Blue Nippon
eBook - PDF

Blue Nippon

Authenticating Jazz in Japan

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Blue Nippon

Authenticating Jazz in Japan

About this book

Japan's jazz community—both musicians and audience—has been begrudgingly recognized in the United States for its talent, knowledge, and level of appreciation. Underpinning this tentative admiration, however, has been a tacit agreement that, for cultural reasons, Japanese jazz "can't swing." In Blue Nippon E. Taylor Atkins shows how, strangely, Japan's own attitude toward jazz is founded on this same ambivalence about its authenticity.
Engagingly told through the voices of many musicians, Blue Nippon explores the true and legitimate nature of Japanese jazz. Atkins peers into 1920s dancehalls to examine the Japanese Jazz Age and reveal the origins of urban modernism with its new set of social mores, gender relations, and consumer practices. He shows how the interwar jazz period then became a troubling symbol of Japan's intimacy with the West—but how, even during the Pacific war, the roots of jazz had taken hold too deeply for the "total jazz ban" that some nationalists desired. While the allied occupation was a setback in the search for an indigenous jazz sound, Japanese musicians again sought American validation. Atkins closes out his cultural history with an examination of the contemporary jazz scene that rose up out of Japan's spectacular economic prominence in the 1960s and 1970s but then leveled off by the 1990s, as tensions over authenticity and identity persisted.
With its depiction of jazz as a transforming global phenomenon, Blue Nippon will make enjoyable reading not only for jazz fans worldwide but also for ethnomusicologists, and students of cultural studies, Asian studies, and modernism.

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Yes, you can access Blue Nippon by E. Taylor Atkins in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Jazz Music. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Contents
  2. List of Illustrations
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Prelude: Plenty Plenty Soul
  5. 1. The Japanese Jazz Artist and the Authenticity Complex
  6. 2. The Soundtrack of Modern Life: Japan's Jazz Revolution
  7. 3. Talkin' Jazz: Music, Modernism, and Interwar Japan's Culture Wars
  8. 4. "Jazz for the Country's Sake": Toward a New Cultural Order in Wartime Japan
  9. 5. Bop, Funk, Junk, and That Old Democracy Boogie: The Jazz Tribes of Postwar Japan
  10. 6. Our Thing: Defining "Japanese Jazz"
  11. Postlude: J-Jazz and the Fin de Siecle Blues
  12. Notes
  13. References
  14. Discography
  15. Index