It’s been said that jazz, at its best, bridges differences and amplifies diverse voices. Sure enough, throughout its rich, 100-year history, jazz has been a flexible, open medium wielded by artists of all stripes for expressions of self-exploration, camaraderie, joy, and pain.
Still, some critics have noted that discussion and appreciation of jazz music remains attached to a Black and white racial binary, leaving out jazz musicians from other cultural backgrounds, like Asian Americans, who also find resonance in the symbolism of jazz and have their own approach to share. Relatedly, there are comparatively few Asian American jazz artists whose names are known widely.
That said, since the 1930s there have been Asian American musicians in jazz who’ve made their mark.
Early on, there were musicians like Afro-Cuban and Chinese-American trumpeter Fats Navarro, a pioneer from the bebop era, and Japanese-American saxophonist Gabe Baltazar, who played lead alto with the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the 1960s. And in the early ‘80s, a community of Asian American free jazz musicians in the San Francisco area created their own avant-garde jazz sound, reflective of their ancestry and inspired by the movement for Black liberation.
More recently, jazz musicians like Grammy-winning Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab, East Timorese-Taiwanese-American composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu, and Japanese-American trumpeter Jun Iida have combined jazz and the traditional music of their ancestral homes, creating their own fresh styles.
Seattle’s own Josh Hou, a Chinese-Malaysian-American jazz accordionist and composer, exists within and beyond this legacy. His new record, Diaspora, explores his multicultural identity and diasporic experience. Hou does this through original compositions and jazz-adapted renditions of traditional and pop melodies from his Chinese and Malaysian heritages — like the Qing dynasty folk song “Colorful Clouds Chasing the Moon” (彩雲追月) and “Rasa Sayang,” a Malay folk song he heard often when he lived in Malaysia’s capital city.
The record features Hou alongside Seattle-based musicians Ray Larsen on trumpet, Alex Chuang on cello, bassist Kelsey Mines, Tai Taitano on drums, and guest artists Leanna Keith on flute and Brian Bermudez on tenor saxophone. Hou and his collaborators will play a show at Theatre Off Jackson on August 18, the day the new album is released.
“Jazz has shaped how I understand music, how I understand harmony, how I understand how to express with improvisation, and all of this has been incredibly valuable to me, and I've taken those and used them as tools to interact with music from my culture and my heritage,” Hou said.
Hou's diaspora
Born in America, Hou lived his childhood years in both Beijing, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia before returning to the United States at 16. Diaspora, and Hou’s two previous solo records, Feeling of Home and Bilingualism, each capture different angles of Hou’s unique upbringing, rich with different cultures, languages, geopolitical histories, and musical styles.
Diaspora reflects those meaningful layers as it combines Eastern melodies he loves and that are vital to his cultural identity, like the famous Chinese orchestral tune, “Theme from The Butterfly Lovers,” with the combo instrumentation, harmonies, and structure of American jazz.
“I do think that in any culture, people are attached to the songs that they grew up with, that their family grew up with...and so it's natural for people to want to play those musics and represent where they come from,” Hou said.
Making and releasing music about the experience of being Asian American and existing in diaspora — a term which describes a group who share a cultural and regional origin but are living away from their ancestral homeland — is also inescapably political in a country with a long history of anti-Asian racism, both entrenched and overt in nature.
On CDBaby, a music distribution platform that assists artists in getting their music on streaming platforms like Spotify, Hou has been unable to present the album art and track names from his records in both English and Chinese. This is due to their policy that song titles and album names only be presented in one language.
“It makes it tough, because so much of the experience of being in diaspora for me is inhabiting multiple languages,” Hou said. “I don’t want my music to only be in Chinese because then it cuts off the community I’m connected to here. But having titles only in English feels more cut off from the heritage I’m trying to connect to.”
Politics come through musically on Diaspora, too. For instance, “Eight” is a beautiful yet unsettling track Hou wrote to commemorate the lives of the eight people, including six Asian women, who were murdered in Atlanta-area spas and massage parlors in March 2021 by a white male gunman. Hou said he wrote that song in tribute to the victims and as a reminder to himself “to continue the fight against the white supremacist, capitalist, colonial structures” at the root of that violence.
Finding his own musical voice
At the same time, Hou doesn’t see Diaspora as a project that’s necessarily in conversation with the Asian American jazz movement of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which emerged in resistance to white supremacy and colonialism. Hou deeply respects, but is not musically drawn to that Bay Area-based cohort, which included Chinese-American musicians like Jon Jang and Fred Ho.
In truth, because there aren’t many nationally and internationally recognized Asian Americans jazz musicians, Hou has struggled to find much Asian American jazz at all that he identifies with. This is partly why Hou organized an Asian American Jazz Showcase at the Royal Room in 2023 – to elevate and spread awareness about local Asian Americans in jazz he admires, like Jun Iida and Evan Captain.
“I hear about [Asian American jazz] less organically, unless I am actively searching for it,” Hou said.
Rather than specifically responding to existing conceptions of Asian American jazz, Diaspora is rooted in Hou’s interest in American jazz, Chinese and Malaysian folk and pop music, and the impetus to understand what it means to be from three distinct cultures all at once. (He’s not alone on this journey of self-discovery. According to a recent Pew Research study, many Asian Americans strive to redefine themselves outside of the U.S.-created pan-ethnic Asian American identity, though this process looks different for everyone.)
“Asian American identity in the political landscape is very confusing and pretty poorly defined. We are not a monolith. We're huge and extremely diverse and our struggles are related, but also not the same. Therefore, the music is going to reflect that too,” Hou said.
“For me, very much, making this music is a reflection of where my current thoughts of racial identity diaspora are, and a lot of that happens in conversation with other people in diaspora, sometimes other artists, but not necessarily in jazz specifically.”
New album reflects on racial identity, cultural history
Such conversations surface in Hou’s original compositions on Diaspora. For example, Hou was commissioned by The Bushwick Book Club, a Seattle arts nonprofit, to write a composition based on a collection by Chinese American poet Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense, which explores her relationship to diaspora, familial ties, language, capitalism, and cultural history. Hou’s poignant, lyrical song, “Mostly of Distance,” ruminates on a line from the title poem: “We who are made mostly of distance.”
“It’s a line that describes the...forever tension [of] being pulled towards homeland yet feeling distant from it, a constant longing from afar,” Hou said. “My work has often consisted of reaching towards homeland.”
Not all Diaspora's explorations are as serious. “Wren’s Happy Day," written for Hou’s goddaughter who is also of Chinese heritage, is a jovial tune carried by Larsen’s nimble trumpeting. The bouncy track, “Double Dog,” considers Hou’s dog and his Malaysian friend’s dog running around a park together.
“It's not always that deep,” Hou said, adding that he’s inspired by “my experiences with the community and the friends and the family that I love...and digging into being in our heritage and culture together.”
Many of the songs on Diaspora are touchstones in Chinese and Malay culture, but rarely encountered organically in Seattle. Hou finds belonging and inspiration in helping his community more readily access their roots, and by intertwining these songs with the jazz tradition on the new record
Hou doesn't hear many of the Chinese "classics" he grew up with played in the U.S. So he started to play them himself, and that has resonated with people, especially Chinese Americans.
“The idea is of connecting to their family and their heritage and remembering, connecting to this trajectory of their family's path and their culture's path. That's just such a powerful experience for people."
