The Ambivalent Freedoms of Indonesian Jazz

Abstract

This paper presents an historical outline and discusses the contemporary meanings of Indonesian jazz. Transformations in the jazz scene following the transition from Indonesia's first to second totalitarian regime (1964–1967) are linked to market reforms that opened the nation to increased Western investment and media. Jazz later played a conspicuous role in the tumultuous dissolution of dictatorial rule and the introduction of democratic reform. For some Indonesians, jazz embodied the complex and ambivalent transformations of freedom itself as Indonesia emerged as the world's third largest democratic state at the turn of the twenty-first century. During the reform era Indonesian jazz has been marked by a tension between adherence to American models and efforts to localize it through hybrid experiments that embody new collectivities in the reintroduction of civil society.