Migrations of Soul: Afro-Latin Music in Cold War Thailand

Musical idioms of the Black Atlantic circulated through Southeast Asia from the late nineteenth onward. The Philippines, in particular, was home to syncopated styles including jazz, vaudeville, and marching band music in the early years of the twentieth century, owing largely to colonial encounters. From the Philippines, these forms moved to Thailand and other nearby countries in subsequent decades, in accordance with labor migration. However, the historical context of these musical idioms was obscured during and by the process of circulation, such that the origins of particular gestures (including rhythms, performative practices, and instrumentation) soon ceased to be associated with the Afro-Latin contexts from which they had emerged. This paper traces the circulation of some specific musical gestures from Cuba and other Latin American settings to the Philippines and then Thailand from 1898 through the 1950s. I focus on the music of the government-sponsored Thai band Suntaraporn as well as a globally oriented Northeastern Thai style called mor lam ploen (pleasurable mor lam) that emerged at the dawn of the Cold War. In doing so, I examine the process by which Afro-Latin musical idioms became commonplace in Thailand, even as the paths of their circulation remained opaque to most listeners. Drawing from musical analysis as well as primary source evidence, the paper argues that Southeast Asia was a site of what Maureen Mahon has called, in a different context, an ironic combination of “presence and obscurity.” Aesthetic ideas from the Black Atlantic were amply present in Southeast Asian music from the beginning of the twentieth century onward, even as Blackness itself has been continually regarded as alien.