Deracinated Flower: Toshiko Akiyoshi's “Trace in Jazz History”

Abstract

In this essay, I explore composer and pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi's articulation of a transcultural “rootlessness” which she developed by rendering non‐jazz influences, drawn most notably from Japanese musical aesthetics, within a jazz context. Her active infusion of traditional Japanese musical elements into large ensemble jazz music compositions and arrangements throughout the 1970s reflected her changing attitude regarding the aesthetic or musical affiliations enabled by nationality, ethnicity, and gender, on the one hand, and musical practices, repertoire, and instrumentation, on the other. By hearing the music Akiyoshi created through this “rootless” approach, we gain invaluable insight into the production and representation of jazz during the 1970s, a time when transcultural expression was changing the sounds as well as the meanings of the genre.

Notes

¹ Peter Rothbart, “Toshiko Akiyoshi,” Down Beat, August 1980, 15.

² Ibid., 15.

³ David Stowe, “‘Jazz That Eats Rice’: Toshiko Akiyoshi's Roots Music” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, eds. Heike Raphael‐Hernandez, Shannon Steen, and Vijay Prashad (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 291. For the record, Stowe has a different view of Akiyoshi's use of Japanese musical elements, as the subtitle to his essay, “Toshiko Akiyoshi's Roots Music,” indicates. However, we both agree that her decision to use Japanese musical elements had more to do with her strong desire to carve a unique place for herself in the jazz world, than as a result of being Japanese per se.

⁴ However, despite being born and spending much of her youth in Japan‐occupied China, Akiyoshi limited her engagement of non‐Western music to elements gleaned from Japan. Hers is not an Asian, but a particularly Japanese, perspective. The segregation of the Japanese and Chinese populations by the occupying Japanese forces must necessarily be considered as well.

⁵ Both original and added emphases. Quoted in William Minor, Jazz Journeys to Japan: The Heart Within (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2004), 37–38.

⁶ Interestingly, in this employment of a tape recording of a tsuzumi performance (which came about because she could not find a tsuzumi performer in Los Angeles at the time), she demonstrates considerable foresight into the potential of using prerecorded audio samples as both compositional and performing resources.

⁷ Eric Porter, “Affirming and Disaffirming Actions: Remaking Race in the 1970s,” in America in the Seventies, eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 54. Harold Cruse phrases this situation a bit differently, as he suggests that black politics had shifted from a “politics of civil rights” to a “politics of black ethnicity” in the same time period. Harold Cruse, quoted in Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 15.

⁸ There have been a number of recent works that detail the social and political climate of the 1970s. See, for example: The Seventies: The Age of Glitter in Popular Culture, ed. Shelton Waldrep (New York: Routledge, 2000); America in the Seventies, eds. Beth Bailey and David Farber; and, perhaps the best overall survey of the decade, Bruce Schulman's The Seventies. Because of their in‐depth examinations of United States' culture during the 1970s, these books provide a rich contextual backdrop for this essay, which is concerned primarily with Akiyoshi's struggles for a musical identity in the United States.

⁹ Leonard Feather, “Contemporary Sculptress of Sound,” Down Beat, October 20, 1977, 15.

¹⁰ Amy Ducan, liner notes to Toshiko Akiyoshi‐Lew Tabackin Big Band, March of the Tadpoles, RCA Victor RVP‐6178, 1977, LP. Reissued as part of the three‐disc set, Mosaic Select: Toshiko Akiyoshi‐Lew Tabackin Big Band, Mosaic MS‐033, 2008, compact discs. Samba is a Brazilian dance music associated with Carnaval, and gagaku is the Imperial Japanese court music tradition (from the fourteenth century forward).

¹¹ She had studied Western classical piano for ten years before taking this nightclub job in Beppu City. Her audition consisted of performing a German tango entitled “Blue Sky.” See Lewis Porter, “‘She Wiped All the Men Out’: Jazzwomen, Part I,” Music Educators Journal, September 1984, 50.

¹² Emphasis added. Leonard Feather, “East Meets West, or Never the Twain Shall Cease: Toshiko Akiyoshi and Lew Tabackin,” Down Beat, June 3, 1976, 17.

