Hiroshi Kono is eight years old and only just beginning to question the racial and economic inequities he sees around him, when he and his family--along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans--are packed off to a concentration camp run by the US government. The harsh and barren world of the Arizona desert where Hiroshi and his family find themselves sets sibling against sibling, parent against child and neighbor against neighbor in a complex grappling with duty and disappointment that will reverberate through the ensuing decades. Sexual initiation, kabuki tales, jazz clubs and alcoholism form the backdrop against which Hiroshi, his siblings and his parents struggle to define themselves. Whether describing Hiroshi's tumultuous postwar coming of age or excavating generational grievances exacerbated by internment, Gene Oishi gives heartbreaking and at times humorous context to the life of a family set adrift by its wartime experiences.
In Search of Hiroshi is in many ways a familiar American story-the odyssey of a young man, torn from his cultural roots, in search of an identity. What makes it unique, however, is that the journey delves into the psychic aftermath of one of the darker chapters of American history, the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. Gene Oishi, the son of Japanese immigrants, spent three years of his childhood confined to camps in the desert wilderness of Arizona. But In Search of Hiroshi is more than a profile of lingering psychic damage. It is an intense and compelling story of dark fears and quiet courage, of despair giving way to hope and love. In searching for himself and his roots, both as an American and a Japanese, Gene Oishi shatters the glossy image of the Japanese-Americans as a well-adjusted and contented ''model minority.'' But In Search of Hiroshi is not only a Japanese-American story: it is also about America and the American experience, seen from a different-and often surprising-perspective.
Back in the early 1940s, late at night in the clubs of Harlem, a handful of jazz musicians began to experiment with a style that no one had ever heard before. The music was fast, complicated, impossible to play for many of the older musicians—but it soon became the lingua franca of jazz music. They called it bebop, and as the years went by, it became even more popular. Today it reigns as perhaps the best-loved style of jazz ever created. Ira Gitler conveys the excitement of this musical birth as only someone who was there can. In The Masters of Bebop, Gitler traces the advent of what was a revolution in sound. He profiles the leading players—Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillepie, Max Roach—but also studies the style and music of the first disciples, such as Dexter Gordon and J. J. Johnson, to reveal bebop’s pervasive influence throughout American culture. Revised with an updated discography—and with a new chapter covering bebop right up through the end of the twentieth century—The Masters of Bebop is the essential listener’s handbook.
A Library Journal Best Reference Book of 2022 This book represents the culmination of over 150 years of literary achievement by the most diverse ethnic group in the United States. Diverse because this group of ethnic Americans includes those whose ancestral roots branch out to East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Western Asia. Even within each of these regions, there exist vast differences in languages, cultures, religions, political systems, and colonial histories. From the earliest publication in 1887 to the latest in 2021, this dictionary celebrates the incredibly rich body of fiction, poetry, memoirs, plays, and children’s literature. Historical Dictionary of Asian American Literature and Theater, Second Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 700 cross-referenced entries on genres, major terms, and authors. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about this topic.
"When bebop was new," writes Thomas Owens, "many jazz musicians and most of the jazz audience heard it as radical, chaotic, bewildering music." For a nation swinging to the smoothly orchestrated sounds of the big bands, this revolutionary movement of the 1940s must have seemed destined for a short life on the musical fringe. But today, Owens writes, bebop is nothing less than "the lingua franca of jazz, serving as the principal musical language of thousands of jazz musicians." In Bebop, Owens conducts us on an insightful, loving tour through the music, players, and recordings that changed American culture. Combining vivid portraits of bebop's gigantic personalities with deft musical analysis, he ranges from the early classics of modern jazz (starting with the 1943 Onyx Club performances of Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Oscar Pettiford, Don Byas, and George Wallington) through the central role of Charlie Parker, to an instrument-by-instrument look at the key players and their innovations. Illustrating his discussion with numerous musical excerpts, Owens skillfully demonstrates why bebop was so revolutionary, with fascinating glimpses of the tempestuous jazz world: Thelonious Monk, for example, did "everything 'wrong' in the sense of traditional piano technique....Because his right elbow fanned outward away from his body, he often hit the keys at an angle rather than in parallel. Sometimes he hit a single key with more than one finger, and divided single-line melodies between two hands." In addition to his discussions of individual instruments and players, Owens examines ensembles, with their sometimes volatile collaborations: in the Jazz Messengers, Benny Golson told of how his own mellow saxophone playing would get lost under Art Blakey's furious drumming: "He would do one of those famous four-bar drum rolls going into the next chorus, and I would completely disappear. He would holler over at me, 'Get up out of that hole!'" In this marvelous account, Owens comes right to the present day, with accounts of new musicians ranging from the Marsalis brothers to lesser-known masters like pianist Michel Petrucciani. Bebop is a jazz-lover's dream--a serious yet highly personal look at America's most distinctive music.
