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You know that musical phrase, don’t you.
This one. Dadadada-da-da-dun-dun-daa!
It was in “Kung Fu Fighting.” It opened “Turning Japanese.” It’s the schticky “let’s sound Oriental!” musical phrase.
Chances are, there’s an uncle somewhere in your family who started humming it when you first brought up the idea of adopting from China.
But where [expletive deleted] did it come from?
This bugged me for months, if not years. Over New Years, our family stayed with a professional jazz musician in Atlanta, and he was using it in a new composition, and he didn’t know where it came from.
“Oh, it’s pentatonic,” he said. “Most of that Asian music is pentatonic. This is just an easy way to do that.”
How old is it?
“Heck if I know.”
But I’ve just had a breakthrough, thanks to somebody who, like, knows how to look it up on wikipedia.
They call it “The Asian Riff.”
And they say:
It remains an open question as to whether the Asian riff has an actual Asian origin or is purely a Western invention.
Apparently, a couple years ago the big brains at Straight Dope pinned it down to an instance in the 1950s… until a really big brain came along (or at least a particular kind of brain that happened to have a really big music collection).
Here is the ultimate history of that stereotypical musical phrase:
The Musical Cliché Figure Signifying The Far East: Whence, Wherefore, Whither? The title pretty much says it all. There are numerous samples on there from numerous sources.
The thing’s been around longer than jazz, longer than rock, and depending on how you measure these things, longer than the blues, which is where jazz and rock came from. It’s older than the Chinese Exclusion Act. It’s been around at least since 1847, in a melody in The Grand Chinese Spectacle of Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp.
Yeah, Aladdin.
1847 was the year when people like Thomas Alva Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were born. Karl Marx had yet to write the Communist Manifest in 1848. Things like telegraphy and postage stamps were just invented and had not reached the general public. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin were still alive, if barely.
In this year appeared (”as produced at the Boston Museum”) an operetta or cabaret or vaudeville or I-don’t-know-what called The Grand Chinese Spectable of Aladdin or The Wonderful Lamp, which included this tune called Alladin Quick Step. A Chinese Alladin?
So one may tentatively say that the riff in its earliest incarnation, if it did signify anything in a conscious way during this period, was more of a general “Oriental riff” than a “Chinese riff.”
It really kicks into first gear, though, in the 1880s, which is about when the blues properly started up (which is where pentatonic scales started taking over Western music), and when… let’s call it “social tensions” began building up, as expressed in the Chinese Exclusion Act.
And by the 20s, it’s pretty recognizable for what it is.
So, now I know. Now you know.
And if you want, just forward your uncle a link to this page….
[...] of white-majority societies, even older than classic music genres that defined American music. A blogger puts the ditty into historical perspective: The thing’s been around longer than jazz, longer than rock, and depending on how you measure [...]