Intro to Mei Han interview, 2/4

2/4/07
Intro to Mei Han’s Interview

(To see the interview post, log in to NewOldMusic project site at http://humanitiesallied.updatelog.com/login. You’ll see a list of “Latest Activity,” with this post and the interview at the top of it. Either one will take you to the thread. There you can comment now or later, as you wish. When and if you do, you’ll automatically be added to the thread. You can remove yourself from it, on the right side of its screen, any time.)

Hi Mei. I have spent much of this past week immersed in your CDs and textual materials, and am ready to talk to you about it.

It has been a very beautiful and interesting experience. It does my heart much good to encounter beauty and imagination that is new to me, and it does my mind good to see that going in a direction I understand and appreciate on the terms of my own personal history. (By that, most generally, I’m thinking of your work’s synthesis of the different musical traditions and approaches long more familiar to me as more separate. I like your way better...)

But before I get into my specific discussion questions about your work, as I do with all the interviewees for this project I would like to fill you in some more about what I’m doing with this book, and how it’s developed so far...so you can get a sense of how your work might fit into that picture.

As your work shows holistically the disciplinary processes of the scholar and musician, composer and improviser, traditionalist and innovator, nationalist and globalist...I want this book to reflect the same kind of depth, rich texture, and fully rounded unity between too-often polarized aspects of human being. I want it to capture and convey the transpersonal poetry and mystery as much as the personal-psychological-biographical, the cultural/ethnographic, and the musicology of the music. It will be more than an academic or journalistic book about music, more than a fiction novel about music, though it will be those things in the usual sense too.

As my research for it has begun to unfold in real time, it’s taken on a life of its own based on who has responded to my initial queries, and how. I take this part of the work that is beyond my control as part of the way that it will take shape. My initial responses drew my first attentions to India, Russia, and Turkey. They went a little distance, as far as I could take them just now, until I get and process more materials.

I tell you this to let you know that in my mind is beginning to form what I think of as my “jazz map”—a concept I picked up from my friend and colleague John Szwed, and used in my last book. If I were writing a history of jazz in America, my jazz map would start with New Orleans, go to Chicago, New York, Kansas City, and so on. Each place would have distinctive narratives and features, time periods, people, musical features and profiles.

In my second book, the map expanded beyond America to Europe and Russia. With this one, it expands further into India, Indonesia, China, Korea, Japan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (to name the countries from which musicians and scholars and I have actually begun to exchange information and insights).

German bassist Peter Kowald said this to me in 1997: “It's interesting that Japanese have a word for 'know,' but they never use it. Roland Barthes' book The Empire of Science, is an interesting book for this. This is a wonderful book about Japan, which he describes as being not really about a real place in the world, but if it was it would be about Japan. Which is a very Japanese way to describe something.”

That is the sense in which my global jazz map (like this book) will be constructed—as much a mythical, Heffley-subjective China as a real one, in your case. The China that comes across in the sound of the music as it strikes my particular ears, as much as in all the historical, musicological, and personal information I hope to take in from and about you and your work.

Like you (and me), most of the musicians and scholars I’m talking to about these different cultures and traditions have roots there, but are also citizens or residents in the West, or their parents emigrated here, or they work and travel from their home base, or are Westerners who have put much of their life into those other places.

China is the biggest blank spot on the Asian parts of my jazz map. I have fleshed out Korea some with the help of Jin Hi Kim; Mongolia, through my study of Sainkho Namchylak; Japan, through a variety of musicians and dancers; and different Asian-American voices and histories through various people here. My entry point to all of them is that they’ve collaborated with the Americans and Europeans I knew or knew about first, or participated in the same general area of music that I did, in some way. My sense of and connections to those “places,” even though I still have far to go with them in this project, are more developed than those of China, in my mind.

But suddenly China is looming large, filling up my radar screen, in several coinciding ways. I am back on the Pacific Rim, where I was born and raised, after 12 years on the East Coast...and I discover you, ASZA, Randy Raine-Reusch not too far from my Portland home, going strong down the path I envisioned traveling for this book. Min Xiao-Fen and Wu Man responded as quickly and graciously to my initial queries, and we found we had mutual friends in the music world, and got off to a good start together. I take all this as a cue that China will be at the center of my plate here for awhile, starting with you.

That will serve as my lead-in to our interview. It is coming to you from the project site; you can follow the link here to post a comment to this post there, if you like. I will send you a second post soon with my interview questions; these will come from my private email to you, and we will communicate there privately until we’re done. When we are, I’ll ask your permission to post our exchange on the project site for others there to see and interact with with their own comments, if they wish.

Thanks, Mei...
MH