The many events that marked the anniversary of the Bandung Conference last year dwelled on the spirit of the event and the significance of solidarity across the Global South for a world at war. As our Afro-Asian Networks project has shown, socialists, trade unionists, feminists, artists, and writers mobilised across the Afro-Asian world, showing that Bandung was not just a one-off event, but an ‘era’ that spanned the 1950s up to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba which called for solidarity across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This year, for instance, is the seventieth anniversary of the Afro-Asian Students Conference, one of many Afro-Asian gatherings that characterised the period.
But closer attention to the music of the era gives us an even richer dimension to this story, one rooted in a visceral spirit of connection across continents, from Africa and Asia to Latin America and the Caribbean. This was evident last spring at an event I co-led in Bristol at IC Visual Lab (ICVL), a local arts organisation and project space that focuses on overlooked social histories. I collaborated with IC Visual Lab’s co-director Ben G.J. Thomas, who spent the weeks prior carefully sourcing rare vinyl records and researching the varied sounds that might have been heard during the Bandung Conference. In this piece, we trace the stories behind these sounds, showing how popular internationalism shaped musical cultures and rhythms across Southeast Asia in the era of decolonisation. Well before Havana’s Tricontinental Conference, Indonesian and Cambodian musicians were reworking the sounds of Black America, Africa, and Cuba for local audiences as they rediscovered their own regional traditions. These sounds captured a sense of people on the move, always looking outwards to the rest of the world, even as the Cold War threatened to tear it apart.
Indonesian President Sukarno, the host of the Bandung Conference, was passionate about the role of culture in representing the country abroad. Indonesian artists, too, announced their arrival on the world stage, declaring themselves ‘Heirs to World Culture’, in a Cultural Manifesto issued in 1950. Amidst a cultural cold war between the Soviet Union, China, and America, who sent ballet troupes, circus performers, and jazz musicians to post-colonial Asia and Africa, these artists drew inspiration from multiple sources and found their own voice.
The Sukarno government used dance diplomacy to promote Indonesian cultural heritage. With the Dancers of Bali world tour of 1952-53, dancers and gamelan musicians travelled from the small Balinese village of Peliatan to the great cities of the world, including London and New York. The show was produced by an English ballet enthusiast, John Coast, who once shipped arms and medicine to supply the Indonesian revolution. Coast repurposed some of the same programs featured in the 1931 Paris Exhibition, which showcased the cultures of the French Empire and fed Western appetites for exoticism. The show featured elaborate costumes, as well as the intricate hand and eye movements and complex footwork associated with Legong, a form of dance which originated in Bali’s royal courts.
With a crowd squeezed like sardines in IC Visual Lab’s gallery space last year, we listened to a few minutes of the gamelan recording which accompanied the tour, immersing ourselves in the centuries-old sounds of hand drums and mallets on metal changing quickly in tempo. (Gamelan traditionally hails from Java and Bali and is an elaborate ensemble of percussion instruments and gongs, often involving a stringed instrument called a siter and a bamboo flute, usually played on the floor.)
Back home, and in front of visiting dignitaries, Sukarno’s tastes were less sophisticated. He loved organising dances, including for those attending Bandung, and favored simple folk forms, such as the Moluccan dance tari lenso, where everyone could participate. As anyone who has read his autobiography – narrated to the American journalist Cindy Adams – knows, no one loved to display his virility more than Sukarno. Dancing allowed him to express his masculine prowess, swirling Indonesia’s most talented female dancers around the floor. As seen in this video of Sukarno on the dance floor (featured in a song he wrote to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Bandung), he loved to get involved, encouraging his guests to do the same.
At the same time, popular music took off throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Its first independent record label, Irama Records, was founded in 1951. Popular music signaled modernity and progress, with musicians and producers experimenting with international influences and instrumentation. A gorgeous recent compilation, Padang Moonrise, released by Soundway Records, highlights some of the musical gems that emerged from Java and Sumatra at this time. It shows the influence of regional popular music, Islamic Gambus, Javanese and Balinese gamelan and the Portuguese-derived folk tradition of kroncong, with jazz and Afro-Latin music.
As young people moved to major cities in search of work in 1950s Indonesia, record labels catered to their longing for home by recording pop songs in a range of dialects and languages. The West Sumatran group Orkes Gumarang, for example, sang in the Minang language. But they were also influenced by world music. While the track ‘Malin Kundang’ was based on a folk story from the region, the instrumentation drew upon Latin rhythms.
The Minang community comes from the West coast of Sumatra and is part of a rich cultural and matrilineal tradition. It has had a pivotal role in Indonesian political and intellectual history, producing figures like Indonesia’s first prime minister Sutan Sjahrir, vice-president Mohammed Hatta, and the elusive Indonesian Marxist Tan Malaka. Yet, music, too, has benefitted from the community’s openness to modern ideas from Islam and the wider world. Probably the most famous Minang singer of the era was Oslan Husein, a member of the group Orkes Teruna Ria. In the track ‘Budjang Talalai’, we could hear the influences of the call of the imam and the readings of the Qu’ran in Husein’s lead vocal, as well as underlying Afro-Cuban rhythms. Indeed, one of Husein’s favourite musicians of the time was the Cuban pianist Perez Prado.