¹³ E. Taylor Atkins, Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 42.

¹⁵ Ibid. So‐called jazz cafes in Japan were places where jazz devotees congregated to participate in a unique practice of silent listening. Where jazz enthusiasts in the United States and elsewhere frequently encourage an enthusiastic physical and communal engagement with the music (through both actual dancing as well as simply physically moving heads and feet to the beat and groove), Japanese fans embraced a decidedly sober encounter with the music. Listeners would come into a jazz coffee shop, place a record on the turntable, and quietly sit—often with closed eyes—listening in their own private space, and foregoing any interaction with other listeners. The heated debates between various jazz factions were limited primarily to the pages of Swing Journal, the leading Japanese jazz journal, which is still published today.

¹⁴ Steven Moore, “The Art of Becoming a Jazz Musician: An Interview with Toshiko Akiyoshi,” http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0043.307. Accessed January 4, 2010. (Originally Michigan Quarterly Review, 43 [Summer 2004]: 392–403.)

¹⁶ Briefly, Yukio Mishima was a post‐WWII Japanese author, playwright, and political activist. Sun and Steel, trans. John Bester (New York: Grove, 1970), remains one of his more well‐known works in the West. While autobiographical, this book was meant as a call to return to the purifying aesthetics of bushido, the way of the samurai. Jun'ichiro Tanizaki was a Japanese author and polemicist who led the philosophical and literary counter to what was perceived as a growing Western hegemony. Tanizaki's ode to Japan, In Praise of Shadows (New York: Leete's Island Books, 1977), is an ardent defense of Japanese aesthetics. See also Atkins's Blue Nippon for a discussion of the “war on jazz” in Japan during WWII, which is recounted in detail in chapter four.

¹⁷ Atkins, Blue Nippon, 196.

¹⁸ See Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life (New York: Da Capo, 1975; repr. 1961), 72–3. Also see Hawes's autobiography, Raise Up Off Me: A Portrait of Hampton Hawes (New York: Thunder's Mouth, 2001; orig. 1972), for more regarding his ideas about jazz performance, performers, and practices.

¹⁹ Atkins, “Can Japanese Sing the Blues? ‘Japanese Jazz’ and the Problem of Authenticity,” in Japan Pop! Inside the World of Japanese Popular Culture, ed. Timothy Craig (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000), 28.

²⁰ Moore, “Art of Becoming,” n.p.

²¹ Ibid., n.p.

²² Feather, “Contemporary,” 13.

²³ Quoted in Atkins, Blue Nippon, 183.

²⁴ For additional information on Akiyoshi's early career in Japan, see Yusuke Torii, Swing Ideology and Its Cold War Discontents in U.S.‐Japan Relations, 1944–1968 (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 2007), and Atkins, Blue Nippon.

²⁵ Mariano studied the Southern Indian wind instrument, the nadaswaram, from his travels to Asia in the early 1960s.

²⁶ The Toshiko Mariano Quartet recorded regularly throughout the early to mid‐1960s. Their recorded output includes: The Toshiko Mariano Quartet (Candid CS‐9012, 1961, LP; reissued as Candid CCD‐79012, compact disc; with Eddie Marshall on drums and Gene Cherico on bass); In West Side (Nippon Columbia NS‐1001, 1963, LP), which was organized around a collection of songs from the musical, West Side Story (with Albert Heath on drums and Gene Cherico on bass; a slightly different version of this recording was released as East and West, Victor BVCJ‐7420, 1963, LP, with the same personnel); and Toshiko Mariano and Her Big Band (Vee Jay VJR‐2505 [US release], 1964, LP; reissued as Vee Jay VJ023, n.d., compact disc). I outline her solo work in the text above.

²⁷ Torii, Swing Ideology, 127–9.

²⁸ Interestingly, Carl “Doc” Severinson, who performs on the opening track, “Broadway,” is not shown on the cover.

²⁹ Quoted in the film, Jazz Is My Native Language: A Portrait of Toshiko Akiyoshi, VHS, produced by Renée Cho, Rhapsody Films, 1983.

