In the first forty years of his career, American pianist Keith Jarrett has established a reputation in multiple stylistic directions. Jarrett has typically incorporated influences as varied as bebop, country, rock, gospel, minimalism, baroque and classical styles into his often lengthy improvisations. Vital to his musical persona, but less obvious, is the influence North Indian classical music has had in shaping Jarrett's improvisatory strategies. Although he never formally studied Indian music, and although his instrument – the piano – is far removed from the conceptual backdrop of North Indian raga performance, Indian music was a central component in the artistic climate out of which his improvised solo recitals grew.

A cultural climate of global influences was the backdrop to the development of Jarrett's solo concerts. Therein, perhaps, lies one key to understanding the spell that this music has cast on large and international audiences. With this format, Jarrett tapped into the ambiance of a particular historic moment, which combined a desire for change with the discovery of spiritual and musical traditions outside the Western world.

In this paper I will demonstrate how explicit and implicit references to classical Indian principles of music making helped shape Jarrett's unique free solo concerts.

Popular music in Hong Kong is the production of a multi-faceted dynamic of international and local factors. Although there has been much attention to its growth from different perspectives, there has been no single study that systematically addresses the complicated interplay of the two interrelated processes of globalisation and localisation that lie behind its development. The main aim of this paper is to explore how social circumstances mediate musical communication among Hong Kong popular artists and audiences, and contribute to its growing sense of cultural identity – how locality emerges in the context of a global culture and how global facts take local form. Firstly, I propose a conceptual framework for understanding the cultural dynamics of popular music in terms of the discourse of globalisation and localisation. Secondly, I consider local practices of musical consumption and production. Thirdly, this paper discusses the impact of the global entertainment business on local popular music. I conclude with a summary of the effects of the interaction between globalisation and localisation on Hong Kong popular music.

Juan Garcia Esquivel's compositions and band arrangements of the late 1950s and early 1960s – his so-called ‘space-age bachelor pad music’ – feature exotic and futuristic instruments, dazzling stereo effects, textless vocalisations, and an array of colourful harmonic resources. This paper situates Esquivel's music within the venerable tradition of the Pastoral mode, a specialised narrative mode met in certain literary and musical works. I begin with an account of the musical pastoral, illustrated with reference to Renaissance madrigals, opera libretti, and especially French concert music from the turn of the twentieth century. In the music of ‘impressionist’ composers, pastoral conventions include a preponderance of ‘slithery’ sounds such as tremolo, trills, glissandi, gauzy timbres, colouristic harmonies and, especially, an over-abundance of motivic material. The steady parade of new themes, with little repetition, and rapidly changing orchestral colours impart a hedonistic atmosphere, consistent with the ‘fantasy of plenitude’ associated with the literary Pastoral. Esquivel's music, I claim, represents a transposition of this bucolic style, in which the ephemeral sounds of the flute and harp are transformed into their space-age counterparts: theremin, vibraphone, buzzimba, and the ‘zu-zu-zu’ of the Randy Van Horne Singers. Esquivel's music, I argue, reconstitutes the particular erotic configurations of classic pastoral: in place of fauns and nymphs are suave bachelors and their dates. The paper concludes with a discussion of representations of the ‘leisurely bachelor’ in other contemporaneous media.

This article considers the parameters and implications of the look of 1960s girl groups such as the Marvelettes, the Shirelles and the Shangri-Las through an examination of approximately two hundred images taken from title pages for songs, from LP covers, and from ads and publicity photos. An overwhelming majority of these visual images depict the members of an ensemble as equal and visually interchangeable, for the members dressed in the same clothes and accessories, sported the same hair style and stood in the same pose. This uniformity supported the chatty teenage dialogue which typified the girl group lyrics. Perhaps more importantly, it also invited the audience member to identify herself with the members of the group. Such a message of belonging was an important part of a marketing strategy aimed at the increasingly multiracial teen market of the period.

This essay explores the political significance of Balinese death/thrash fandom. In the early 1990s, the emergence of a death/thrash scene in Bali paralleled growing criticism of accelerated tourism development on the island. Specifically, locals protested the increasing ubiquity of Jakarta, ‘the centre’, cast as threatening to an authentically ‘low’, peripheral Balinese culture. Similarly, death/thrash enthusiasts also gravitated toward certain fringes, although they rejected dominant notions of Balinese-ness by gesturing elsewhere, toward a global scene. The essay explores the ways in which death/thrash enthusiasts engaged with local discourses by coveting their marginality, and aims to demonstrate how their articulations of ‘alien-ness’ contributed in important ways to a broader regionalism.

This article explores the interactions and tensions arising from a vibrant Canto-pop industry exported from Hong Kong to an interventionist nation-state of Singapore bent on discouraging the use of dialects by its ethnic Chinese population. Aside from highlighting the roles of technological and commercial factors behind the regional music networks, it seeks further to position this contemporary relationship within the larger historical and cultural context. The cultural politics involved here is not just an isolated phenomenon between two different cities. More importantly, the language policies of the Singapore government represent a haunting replication of the perennial attempts by central authorities in China to impose a more standardised linguistic and cultural identity on its dialect-speaking peripheries. This identity is based on not just the court language of Mandarin, but notions of ‘Chineseness’. This article goes on to question the extent to which Canto-pop could help foster a more hybridised identity transcending both the current dictates of the modern Singaporean state and the imagined cultural boundaries of a more historically entrenched Sino-centric realm.

On the way to my library there is a little shop named ‘World Music. The Oasis of Music from Asia, Africa’. One morning I stopped my bike and went in just curious to see what world music could be in my little town. In the racks even the smallest country from Asia or Africa was represented with one or two CDs, most of them produced in Paris or London. The other customers were half my age (around thirty to thirty-five, nobody over fifty or under twenty). The owner, an immigrant who has lived in Sweden for more than ten years, had this to say:

The youngsters do not come here, all my customers are between twenty-five and forty. There is a growing interest in world music: people with money are visiting foreign countries as tourists and when they come home they come to me, asking for artists or groups they have heard. Most of them have an academic background and speak English fluently.

The ‘Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop. By Murray Forman. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. 400 pp.

Global Noise: Rap and Hip-Hop Outside the USA. Edited by Tony Mitchell. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001. 352 pp.