Tales of Southeast Asia's Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936. By Peter Keppy. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2019. xiii, 269 pp. ISBN: 9789813250512 (paper)

Keppy first explores the deep relationship between Luis Borromeo, a Filipino from an elite family who was formally trained in classical music, and an audience of middle- and upper-class fans who began shaping a middle-brow popular culture that borrowed from older Spanish entertainments as well as newer American styles. Borromeo is placed within a richly drawn historical context in which official culture, as represented by the University of the Philippines's Conservatory of Music, which privileged the European concert tradition, was simultaneously undermined by music professors’ interests in popular music and dance, allowing both ends of the cultural spectrum to mingle in concert as well as dance halls. [...]it is the impact of media—phonograph recordings, sound films, song sheet publications, and radio, not to mention the newspapers and journals Keppy productively engages throughout the book—that helped institutionalize and normalize the hybrid popular music styles that shaped mass popular audiences while creating an “‘in-between’ culture that remained awkwardly situated between high art and vulgar entertainment” (p. 2).