³⁰ I am thinking here of dominant cultural representations of Asian females, particularly in popular culture. See Laura Hyun‐Yi Kang's essay, “The Desiring of Asian Female Bodies: Interracial Romance and Cinematic Subjection,” Visual Anthropology Review 9 (1993): 5–21, which confronts this issue in a close reading of the film, Come See the Paradise (Twentieth Century‐Fox, 1990).

³¹ Ingrid Monson, “The Problem with White Hipness: Race, Gender, and Cultural Conceptions in Jazz Historical Discourse,” Journal of the American Musicological Society, 48 (Fall 1995): 405.

³² Quoted in Atkins, “Can,” 213.

³³ Pianist Hampton Hawes describes Mingus in his autobiography, Raise Up Off Me: “Now Charles [Mingus] is a strong cat with a temper; on his own trip and unpredictable. There are people who are afraid of him. Been known to lift drums over his head like Atlas holding the world and throw them off the stand 'cause he didn't like the way the cat played” (105).

³⁴ Brian Priestley, Mingus: A Critical Biography (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 134. Akiyoshi's feelings for Mingus were disclosed explicitly on her Ascent recording, Farewell (RCA Victor RVC RVJ‐6078, 1980, LP; reissued as Ascent ASC‐1000, 1980, LP, and BMG KP06560, 2003, compact disc), with the track, “Farewell (to Mingus).” This number is an openly “heartfelt tribute,” as Leonard Feather describes in the liner notes. It begins with introductory passage for flutes and muted, lower‐register brass. The theme itself is stated by Tabackin's warm, Lester Young‐inflected solo that features both an airy vibrato and languid pacing. The rich support that Akiyoshi gives the tenor saxophonist—with deep long tones in the brass and saxophones—is complemented by the doubling of the tenor's statement by the flutes. Akiyoshi's piano solo follows. Its first chorus pares the ensemble down to a piano trio. Akiyoshi's two‐handed solo conveys both strength and sensitivity, and this passage merges the characteristics that Mingus embodied throughout his music and his life. Mingus's autobiography, Beneath the Underdog (New York: Vintage‐Random House, 1971), attests to his complex personality. As he wrote in the passage that begins the book, “In other words, I am three. One man stands forever in the middle, unconcerned, unmoved, watching, waiting to be allowed to express what he sees to the other two. The second man is like a frightened animal that attacks for fear of being attacked. Then there's the over‐loving gentle person who lets people into the uttermost sacred temple of his being and he'll take insults and be trusting and sign contracts without reading them and get talked down to working cheap or for nothing, and when he realizes what's been done to him he feels like killing and destroying everything around him including himself for being so stupid.” (Mingus, Beneath the Underdog, 1.) While Beneath the Underdog should not be read as a straightforward memoir, Mingus aptly describes himself as a mixture of strength and sentiment, cold‐eyed realism and soft‐hearted sentimentality, which was expressed in the range of his work from the boisterous “Fables of Faubus” to the tenderhearted “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

³⁵ Feather, “East,” 38.

³⁶ That Mingus harbored no ill will can be evidenced by his attendance at her Town Hall concert later that year. This appearance seems to suggest his support of her efforts at creative independence—an endeavor he continually attempted to realize throughout his own career. In her interview with Steven Moore (Moore, “Art of Becoming”), Akiyoshi acknowledged Mingus's significance for her, stating: “I don't think Bud [Powell] or [Charles] Mingus realized that they have had a big impact on my career. They probably meant [their compliments and encouragement] very casually, but what they said meant many things to me.”

³⁷ Quoted in the film, Jazz Is My Native Language.

³⁸ Feather, “Contemporary,” 15.

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Feather, “East,” 17.

⁴² Fred Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Toshiko Akiyoshi,” All About Jazz, April 20, 2003, http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=291 (accessed August 12, 2008).

⁴³ See Atkins, Blue Nippon, 195.

⁴⁴ Feather, “East,” 39.

