Asian-American jazz

Asian-American jazz is a musical movement in the United States begun in the 20th century by Asian-American jazz musicians.

Although Asian Americans had been performing jazz music almost since that music's inception, it was not until the late 20th century when a distinctly Asian-American brand of jazz began to develop. Gabe Baltazar and Paul Togawa were early jazz musicians established in the 1950s Los Angeles jazz scene. In the 1970s and early 1980s, West Coast musicians such as Gerald Oshita, Glenn Horiuchi, Anthony Brown, Jon Jang, Mark Izu, and Russel Baba, as well as New Yorkers like Fred Ho and Jason Kao Hwang, began to create a hybrid music that was reflective of their ancestral heritages and experiences as Asian Americans, but which was at the same time also rooted in jazz, a music of African American origin. Most of the first musicians associated with the movement were of Japanese or Chinese ancestry, though more recently musicians of Filipino, Vietnamese, and Indian descent have also become active.

Asian Americans

Asian Americans are Americans of Asian descent. The U.S. Census Bureau definition of Asians refers to a person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent. It includes people who indicated their race(s) as "Asian" or reported entries such as "Chinese", "Indian", "Filipino", "Korean", "Japanese", "Vietnamese", and "Other Asian" or provided other detailed Asian responses. They comprise 4.8% of the U.S. population alone, while people who are Asian combined with at least one other race make up 5.6%As of 2012, Asian Americans had the highest educational attainment level and median household income of any racial demographic in the country, and in 2008 they had the highest median household income overall of any racial demographic.

Terminology

As with other racial and ethnicity based terms, formal and common usage have changed markedly through the short history of this term.

Prior to the late 1960s, people of Asian ancestry were usually referred to as Oriental, Asiatic, and Mongoloid. The term Asian American was coined by historian Yuji Ichioka, who is credited with popularizing the term, to frame a new "inter-ethnic-pan-Asian American self-defining political group" in the late 1960s.

List of jazz festivals

This is an incomplete list of notable jazz music festivals, broken down geographically. The festivals mentioned here should have at least some international recognition. This list generally excludes multi-genre festivals with only a partial focus on jazz, though such fusion festivals may be listed under individual subtopics of Jazz festivals by country.

Jazz has appeared in various festivals since the turn of the century, after the genre originated in African American communities during the late 19th and early 20th century. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on different national, regional, and local musical cultures, giving rise to many distinctive styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. In the 1930s, swing big bands, Kansas City jazz, and Gypsy jazz were the prominent styles. Bebop and cool jazz emerged in the 1940s, and the 1950s saw free jazz, hard bop, and modal jazz. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock rhythms, electronic instruments and the highly amplified stage sound of rock, with large festivals exhibiting the sounds in response. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called "smooth jazz" became successful, and other jazz styles include Afro-Cuban jazz and various fusion genres.

Asian

Asian refers to anything related to the continent of Asia, especially Asian people.

Asian may also refer to:

Jazz

Jazz is a music genre that originated from African American communities of New Orleans in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the common bonds of African American and European American musical parentage with a performance orientation. Jazz spans a period of over a hundred years, encompassing a very wide range of music, making it difficult to define. Jazz makes heavy use of improvisation, polyrhythms, syncopation and the swing note, as well as aspects of European harmony, American popular music, the brass band tradition, and African musical elements such as blue notes and African-American styles such as ragtime. Although the foundation of jazz is deeply rooted within the black experience of the United States, different cultures have contributed their own experience to the music as well. Intellectuals around the world have hailed jazz as "one of America's original art forms".