Book Review

Wong's book takes an ethnographic approach in exploring the social and political construction of Asian American identities through music. Case studies include Laotian song, Cambodian music drama, karaoke, Vietnamese pop, Japanese American taiko, Asian American hip hop, Asian American listeners, and Asian American improvisational music. Wong draws on feminist theories of performativity, viewing musical performance is a form of cultural work with the potential to articulate and affect identity politics, especially with regard to interethnic contact.

To Duval, German jazz vibraphonist Christopher Dell approached writing Prinzip Improvisation ("The Improvisation Principle") as he approaches performing music, preferring improvisation to premeditated structure. The book is therefore an attempt to grapple with the problem of using language to describe jazz' fluid musical processes, and a nonlinear text which an active reader may choose to interpret in his or her own way.

To Scott Thompson, Prévost "nail[s] to the mast" the idea that musical practice can help to foster communitarianism. For Prévost, music at its root is comprised of the social relationships between those involved in its creation. By championing communitarian social relations in particular, Prévost identifies operational aspects of improvisation as the means by which to enact such relations in the process of music-making, during which musicians actively search for appropriate musical responses in dialogue with those around them.

Guthrie Ramsey's Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop explores the lationship between music and African American identity. Surveying an array of black music styles, Ramsey asks how African Americans have identified themselves in music. He draws upon his experience as a jazz and gospel pianist and his family's participation in the Great Migration to generate an ethnographic method that positions family narrative at the intersection of racial identity and musical expression.