The arrival of pop music was complicated by Sukarno’s increasing distrust of the West and clampdown on Western-influenced music in the mid-1960s. Indonesia was not alone in viewing rock and roll culture as associated with unruly young men and women. One of Indonesia’s first girl bands, Surabaya’s Dara Puspita, quickly garnered a reputation for its loud and sensational concerts and ‘irrepressible’ harmonies. According to the liner notes of a recent reissue, they were hauled into a government censorship committee to play different songs, right before departing for gigs in US-aligned Thailand.
The band’s ascent coincided with one of the most traumatic events in Indonesian history. Two days after the band landed in Bangkok, six army generals were killed in a suspected coup, and blame was pinned on the Indonesian Communist Party. With the support of US and British intelligence sources, an anti-communist army leadership and vigilante groups murdered half a million suspected leftists and unlawfully detained a million others in a period of six months. The group stayed in Thailand for three months, refining their music and engaging with Thai musicians, before returning home. While allegedly refusing a medal of bravery offered to them by the new Suharto government, the new US-aligned political environment was far more conducive to rock n’ roll, with the group’s first record selling over 40,000 copies. Their later tracks speak to the influence of the Beatles (albeit with their own stamp) and the beginnings of early Indonesian psychedelia. However, it was the first track we heard, ‘Surabaya’, a messier ode to their hometown that parallels Orkes Gumarang’s love letter to its Minang roots.
While Sukarno and Indonesian popular music evolved in step with the country’s increasing internationalism amid an escalating Cold War, Cambodia, too, was caught in the sway. The country began stepping out on the international stage after gaining its official independence from France in 1954 at the Geneva Conference. Cambodia’s leader at the time was Norodom Sihanouk, a prince educated in France who took up the saxophone, jazz, and also became a film-director. France believed it had a malleable puppet on their hands, but when Sihanouk realised he was losing popular support for cooperating with returning colonisers, he abdicated his throne. Instead, he led his country as a civilian politician, promising independence in three years. Sihanouk arrived in Bandung after meetings with Nehru, taken with the idea of neutralism and keeping his country out of the Cold War. Neutralism, he argued, was not a choice but a necessity, being wedged between a partitioned Vietnam and US-aligned Thailand.
While leading Cambodia, Sihanouk never really gave up his career as a musician and director. Popular songs from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan as well as European and American standards are evident in his cultural repertoire. While his early compositions signal their debt to European music as well as their roots in Khmer scales and lyrics, Sihanouk, like Sukarno, began moving closer towards the Eastern bloc by the end of the 1950s. Cambodian recordings from the era are hard to find, many destroyed as the Khmer Rouge cracked down on music considered either western or oppositional to the regime. Copies that survived now fetch high sums with collectors, yet recordings of Sihanouk’s music remain relatively accessible, overlooked by many as a cultural and historical oddity. His compositions were written in a style popular of the time, using musical scales common to Khmer music, yet performed with Western orchestral instrumentation.
We listened together to a rare recording of Sihanouk’s love letters to his Asian neighbours, including China, Laos, and Indonesia. These were written during his first years in exile (1970-75), following his deposition by Lon Nol in a coup backed by the United States and South Vietnam. While beholden to the nations who supported him in exile, the songs also demonstrate gratitude and affection.
At the same time, Cambodian popular music exploded in its cities, drawing on Western popular music, the cha-cha, and Latin rhythms. One of the most popular singers of the day was Sinn Sisamouth, who moved to Phnom Penh to study medicine. He sang and studied music in his spare time, often invited to perform at friends’ weddings. In 1953, following independence from France, he was asked to join the newly formed National Radio station. He was a favourite of Sihanouk’s mother and often asked to perform at the palace. While original copies are almost impossible to find, in recent years there has been a real effort to track down, digitise and distribute his music. (For those interested in hearing more, two compilations of Sisamouth’s music have been released by Lion Production as part of their ‘Groove Club’ series.)
Women, too, played a major role in Cambodia’s burgeoning music scene, with figures including Huoy Meas (hu-y may-as), Pen Ran, Mao Sareth, and Keo Setha. Many had dual careers spanning film and music, but most of the films of this period have been lost. First among many during this period was Ros Serey Sothea, described by Norodom Sihabouk as the ‘Queen with the Golden Voice’. While her music ranged from traditional Khmer folk songs to upbeat garage rock, she was most beloved for her romantic ballads, often imbued with a sense of tragedy or lament. It is a sensation that has only grown for those listening today, given Sothea’s disappearance at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, along with Sinn Sisanouth.
Culture was a core part of the ascent of the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s in a far more insidious way. While global influences permeated Cambodian pop, the Khmer Rouge project was bent on reclaiming an authentic Cambodian past. It posed a new post-colonial vision of radical independence, erasing any trace of colonial modernity. In the genocide that followed, 1.5-2 million Cambodians died, 25% of the population, many of them urban-dwellers, musicians, and the producers and consumers of the popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, like Sothea and Sisanouth.
In Southeast Asia, the music of the Bandung era stands as a testament to the internationalism of the time and to the role of musicians in giving voice to the tensions between home and the world that resonated in the hearts of many. Yet like the nations present at Bandung, musicians, too, could not help but be caught up in the violent repercussions of a global Cold War. In our second instalment, we’ll be taking this story forward into Egypt, Ghana, and the Congo in the late 1950s and 1960s, using music to pull the threads of solidarity across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean ever closer together.