The Jazz Itineraries series, a new format based on Ken Vail's successful Jazz Diaries, charts the careers of famous jazz musicians, listing club and concert appearances with details of recording sessions and movie appearances. Copiously illustrated with contemporary photographs, newspaper extracts, record and performance reviews, ads and posters, the series provides fascinating insight into the lives of the greatest jazz musicians of our times. No.1 in the series, Dizzy Gillespie: The Bebop Years 1937?1952, chronicles Dizzy's life from his early struggles, through the birth of bebop, the demise of his first big band, up to his departure for France in 1952.
Weaving together the stories of three generations of Samoan women, contrasting the traditional and the modern,They Who Do Not Grieveis a stunning new novel from one of the Pacific's most exciting writers. Malu, brought up by her grandmother, has only a ghostly memory of her dead mother. And 'malu' is also the name of the Samoan woman's traditional tattoo, and the shame and grief not completing the tattoo ceremony can haunt a life forever. Young Malu, watching the Americans living on the island, sees the modern way, the Nineties discontent overtaking the Sixties notions of an island paradise, whilst hearing tales from the older Samoan women of the old life. Although destined to repeat the patterns of the past, Malu can turn them into vivid stories for the future.
In 1957, Duke Ellington released the influential album A Drum Is a Woman. This musical allegory revealed the implicit truth about the role of women in jazz discourse—jilted by the musician and replaced by the drum. Further, the album’s cover displays an image of a woman sitting atop a drum, depicting the way in which the drum literally obscures the female body, turning the subject into an object. This objectification of women leads to a critical reading of the role of women in jazz music: If the drum can take the place of a woman, then a woman can also take the place of a drum. The Drum Is a Wild Woman: Jazz and Gender in African Diaspora Literature challenges that image but also defines a counter-tradition within women’s writing that involves the reinvention and reclamation of a modern jazz discourse. Despite their alienation from bebop, women have found jazz music empowering and have demonstrated this power in various ways. The Drum Is a Wild Woman explores the complex relationship between women and jazz music in recent African diasporic literature. The book examines how women writers from the African diaspora have challenged and revised major tropes and concerns of jazz literature since the bebop era in the mid-1940s. Black women writers create dissonant sounds that broaden our understanding of jazz literature. By underscoring the extent to which gender is already embedded in jazz discourse, author Patricia G. Lespinasse responds to and corrects narratives that tell the story of jazz through a male-centered lens. She concentrates on how the Wild Woman, the female vocalist in classic blues, used blues and jazz to push the boundaries of Black womanhood outside of the confines of respectability. In texts that refer to jazz in form or content, the Wild Woman constitutes a figure of resistance who uses language, image, and improvisation to refashion herself from object to subject. This book breaks new ground by comparing the politics of resistance alongside moments of improvisation by examining recurring literary motifs—cry-and-response, the Wild Woman, and the jazz moment—in jazz novels, short stories, and poetry, comparing works by Ann Petry, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, and Maya Angelou with pieces by Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Ellington. Within an interdisciplinary and transnational context, Lespinasse foregrounds the vexed negotiations around gender and jazz discourse.
