Overview

A study of the 1974 album Kogun by the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band, this book assesses not just its importance in jazz history but also its part in public remembrance of World War II in Japan. In 1974 a Japanese soldier emerged from the Philippine jungle where he had hidden for three decades, unconvinced that World War II had ended. Later that year, the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band released its first album, Kogun (“solitary soldier”), the title track of which adopted music from medieval Japanese no theater for the first time in a jazz context as aural commemoration of his experience. At a time when big band jazz was mostly a vehicle for nostalgia and no longer regarded as a vital art, the album was heralded as a revelation. Kogun elevated Akiyoshi’s reputation as a brilliant composer/arranger and earned Tabackin acclaim as a compelling, versatile improviser on tenor saxophone and flute.

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9798765109007

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E. Taylor Atkins is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, USA. He is the author of A History of Popular Culture in Japan (Bloomsbury 2017; 2nd. ed., 2022), Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (2010), and Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001), and editor of Jazz Planet (2003).

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