (2011). Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Brunskill, I. (March 1, 2011). For a Little Room Behind the Shop. In The American Interest. Retrieved from http://www.the-american-interest.com/article-bd.cfm?piece=936

Dalai Lama. (2009). The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition: A Handbook for Living. New York: Riverhead/Penguin Group (USA).

Feldman, F. (2012). What is this Thing Called Happiness? London/New York: Oxford University Press.

Grauer, V. (2011). Sounding the Depths: Tradition and the Voices of History

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Grun, B. (1982). Timetables of History. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Heffley, M. (2000). Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Identity, Improvisation, and Identity in Freie Musik Produktion (Ph.D. dissertation). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University.

Hester, K. (Summer, 2007). Interview with Douglas Ewart of the AACM. ISIM Newsletter (3)2, p. 7.

Japanese-American Historical Plaza (Portland). (2014). The Oregon Encyclopedia: A Project of the Oregon Historical Society. Retrieved from http://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/japanese_american_historical_plaza_portland/#.VCSWyPnILUU

Karabell, Z. (2010). Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends on It. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Kim, J.H. (1998). Female Energy in Music. The Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium: Festival Nieuwe Muziek, Evterpe Magazine, Logos Blad Magazine.

Kingsley, P. (2010/11). A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet, and the Destiny of the Western World. Point Reyes, CA: The Golden Sufi Center.

Kotkin, J. (2010). The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. New York: Penguin Press.

Kristof, N. & Wu Dunn, C. (2010). Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Knopf Doubleday/Vintage Books.

____________________. (1994). China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power. New York: Random House.

____________________. (2001). Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Moiers, B. (May 27, 1997). Innerview with Mike Heffley on scholar fiction genre. Retrieved from http://billmoiers.com/episode/mike-heffley-on-scholar-fiction/

Naisbitt, J. & Naisbitt, D. (2010). China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society. New York: HarperBusiness.

Pellegrinelli, L. (2008). Separated at 'Birth': Singing and the History of Jazz. In Nichole T. Rustin and Sherrie Tucker (eds.), Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Pinker, S. (2012). The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin Books.

Stewart, J. (September 18, 2014). The Daily Show, Season 19, Episode 155. Retrieved from http://www.hulu.com/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart

Webb, J. (2005). Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America. New York: Broadway Books.

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[1] Lara Pellegrinelli (2008) rightly makes several points in her “Separated at 'Birth': Singing and the History of Jazz”: the voice-as-instrument was indeed generative to that music, was more a woman’s than a man’s terrain, and was shunted aside unduly by historians and scholars of the music for sexist and classist reasons. Her essay’s concern was to correct jazz historiography for those lacunae, and de-marginalize/re-centralize woman’s voice in the way we hear and think about the music, both historically and moving forward. Kara A. Attrep (2008) builds on this concern in her review of the anthology presenting Pellegrinelli’s essay when she writes that “there is a need for gender studies scholarship in jazz outside of North America and  Europe—particularly in western and southern Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and transnational considerations of jazz...”.

[2] Recall Grauer’s depiction of collective vocal music as the urgrund of all human music, and the various traditional (and powered-over) suspicions of instrumental music as steps too far beyond nature—by rationalism, scientistic technology, militarism—into civilization’s power-over  hubris.

[3] Kotkin (2010), the Naisbitts (2010), Karabell (2010),  and Kristof and Wu Dunn (2010) are just a few representative prospecti, all fresh as I write, that resonate with such daydreams.

[4] Again, I reference for grounding a bit of the “happiness studies” literature generally pertinent to my perspective here: both Derek (2011) and his wife Sissela Bok (2011), daughter of the great Gunnar Myrdal; Brunskill on Bakewell on Montaigne (2011); the Dalai Lama (2009); and Feldman (2012). Add a line or 2 reflecting a reading of their Amz abstracts

[5] See Kingsley (2010/11, pp. 143-47, fn. 25) add more about that source. Also, find NYT article about shared ancestry w/ Euros

[6] See Kim (1998) on "Female Energy in Music," for its thesis that human world culture, reflecting cosmic currents, is trending from a yang-heavy to a yin-enlightening period.

[7] from website.