Welcome to the fourth installment of Bangkok After Dark, the story of an intimate relationship between Thailand and the United States during the Cold War, told at the level of nightlife. If you’re enjoying this series, please share the link to sign up:
Last week’s post described Maurice Rocco in New York in the mid-to-late 1930s. These are the years when he left the American midwest and became a breakout star on the east and west coast, in nightclubs and feature films.
For this week, I promised a discussion that would bring Rocco’s story in the 1940s. But we’ll save that for the next post on August 2nd (next week I’m taking a break while on vacation!). This week I want to say a few words about how Rocco was, even as early as the 1930s, already on an international trajectory. While there was never any guarantee that Rocco would end up in Thailand, and nor were the person and place fated for each other, the fact that Rocco would eventually become an expatriate in Bangkok is not at all surprising. American jazz and show business might have seemed distinct from places like Bangkok in the 1920s and 1930s, but in fact they never were.
In an excellent history of jazz in China, Andrew F. Jones notes how American and European gramophone companies sought markets in Asia as early as the turn of the twentieth century. Just a few years into the 1900s, American recording engineer F.W. Gaisberg traveled across the continent recording local music in many countries, Thailand included. And records were marketed and sold actively in China, where a culture of listening to recorded music in public places quickly emerged in, for example, movie theaters and shops. In other words, the powerful currents of global media exchange we tend to associate with the past few decades were already well underway.
One example of this in Thailand is a style called Lam ploen. lam ploen was first created around 1945, in a lower northeastern Thai province that is today called Ubon Ratchathani, less than 100 kilometers from Laos. It was initially performed by troupes who traveled from city to city playing on stages. These troupes and their shows were also strongly influenced by a Central Thai theatrical form called liké, which was known for its colorful costumes and dramatic stories. Hearing and listening to live lam ploen was akin to watching a musical soap opera. In all of these ways, lam ploen was something very new in the post-war period.
Songs like ngap ngep (งับแงบ) by Wangsatan Singthaam and Boonpheng Faipiewchai (วังสถาน สิงห์ธรรม และ หมอลำบุญเพ็ง ไฝผิวชัย), recorded as a 78-speed record in 1945, were among the first to articulate lam ploen both rhythmically and melodically:
Since most lam ploen troupes were primarily live performers rather than recording artists in the 1940s and 1950s, relatively few recordings exist from the genre’s earliest years. Other classics, including Chawiwan Damnoern’s lam ploen gaew naa maa (ลำเพลินแก้วหน้าม้า) and Por Roongsin’s khun chang khun pen (ขุนช้างขุนแผน) were performed on stage in the 1950s but only recorded later, in the 1960s or even 1970s. lam ploen enthusiastically engaged global music, including performance ideals drawn from Afro-Latin contexts. lam ploen was theatrical and entertaining -- indeed the word ploen means “pleasurable” -- and it turned away from Buddhist didacticism and towards live performance and eventually studio recording. Percussionists played conga drums or jazz kits, with syncopations that indexed Latin American ballroom music. Vocalists sang secular lyrics instead of reciting sacred texts.
Here is lam ploen gaew naa maa, which has a particularly lovely groove starting around 3:00:
lam ploen and its globalist tendencies date to the very earliest moments of the Cold War.
Lam ploen emerged under the modernizing government of Field Marshall Plaek Phibunsongkram, who promoted international music and its ideologies from the late 1930s through the late 1950s. Phibun hoped to create a centralized form of “Thainess” through a series of mandates that would align Thailand with the social and governmental modes of Europe, including its fascist countries. But Phibun’s efforts were driven less by political principle than by a desire to reap the geopolitical benefits of appearing modern. His mandates outlined rules for everyday apparel, gender relations, public/private divisions, food (his administration invented pad thai, a symbolic national dish, in the 1930s), and individual spending habits. These rules were designed to make Thailand culturally and politically legible to the west. Phibun was also notably concerned with music. Among other measures, he commissioned a European-style national anthem, ordering that it be broadcast (and dutifully attended by everyone) twice daily in nearly every public place nationwide. This twice-daily ritual still occurs.
And yet despite its cosmopolitanism, lam ploen did not quite square with Phibun’s modernizing vision. Put bluntly, it was too rustic. Instead Phibun promoted Bangkok-based groups like the Suntaraporn band, who incorporated samba, cha-cha-cha, and rumba into a jazz-inflected amalgam to showcase the nation’s contemporaneity. Suntaraporn were in effect a propaganda tool of the Government Public Relations Department (GPRD), and the music they played was coded as elite. Through their interpolation of ballroom rhythms and Dixieland jazz into luk krung (city music) and phleng thai sakon (Thai international music), Suntaraporn showcased Phibun’s vision of Thai modernity. The band was hired to play in some of Bangkok’s most lavish royal spaces, including the Blue Hall Ballroom in Bangkok’s Lumphini Park, and many of the band members were recruited precisely because they had existing connections with the state bureaucracy. Suntaraporn’s recordings blanketed Thai radio and television in the 1940s, their lyrics full of highbrow language and other symbols of the worldly place that Phibun wanted Bangkok to be. And as media systems -- particularly radio -- increasingly stretched to the provinces, Suntaraporn as sound and symbol carried implications for the nascent project of Thai national identity.
lam ploen musicians were very much aware of Suntaraporn and the innovations that they had freighted into the country, largely as a result of the development of new provincial radio networks that carried music from Bangkok into Isan. The group Atsawin Simok (อัศวินสีหมอก), for example, who may have been the first lam ploen group, originated in the Laotian capital of Vientiane in the 1930s, and performed in Bangkok in the 1930s and 1940s. Led by a mor lam named Kammun Soda (คำมูล โสดา), Atsawin became the icons of a new sound called lam viang -- that is, mor lam in the style of Vientiane, the capital of Laos. The group left Bangkok at an unknown point, and relocated to the central province of Suphanburi before returning later to Isan. Atsawin eventually went into the studio. Their recordings burst with worldliness.
If the influence lam ploen took from Afro-Latin music seems an oddity, it is worth tracing this history a bit further back, from a time even before Maurice Rocco was born. Several members of the Suntaraporn band were Filipino, including Melanio “Billy” Flores, a multi-instrumentalist who played guitar in the group.
Dixieland jazz had been present in the Philippines since the late 19th century, likely introduced by Black American soldiers stationed there during the period when the United States laid claim to the nation. Pinoy (a synonym for Filipino) musicians were seen in Thailand as exotic, so Flores’ presence in the band was an asset in itself. But Flores was also an exceptional jazz guitarist, having played in cabarets and clubs in many global places -- Cebu in the Philippines; Madagascar for Dutch patrons; Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka); Bombay, India; and Singapore -- before arriving in Thailand. Having Filipino members skilled in an international style like jazz helped brand Suntaraporn as cosmopolitan. But Flores also brought a keen sense of Black Atlantic musical performance to the group, and in turn to Thailand itself.
The globalization of jazz and other popular musics around 1900 had profound effects in Southeast Asia. Jazz and Latin music would become crucial symbols of modernity, so potent that they would be woven into Thai politics at every level. Beyond Suntaraporn’s success as a propaganda vessel of the Thai government, and beyond Phibun’s careful management of national music, King Rama IX was famous as a composer and jazz clarinetist. Rocco was not famous enough to be known in Thailand in the 1930s, but jazz certainly was. The career Rocco was building in the United States in the 1930s was, in real time, comfortably suited to seemingly faraway places like Bangkok. By the time he got there in the 1960s, the country was ready for him. In fact it had been ready for many decades.