Gramophone records and the eclectic sounds of the Asian port city

The following is an adapted excerpt from a new book by Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920-1940 (Cambridge, 2016). The hardback version will be available in Asia this September (and hopefully in paperback next year). The author will also be giving a talk at Pansodan Scene on August 24 at 7pm.

 

In 1941, a story appeared in Rangoon’s University College Annual depicting an ‘old-fashioned Burman’ shocked to hear ‘Johnny’, a popular radio DJ adored by the Burmese public, introducing his audience to the Swiss art of yodelling. The narrator assured him:

This is the modern trend in Burmese music. Like the modern trend, you know, in Chinese and Japanese and Siamese music. The whole East is going Far West. And Johnny is nothing. Listen, tomorrow I’ll bring you a whole set of records such as the younger generation swoons over… I’ll give you an idea of what it’s like. There’s Morning Tin Tin… Then film star May Than… But you must have the latest – positively the latest Topical songs by Ma Kyi Aung… all put to sweet English tunes.

The changing tastes of a young generation marked the sensory transformation of the modern Asian city throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The writer blamed the flooding of the gramophone market with ‘Burmese renderings of English songs, well mixed, and loudly accompanied by Hawaiian guitars, Hill Billy Banjos, Harlem Saxophones and Cornets. What a tragedy if this trend does not stop before swing and hot-cha comes creeping in – and how unbearably comic it must be to others.’

Comic as it seemed, Burmese musicians loved adapting punchy, standard jazz tunes, usually created for musicals and vaudeville acts in America. Like musicians around the world, they transformed them into something fresh and modern, adapted for new audiences. With the new availability of the gramophone, the same phenomenon was occurring in Africa, Latin America, and East Asia.

The gramophone industry depended on revenues from an emerging global market. Newly minted corporations such as the Victor Talking Machine Company, the Gramophone Company, and the Compagnie Phonographique Frères fanned out across the globe from the turn of the century searching for new sounds and consumers. They were highly dependent on local agents. When Fred Gaisberg arrived in India in 1902 to begin recording local songs for the Gramophone Company to sell to the Asian market, he was helped by Amarendra Dutt and Jamshedi Madan, the doyens of the Calcutta theatre world. After recording several hundred titles in Calcutta, he moved eastwards, setting up ad-hoc recording studios in his hotel rooms and using local agents.

Between 1900 and 1910, the Gramophone Company had made 4,410 recordings in India, 508 in Burma, 121 in Malaya, 97 in Siam, and 93 in Java. The recordings were sent back to Europe, processed and shipped back to local agents (such as Solomon and Co. in Rangoon) along with the company’s gramophones. Columbia and RCA followed the trend (Gramophone became ‘His Master’s Voice’ – HMV – in 1924). Sheer market capitalism, motivated by the need to sell as many records as possible, had resulted in the preservation of diverse musical traditions and the exposure of local Asian audiences to new forms of both Western and Asian music.

Asian musicians brought jazz to a new generation. Many refrains had a global resonance traceable to standard chord changes, but localised through the addition of new melodies, experiments with different instruments, and linguistic and lyrical adaptation. Burmese musicians created their own forms of hybrid popular music, engaging audiences by mixing both traditional and modern styles. They worked with popular Burmese women singers such as Ma Than E and Ma Kyi Aung. As the Burmese music scholar Kit Young told me, Burmese melodies were mixed with a cha-cha rhythm on the piano, or a western melody with Burmese lyrics that worked with Burmese drum patterns.

Photo via Aung Soe Min’s collection

In Burmese Family, Mi Mi Khaing described Burmese popular music in the 1930s: ‘The technique was to take the refrain of a Western jazz tune as the repetitive theme, with a slight alteration to the rhythm, and to embroider this extensively with a slapdash quality of Burmese turns of melody.’ The Isle of Capri, a sentimental jazz tune with a slight polka rhythm, popularised by the British crooner Al Bowly in 1934, was transformed into a rich, textured melody, sung in a girlish garble by the charismatic Ma Kyi Aung in the song ‘Tea Party’.

This was not a simple case of copying the West. The content of the song had political purchase, with its lyrics attacking colonial culture. As Khaing says, a ‘sickly account of a romantic meeting in isle of Capri converted into a satirical skit on the Rangoon fashion of giving garden tea-parties in the English manner.’ The tune was expanded, re-worked, and became an instant success, with the original song chords remaining only as a faint refrain.

The transformation of the ‘Isle of Capri’ into a parody of colonial culture was similar to the practice of Filipino jazz musicians, who created an atmosphere of irony, humour, and carnival during their performances as they toured Asia. Filipino jazz musicians were commissioned to provide the latest American music at hotels and dance halls in Singapore, Penang, Rangoon and Bangkok. The Filipino contribution to the development of ‘national’ music cultures in Southeast Asia is evident in their influences on aspiring performers in the 1930s, such as P. Ramlee, Malaysia’s most beloved performer in the 1950s. Ramlee followed the latest Filipino bands, listening to each number, comparing their approaches, techniques and styles.

