Scholarship on Asian American jazz is often found at the margins of academia. Jazz remains an uncommon object of inquiry in Asian American studies, and considerations of race and ethnicity in jazz studies typically remain fixed within a white/Black racial binary. To my knowledge, there is no “Center for Asian American Jazz Studies” housed in any university music department, and there is certainly not a degree that one can receive in Asian American jazz performance. Yet those who have made this music central to their lives and research have embraced its relative marginality—often letting the silences, absences, and institutional erasures of varyingly entwined “Asian American” and “jazz” mainline discourses act as an operative framework for consideration and problematization. While lacking a nominal institutional home, scholars and musicians who have taken Asian American jazz as a focus have carved out a niche position in their respective specialties and (sub)disciplines, cultivating an...
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