This essay brings together my opening remarks as Director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University with my concluding thoughts offered as the final speaker on a panel with Hafez Modirzadeh and Jen Shyu at the Asian American Jazz: Past, Present, Future symposium held on February 17, 2023.
When I wrote “Silent But Not Silenced: Asian American Jazz” sixteen years ago, there was very little published on Asian American involvement in jazz.1 I drew from Susan Asai's “Cultural Politics: The African American Connection to Asian American Jazz-based Music”;2 Deborah Wong's Speak It Louder, with baritone saxophonist Fred Ho on its cover;3 George Yoshida's Reminiscing in Swingtime;4 and conversations with tenor saxophonist Francis Wong and pianist Jon Jang, among many other musicians, to help me hear the long history of Asian American musicians’ involvement with US-American popular music, and jazz in particular. Since...
