California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads. By Mina Yang. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. xii, 184 pp. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03243-1.)

Abstract

There has been a flurry of historical scholarship on concert and popular music from California in recent years. For a long time, Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz, 1945–1960 (1992) and Steven Loza's Barrio Rhythm (1993) were largely solitary pioneers, but in the last ten years we have seen important contributions on jazz, country, blues, rock ‘n’ roll, opera, and formal concert music from Clora Bryant, Gerald Haslam, David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Catherine Parsons Smith, and others. Taken together, it is hard not to conclude that the musical history of California rivals, if not eclipses, that of the East Coast for richness and breadth, especially when the lens is focused on specific times and contexts. Mina Yang's California Polyphony is the latest addition to that bonanza and the first, perhaps, to shine a light across the quilt of ethnic musics that have found a home in the Golden State. Yang's purpose is twofold: to challenge the Euro- and Atlantic-centric nature of much music criticism and to document the state's multicultural musical heritage without masking the “deeper divisions and inequalities” (pp. 2–3). Yang writes that her book “foregrounds the very quality missing in the more specialized studies about California music—the multifaceted relationship with a racially and ethnically diverse population” (p. 3).