Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam

The artistry of Vietnamese jazz has never received thorough documentation, so Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam is a very welcome addition to music scholarship. The book features conversations held from 2009 to 2017 “over whiskeys and smokes” (xiii) between academic Stan BH Tan-Tangbau and self-taught jazz musician Quyền Văn Minh. Tan-Tangbau recorded, transcribed, and translated these conversations and then organized them into a narrative about Quyền Văn Minh's musical life. Essentially a curated autobiography, Tan-Tangbau foregrounds the musician's own words and occasionally provides contextual information, presenting specific anecdotes alongside the historical events of northern Vietnam over the second half of the twentieth century.The book tells the story of the emergence of jazz in Vietnam through the experimentations of a hard-working musician who used the guitar, clarinet, and various saxophones to teach fellow musicians how to play and understand jazz. Tan-Tangbau organizes the narrative into thirteen “tracks.” Eleven focus on Quyền Văn Minh, and two (4 and 10) offer summaries of secondary literature on jazz in Eastern Europe and Asia, respectively, to further the argument that jazz should not simply be understood as American. Track 1 effectively introduces the musician's life from the first time he heard jazz on the radio, to his career in government troupes and then as a saxophone lecturer, to the organization of solo concerts, and finally to his eponymous jazz club that remains open today. Track 2 starts with the jazz club, its various iterations, and the struggles he faced establishing a stable location to hear jazz in Hanoi. Track 3 returns to Quyền Văn Minh's musical upbringing in wartime Hanoi. In addition to descriptions of early music lessons, Tan-Tangbau also points to the importance of radio and broadcasts on the public speaker system (loa phường) in shaping Quyền Văn Minh's sound; these details intersect quite well with recent work by Lonán Ó Briain.1 Tracks 5 and 6 detail Quyền Văn Minh's early career as a professional musician in the 1970s and his brief exposure to recorded jazz. These chapters examine various genres of music he performed, including nhạc đỏ (red music), nhạc nhẹ (light music), and music of electric combo bands, and the gradual lifting of restrictions in the late 1980s on previously prohibited music. Tracks 7 and 8 explore three solo recitals he gave in Hanoi in 1988, 1989, and 1994 that carved a space for Vietnamese jazz in the public sphere. Track 9 describes his career as a teacher of saxophone at the music conservatory in Hanoi. Tracks 11, 12, and 13 depict his increasingly prominent stature following several tours, the release of records, and nightly performances over many years at his club. Overall, Tracks 7, 8, and 11 offer the most about Quyền Văn Minh's approach to music practice and, in particular, how he draws on music he heard in northern Vietnam, especially among some ethnic minority peoples, to shape a Vietnamese jazz sound.Despite plentiful descriptions from the musician himself and extensive summaries of secondary literature, the book might have benefited from more rigorous engagement with typical research methods found in ethnomusicology and jazz studies. By this own admission, Tan-Tangbau asked few questions and largely allowed Quyền Văn Minh to speak about whatever he wished during their conversations (xiii). This creates a rather diffuse narrative with many unanswered questions concerning musical genre and style. Even after referencing the blues, big band, bebop, and free jazz and citing useful models of Polish and Japanese jazz, it remains unclear where Quyền Văn Minh sonically positions himself vis-à-vis other jazz musicians and how his jazz style changed over time. On one occasion, Tan-Tangbau describes a work titled “Ngẫu Hứng Tây Nguyên” (Central Highlands Improvisation) as “a new swinging sound for the Central Highlands, known for its distinct, colorful inhabitants . . . dwelling amid the rolling hills and mountainous valleys” (192). Instead of encountering an informative description of the sound of the tune, readers cringe at the simplistic imagery. I also hoped to read more considered arguments on improvisation. Tan-Tangbau adopts Quyền Văn Minh's assertion that folk and popular music in Vietnam “have their own frameworks that limit the possibility of improvisation” (188–89). On the contrary, traditional and folk music in Vietnam have musical structures that encourage improvisation—structures not that dissimilar from some jazz. This kind of mischaracterization should have been interrogated, if only to understand why Quyền Văn Minh believes this.At times contradictory and repetitive, some may struggle to complete the book, which is not to say that Quyền Văn Minh's life and work are boring. He is a pathbreaking musician, but moments emerge when Tan-Tangbau first overstates his case and later needs to revise previous statements. In track 7, for instance, Tan-Tangbau writes that Quyền Văn Minh's 1989 concert “was most likely the first time in the history of Vietnam that the word ‘jazz’ was uttered during a public broadcast without ideological disdain” (119). Tan-Tangbau later remembers that the Republic of Vietnam also had some jazz, so he qualifies this as “the first time since reunification” (130). I fear, then, that Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam will only be of niche interest to those who know the musician already. I encourage prospective readers with interests in Vietnamese cultural policy and jazz in socialist and post-socialist contexts to skim through the text and identify specific passages for closer reading. Individual chapters have fewer instances of internal repetition, so Tan-Tangbau and the publisher may have conceived of each track as a standalone text for potential use as a primary source document in classes on global jazz or the impact of state socialist policy on the arts. With a bit of imagination, then, readers will find good uses for the book

Art · Guitar · Jazz · Jazz dance · Linguistics · Literature · Management · Musical · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Vietnamese · Visual arts · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies