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oai:drum.lib.umd.edu:1903/184362017-06-13T10:35:23Zcom_1903_2265com_1903_1611com_1903_2col_1903_2796col_1903_3

Witzleben, J. Lawrence Scally, William Donawerth Digital Repository at the University of Maryland University of Maryland (College Park, Md.) Music 2016-06-22T06:22:59Z 2016-06-22T06:22:59Z 2016 https://doi.org/10.13016/M2BF6H http://hdl.handle.net/1903/18436 In the early twenty-first century, jazz has a history in Japan of approximately 100 years. In contemporary Tokyo, Japanese musicians demonstrate their right to access jazz performance through a variety of musical and extra-musical techniques. Those accepted as fully professional and authentic artists, or puro, gain a special status among their peers, setting them apart from their amateur and part-time counterparts. Drawing on three months of participant-observation in the Tokyo jazz scene, I examine this status of puro, its variable definition, the techniques used by musicians to establish themselves as credible jazz performers, and some obstacles to achieving this status. I claim two things: first, aspiring puro musicians establish themselves within a jazz tradition through musical references to African American identity and a rhetoric of jazz as universal music. Second, I claim that universalism as a core aesthetic creates additional obstacles to puro status for certain musicians in the Tokyo scene. en Ideals, Aesthetics, and Practices of Professionalization in the Tokyo Jazz Scene Thesis Music Ethnomusicology Japan Jazz Tokyo open.access