This paper examines how Indonesian nationals have used jazz to build their musical taste and an associated cosmopolitan lifestyle. While cultural studies in Southeast Asia highlight an uptick in the mass production and consumption of popular media during the 1970s, less attention has been given to predecessors, especially those who made the uncertain transition from colonial to postcolonial regimes. In this presentation, I seek to rethink an important moment in Indonesian history by advocating for a horizontal understanding of the sounds experienced by the participants at the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference. I problematize hegemonic nationalistic narratives of aurality focused on the traditional arts that mask embedded environmental and cosmopolitan features of musical practices. I analyze the sounds of the bamboo angklung as staged for Non-Alignment leaders; the historically muted cosmopolitan sounds heard by the Conference participants, particularly, a group of popular and jazz musicians who performed nightly at the Savoy Homann Hotel; and examine how this era has been creatively reimagined and resocialized into the public sphere through the contemporary practices of two Indonesian sisters and DJs. Based on close readings of Indonesian popular media, collaborative relistenings of popular Indonesian recordings among Indonesians and diasporic communities in the Netherlands and the United States, and ethnographic research among grassroots community archivists, this paper analyzes how the longstanding embeddedness of jazz within the public sphere of Javanese urban societies helps rethink the role of cosmopolitan cultural production within Indonesian nationalism.

The salient participation of Filipino musicians in Asia’s jazz labor force since the beginning of the 20th century is a point of departure in understanding the social and cultural situatedness of jazz in Manila, Philippines. Through the mobilities of the Jazz Friends, a most productive collective after the Second World War (1950s to the 1980s), this paper examines jazz as a cultural space of empowerment for Filipino players. In particular, by approaching jazz as a translocal scene (Bennett, 2004; Crossley, 2018; yamomo, 2018), the mobilities of affiliates Lito Molina and Tony Velarde are discussed to highlight how they gave priority to cultivating the local musical practice and cultural positioning of jazz in Manila. Their movements mapped motifs of positionalities (Ahmed, 2006), shaping the stances (Berger, 2009) that they had in engaging with the genre culture of jazz (Holt, 2007). By delving into Molina's and Velarde's trajectories alongside the collective's performance routes throughout the period of study emerging from oral interviews and archival sources, negotiations concerning race, class, gender, and cultural identity are explored. The pathways of the Jazz Friends in jazz joints, US military clubs, concerts, and workshops; their encounters with various genre and entertainment spaces; and the mediations from diverse stakeholders of the scene are reflected upon to trace the place(s) of jazz in Manila as an expressive culture.

This paper examines Vietnamese print media discourse on jazz that accompanied the rise of the music in socialist Vietnam. Our analysis suggests that in the initial years, print media played a part in helping to reaffirm the status of jazz as a new and proper mainstream international music art form in the official Vietnamese soundscape. Following saxophonist Quyền Văn Minh’s invention of Jazz Việt as a nuanced sound, print media began to present jazz as a music performed by Vietnamese musicians, that had embraced Vietnamese cultural elements, and no longer strange to the ears of Vietnamese audience. With this shift, jazz in Vietnam was effectively placed in a position “between worlds,” located at the intersections of the domestic and international, tradition and modern, and Eastern and Western. By the turn of the millennium, however, jazz in the print media gradually shifted toward a discourse that centers on the pioneering musician Quyền Văn Minh rather than focus on the music itself. Our analysis is a timely reminder that the story of jazz in Vietnam awaits further unpacking.