Jazz Perspectives Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2010, pp. 35–57 ISSN 1749–4060 print/1749–4079 online © 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17494061003694147 Deracinated Flower: Toshiko Akiyoshi’s “Trace in Jazz History” Kevin Fellezs Taylor and Francis RJAZ_A_469936.sgm 10.1080/17494061003694147 Jazz Perspectives 1749-4060 (print)/1749-4079 (online) Original Article 2010 Taylor & Francis 04 1 000000April 2010 KevinFellezs kfellezs@ucmerced.edu I’m trying to draw from my heritage and enrich the jazz tradition without changing it. I’m putting into jazz, not just taking out. Toshiko Akiyoshi 1 Across her musical career, the Japanese-American composer and pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi has pursued an ideal of creative transcultural “rootlessness.” She has devel- oped this aesthetic by rendering non-jazz influences, drawn most notably from Japa- nese musical aesthetics, within a jazz context. Across the 1970s, her active infusion of traditional Japanese musical elements into large-ensemble jazz compositions and arrangements reflected her changing attitude regarding both the creative aesthetics and musical affiliations enabled by nationality, ethnicity, and gender, on the one hand, and musical practices, repertoire, and instrumentation, on the other. By viewing Akiyoshi’s music through the perspective of this “rootless” ideal, we gain invaluable insight into the production and representation of jazz during the 1970s, a time when transcultural expression was changing the sounds as well as the meanings of the genre. In this essay, I explore both how Akiyoshi’s “rootless” creative aesthetic was a result of her musical experiences, and how this personal history reinforced her nascent mistrust of any presumptive links between authentic jazz and the contentious catego- ries of race, gender, and nationality. Moreover, I argue that the ways in which gender “rules” framed her work significantly affected her aesthetic and career decisions. Indeed, because her professional experiences undermined certain racialist, gendered, and nationalist ideas about jazz, her gradual rejection of those ideas enabled her to “enrich, without changing, the jazz tradition.” 2 I want to be clear: in this essay, I do not present her work or “rootlessness” as a paradigm of a color-blind aesthetic, nor do I mean to downplay the very racialized, gendered, and nationalistic ideologies through which Akiyoshi had to work. This essay is also not meant to be an apologia for a post- racial, post-nationalist multicultural rhetoric. Rather, I want to emphasize the constructed-ness of Akiyoshi’s creative work, particularly once she decided to move past the limits that Japanese jazz musicians had placed on their own artistic legitimacy within jazz. Additionally, her alienation from traditional Japanese culture and, in 1 Peter Rothbart, “Toshiko Akiyoshi,” Down Beat, August 1980, 15. 2 Ibid., 15. Downloaded By: [Fellezs, Kevin] At: 19:12 23 July 2010