Ideals, Aesthetics, and Practices of Professionalization in the Tokyo Jazz Scene

In the early twenty-first century, jazz has a history in Japan of approximately 100 years. In contemporary Tokyo, Japanese musicians demonstrate their right to access jazz performance through a variety of musical and extra-musical techniques. Those accepted as fully professional and authentic artists, or puro, gain a special status among their peers, setting them apart from their amateur and part-time counterparts. Drawing on three months of participant-observation in the Tokyo jazz scene, I examine this status of puro, its variable definition, the techniques used by musicians to establish themselves as credible jazz performers, and some obstacles to achieving this status. I claim two things: first, aspiring puro musicians establish themselves within a jazz tradition through musical references to African American identity and a rhetoric of jazz as universal music. Second, I claim that universalism as a core aesthetic creates additional obstacles to puro status for certain musicians in the Tokyo scene

Sounds of the Compact City: A Musical Urban Ethnography of Toyama City, Japan

My dissertation explores the sonic and musical aspects of social life in Toyama City, a Japanese city of about 400,000 people that has recently been connected to Tokyo by a high-speed rail line. To support an aging and shrinking population while moving toward greater environmental sustainability and resilience in the face of a changing climate, the Toyama City government has enacted a series of programs termed the “Compact City Plan” to improve ease of access to public transportation and vital facilities while encouraging older residents to live in designated “residence encouragement zones” close to major transportation hubs. Drawing on extended in-person engagement, correspondence, and examination of online materials, I discuss the interplay of music, sound, and the natural and constructed environment. What emerges is a picture of social life in the city, animated and given meaning by individuals, communities, and patterns of movement in both its everyday life and in moments of celebration or catastrophe. This dissertation includes a detailed exploration of the sensory experience of the Toyama City center, an overview of several musical webs that rely on the movement of people into, out of, and within Toyama City, an overview of other webs that have coalesced around key individuals, and an account of several important festivals that occurred or were cancelled in 2019–2020. Tying these threads together is a discussion of the co-constituency of the human-made and natural environments and the ways that social worlds rise and fall from them. This is a study of both the connections and interruptions that characterize life in Toyama City. Part-way through my fieldwork period, I had to return to the U.S. as the spreading COVID-19 pandemic threatened safety, travel, and the operations of everyday life. This shift to remote fieldwork, however, also allows attention to Toyama’s connections and self-presentation to the rest of the world. Toyama is both similar to other small cities and unique, and this study of the city’s diverse sonic and musical life across multiple genres and in both local and virtual domains provides a model for making sense of the material life of a small city