Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band's Kogun

A study of the 1974 album Kogun by the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band, this book assesses not just its importance in jazz history but also its part in public remembrance of World War II in Japan.
In 1974 a Japanese soldier emerged from the Philippine jungle where he had hidden for three decades, unconvinced that World War II had ended. Later that year, the Toshiko Akiyoshi-Lew Tabackin Big Band released its first album, Kogun ("solitary soldier"), the title track of which adopted music from medieval Japanese no theater for the first time in a jazz context as aural commemoration of his experience. At a time when big band jazz was mostly a vehicle for nostalgia and no longer regarded as a vital art, the album was heralded as a revelation. Kogun elevated Akiyoshi's reputation as a brilliant composer/arranger and earned Tabackin acclaim as a compelling, versatile improviser on tenor saxophone and flute.

E. Taylor Atkins is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, USA. He is the author of A History of Popular Culture in Japan (Bloomsbury 2017; 2nd. ed., 2022), Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910-1945 (2010), and Blue Nippon: Authenticating Jazz in Japan (2001), and editor of Jazz Planet (2003).

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. The Lone Soldier
2. The Long Yellow Road
3. The Band
4. The Record
5. The Title Track
6. The Reckoning
Epilogue: The Legacy
References
Abbreviations
Interviews/Email Correspondence
Select Discography
Notes
Index