⁴⁵ Original emphasis. Ibid., 17. Additionally, the only big band recording of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra to feature compositions not written by Akiyoshi is Tribute to Duke Ellington (BMG/Novus‐J, 1999, compact disc), which features a three‐part “Tribute to Duke Ellington Suite” as well as performance of Ellington's “Prelude to a Kiss,” “Day Dream,” and “I Let A Song Go Out of My Heart,” all arranged by Akiyoshi. This 1999 release remains outside the scope of this article, though it is an important indication of Ellington's influence on her musical life.

⁴⁶ Lew Tabackin, liner notes to Salted Gingko Nuts, Ascent ASC 1002, 1982, LP.

⁴⁷ Feather, “East,” 38.

⁴⁸ Feather, “East,” 17.

⁵⁰ Feather, “Contemporary,” 14.

⁴⁹ Leonard Feather, liner notes to Kogun, RCA Victor RVC RCA‐6246, 1974, LP. This recording has been reissued as part of the three‐disc set, Mosaic Select: Toshiko Akiyoshi‐Lew Tabackin Big Band, Mosaic MS‐033, 2008, compact discs.

⁵¹ Ibid., 15.

⁵² Feather, liner notes to Insights, RCA Victor RVC RVP‐6106, 1976, LP. Reissued as part of the three‐disc set, Mosaic Select: Toshiko Akiyoshi‐Lew Tabackin Big Band, Mosaic MS‐033, 2008, compact discs.

⁵³ While outside of the concerns of this particular essay (as it focuses on the 1970s), Akiyoshi was approached by Nakagawa, a Buddhist priest from Hiroshima, about composing a piece to memorialize the 1945 atomic bombing of his city. For this commission, Akiyoshi wrote a three‐part suite entitled Hiroshima: Rising from the Abyss, which was released by RCA in 2001 (reissued on True Life Entertainment 10008, 2003, compact disc). Recent recordings such as Let Freedom Swing (Hänssler Verlag, 2008) indicate her continued use of her music to promote socially progressive ideals. The 1976 album, Insights, also features a politically‐themed suite entitled “Minamata,” which was composed as a response to the industrial mercury poisonings of the Minamata village (as a result of chemical runoff into the Minamata Bay from the Chisso Corporation's manufacture of fertilizer and plastics). Since most of the villagers ate the fish from the waters surrounding the village, they were among the first to feel the effects of the concentrated poisons that accumulated in the fish. Recent recordings such as Jazz Matinee: Let Freedom Swing (Hänssler 093203, 2008, compact disc) demonstrate the continued use of her music to promote socially progressive ideals.

⁵⁴ The number became the title track to a 1978 quartet recording, Toshiko Plays Toshiko (released in the United States as Notorious Tourist from the East, Inner City IC 6066, 1979, LP; the album was released in Japan on the Discomate label but under the title, Toshiko Plays Toshiko). The recording featured her big band compositions rearranged for this quartet, which included trumpeter Steve Huffstetter, bassist Gene Cherico, and drummer Billy Higgins.

⁵⁵ Charles Mingus, New Tijuana Moods, Bluebird RCA 68951, 2006 (orig. 1962), compact disc.

⁵⁶ For example, one of Mingus's close friends, trumpeter Theodore “Fats” Navarro, recalled in a Down Beat interview, “[Mingus] knew all the places where they had jam‐sessions. He used to go to some Puerto Rican places, some Cuban clubs, too, and sit in with the Cuban bands” (quoted in Brian Priestley, Mingus: A Critical Biography [New York: Da Capo, 1982], 36). Mingus also collaborated with various Latin musicians such as Cándido Camero, Cal Tjader, and Sabu Martínez.

⁵⁷ Moore, “Becoming,” n.p.

⁵⁸ Feather, “Contemporary,” 14–15. I have retained the original wording of the published interview. However, it seems as if there has been some inadvertently awkward editing that merged a discussion of dissonance with rhythmic feel. That said, my point is to highlight Akiyoshi's sense that wedding Japanese rhythmic sensibilities to jazz's swing feel is “natural” rather than incompatible or detrimental.

⁵⁹ Emphasis added. Quoted in Porter, “She Wiped All the Men Out,” 50 n37. According to Lewis Porter, Akiyoshi's thoughts were titled “Inspiration” and were printed on the folder of every Akiyoshi chart published by Kendor Music.