“The Best Jazz Pianist of Asia”: Remembering Bubi Chen in Indonesian Grassroots Sound Archives

In this paper I consider how “awareness” campaigns affect grassroots archives and influence acts of remembering and heritagization. I focus on a case study of Bubi Chen, a Chinese Indonesian jazz pianist from Surabaya, who played throughout the 1950s-2000s and recorded on many national and several international record labels. Despite being described by an American critic as the top jazz pianist in Asia in the 1960s, Chen has only recently been lauded as an Indonesia national hero. His inclusion has been eerily silent, as his image has been circulated online, plastered on t-shirts, and painted on promotional vehicles, yet his recordings are still difficult to access. This adversely affects ability for contemporary Indonesian jazz musicians to draw on Chen as part of their acoustemology (Feld 2015), such as transcribing his improvisations and building upon Chen’s groundbreaking intercultural fusions of jazz and music inspired by the Indonesia’s traditional communities. I suggest awareness through grassroots campaigns acts as a double-edged sword that creates limiting negative feedback from long buried traumas, cooption through hegemonic economic structures, and institutional non-performatives (Ahmed 2006). In this presentation I will discuss awareness and archival value; the relationship of inalienable possessions in archival contexts and nostalgia; Lokananta’s popular music and little-known jazz recordings; and how the politics of preservation has the limited access of Indonesians to parts of their national heritage.