The artistry of Vietnamese jazz has never received thorough documentation, so Playing Jazz in Socialist Vietnam is a very welcome addition to music scholarship. The book features conversations held from 2009 to 2017 “over whiskeys and smokes” (xiii) between academic Stan BH Tan-Tangbau and self-taught jazz musician Quyền Văn Minh. Tan-Tangbau recorded, transcribed, and translated these conversations and then organized them into a narrative about Quyền Văn Minh's musical life. Essentially a curated autobiography, Tan-Tangbau foregrounds the musician's own words and occasionally provides contextual information, presenting specific anecdotes alongside the historical events of northern Vietnam over the second half of the twentieth century.
The book tells the story of the emergence of jazz in Vietnam through the experimentations of a hard-working musician who used the guitar, clarinet, and various saxophones to teach fellow musicians how to play and understand jazz. Tan-Tangbau organizes the narrative into thirteen “tracks.” Eleven focus on...