Musicians in port-cities drew from an eclectic range of influences. The vibrant streetscape of colonial Penang included Western popular music, Chinese opera, Malay and Tamil songs, and Indonesian kronchong. Bangsawan orchestras, characterised by their flexibility, incorporated new instruments from the saxophone to Spanish maracas to the Malay rembana, a frame drum with possible origins in the Middle East.

Burmese orchestras frequently incorporated foreign instruments such as the piano, violin, mandolin, Hawaiian slide guitar, Chinese lute, banjo, experimenting in their accompaniment of silent movies. In Bangkok, Western show tunes, jazz, and tango became popular via the gramophone. Kru Eua Sunthornsanan (1910-1981) returned from studies in England to work in the Fine Arts Department, where he was first introduced to jazz music. Eua combined jazz and classical Thai music in scores for new Thai movies.

The Great Po Sein

In Burma and Penang, popular theatre stars reached new audiences through records. Major theatre stars, such as Po Sein, helped to transform traditional popular theatre using the capital from such records. Around 1910, partly to release him from a contract with a shrewd theatrical agent and partly to introduce him to new influences and techniques, the Gramophone Company sent Po Sein to India.

As Maung Khe Sein and Joseph Whitley relate in The Great Po Sein, Po Sein travelled to Jaipur to see Kathak dance, finding similarities with the rhythmic dances of Burmese villages, and to an Indian circus in Kompur, where he learned that through a performance hall one could watch a performance without the distractions of an outdoor setting and facilitate the collection of admission tickets. In Allahabad and Calcutta, Po Sein witnessed scenes from the Ramayana. He was inspired to return to Burma and begin the dramatization of the Jataka stories on the life of Buddha. By the 1920s, Po Sein had acquired a troupe of 180 dancers and introduced complicated group dances modelled on those of the Siamese Royal Court. Other innovations included the introduction of more intimate partner dancing on stage.

The newfound, public intimacy between men and women was visible in dance halls throughout Asia and the wider world. In Britain, popular music signalled changes in gender relations, with the couple as an expressive unit, and music and dance playing a mediating role.  In Penang, bangsawan theatre featured more emotional expression than traditional wayang (puppet) theatre, with stage lovers using endearments and being able to ‘touch hands, giggle, and sit next to each other’, while nonetheless showing emotional control and restraint. The creation of new, ‘authentic’ national popular cultures, drawing on a range of influences from abroad, also promoted more liberal gender relations.

In Penang, the popular musical theatre form of bangsawan came to symbolise a hybrid and authentically cosmopolitan form of Straits culture, fusing a number of diasporic, foreign, and local influences. Bangsawan emerged in the nineteenth century out of the mingling Parsee theatre with Arab and Malay influences, and later, Western sub-plots and Italian opera inspired by touring vaudeville and operetta troupes.

The Malaysian musicologist Tan Sooi Beng describes the genre’s appeal to a multi-ethnic audience, where an evening could feature a Hindustani or Arabic fairy-tale, a Shakespearean tragedy, a Chinese romance, and an English or Dutch play – although performers would always speak in Malay, understood by most of the audience. The variety of music and dance numbers included not only a diverse range of Asian music, but also ‘exotic’ numbers such as Hungarian, Cossack, and Hawaiian dances.

Bangsawan actors and actresses learned the latest dances (the tango, blues, Charleston, foxtrot, quickstep, waltz, and the rumba) from the talkies, which were later emulated in Penang’s dance halls. While bangsawan grew especially popular with young people, it also began losing not only its audiences but its greatest stars to the cinema. Top performers were lured to the big cinema houses to become film stars.

Both Asian and Western music surged through the gramophone and the radio, injecting new life into leisure entertainment, particularly among the urban young. In Penang, the journalist George Bilainkin unwittingly unravelled the myth of the ‘legendary’ life of European expatriates in the tropics in his observations of bored expatriate barflies and lonely hearts, placing them in sharp contrast to the vibrant, leisurely life of Asians and Eurasians, who could be found drinking, gossiping, and listening to gramophone music until the early hours of the morning. Similarly, in Rangoon, the 1941 story described ‘gramophones blaring out tunes from the latest Burmese records on Dalhousie Street in West Rangoon.’

Rangoon and Bangkok residents complained of the sounds of Chinese opera from the speakers of neighbours’ wireless radio. Records of popular Tamil theatre performers also made their way to the Straits with Tamil migrants. Just as the young were those most willing to seize new forms of popular culture that brought them in touch with a wider, modern world, so did migrant communities seize the opportunity to connect to home through the wide availability of Chinese and Tamil music.

New technologies of sound and an eclectic mix of styles, brought in by migrants and the young, permeated the city. While Europeans described its downtown core and ethnic enclaves as mysterious, exotic and underground, the Asian city was quickly becoming a marker of cosmopolitan modernity, characterised by its youth, dynamism, and diversity.

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