Beginning in the last decade of the twentieth century, there has been a considerable increase in popular culture studies, affirming the position of popular music as a relevant and significant addition to musicological topics, issues, and concerns for examination. Popular music has been analyzed mainly in relation to capitalism, specifically its mode of production, commodification, mass distribution and consumption, use of media technology, and its connection to mass entertainment. In recent years, popular music studies have seen an influx of new interpretation using established culture theories, and a few scholars have ventured into new ways to explain and understand its various facets.

Peter Keppy's Tales of Southeast Asia's Jazz Age: Filipinos, Indonesians and Popular Culture, 1920–1936 is one such propitious addition to the growing literature on popular music studies. He examines the cultural histories of the Philippines and Indonesia in the 1920s and 1930s, referred to in the book as the “Jazz Age,” through Henry Jenkins’ concepts of popular cosmopolitanism and participatory pop, and Joel Kahn's theory of popular modernity. Keppy highlights the two cultural brokers of this popular music culture during the Jazz Age – Luis Borromeo in the Philippines and Miss Riboet in Indonesia – who represented the image of a star, regarded as among the most profitable musicians in the market and thus influential. Their stardom pinnacled in the 1920s and the 1930s, at a time when these two Southeast Asian colonies were seizing the effects of modernity introduced by capitalism and their respective imperial masters, while at the same time struggling with the burgeoning nationalism and emancipatory sentiments that were taking root in their states.

Keppy chronicles the successful musical careers of Luis Borromeo and Miss Riboet and the impact of their positions as cultural brokers in establishing vaudeville in the Philippines and Malay opera in Indonesia, respectively. Both are considered as “in-between” or transcultural musical forms that expressed and infused local sentiments and traditions while appropriating the encroaching hegemonic musical cultures of the West. Capitalizing on his popularity as a vaudeville artist in the USA, Borromeo, upon his return to the Philippines in the early 1920s, aspired to influence the popular music scene in the Philippines through his vaudeville productions that introduced local plays and other pioneering segments. Similarly, Miss Riboet's immense audience support that spanned the entire Malay region allowed her to establish a hybrid form of theater that exposed rural Javanese traditions and norms that contained educational value. In their quest for success – measured in terms of audience reach and sales – in the music industry during the Jazz Age, they relied on the established mechanisms of capitalist processes already in place in the two empires by the 1920s. The transformed taste of the colonial subjects, particularly from the local elites, and middle and upper–lower classes, for anything that would symbolize their attainment of modernity became an important factor in Borromeo and Riboet's strategy in capturing a wide market of paying audiences. In the realm of culture, this popular modernity was evident in the market's penchant for the new rhythms of jazz music, theater productions that incorporated alternative and modern representation of local culture including music, and songs that reflected the nascent emancipatory sentiments of the time, among others. By producing cultural products that catered to this lucrative market, both the producers (artists) and consumers complemented each other in defining a new popular genre in what Jenkins referred to as “participatory pop.”

The book has ten chapters with an introductory chapter that establishes the period as an appropriate time for a modern cultural experience to unfold in the two Southeast Asian colonies. Chapters 2–6 provide a detailed narrative of Luis Borromeo's origin, career, work, and life contextualized within the dramatic unfurling of colonial life in the Philippines under the US imperial government. The rich descriptions of cabaret dancers and their relation to their elite and middle-class patrons in Chapter 3 show the dichotomy in Philippine society that typified the ambiguous situation of colonial subjects who were socially stratified according to long-established colonial structures. In Chapter 4, Keppy traces the founding of Borromeo's vaudeville company and the early years of vaudeville shows in the Philippines, including other equally successful producers of this profitable substitute for the previously-patronized sarsuwela and other theater productions. The controversy of becoming a “modern” Filipina is discussed in Chapter 5 with the emergence of the annual search for a queen within the Manila Carnival, and the contribution of female vaudeville stars in elevating vaudeville into a “classy” production. Chapter 6 recounts the demise of vaudeville in the Philippines upon the entry of sound and recording technology.

Chapter 7 chronicles the Indonesian Miss Riboet's early involvement with the once-regarded “second-rate theatre of the native working classes” (p. 137) to her rise to stardom – becoming the most-recorded Malay singer in the 1930s. Chapter 8 documents Miss Riboet's endeavor to create a modern Malay theater that incorporated local elements and emphasized moral uprightness and good-naturedness, successfully patronized by the Dutch colonial elite which legitimized her stardom. In Chapter 9, Keppy lionizes Miss Riboet through portraying her as a role model for Indonesian women who displayed compassion and courage in her work and attitude. Chapter 10 gives us Keppy's interpretation of Miss Riboet's position in Indonesia's theater industry and the emergent sound movie industry in the 1930s, and her subdued but important role in Indonesia's progress and emancipation as a nation.

This book occupies a significant position in Southeast Asian music historiography because it tackles a long understudied facet of local music history by centering on widely supported “popular” music productions by local masses. Popular music, as traced by Keppy in the development of mass-supported vaudeville productions of Borromeo and elite and middle class-patronized operas and Malay theater productions of Miss Riboet, is closely connected to the commodification of music and the importance of its wide distribution to spell success. However, in the case of the Philippines, the contention that Borromeo pioneered pop cosmopolitanism in the colony is disputable when one looks at the lucrative theater productions of late nineteenth-century Manila, particularly operas, zarzuelas, sarsuwelas, and Tagalog plays. The bourgeoning middle class was already exercising its powerful role as consumers of musical productions, elevating significant actors/actresses into marketable stars such as Chananay, Práxedes “Yeyeng” Fernandez, Patrocinio Tagaroma, and José Carvajal – the latter became the parents of Eliseo and Patrocinio Carvajal. These theater stars also ventured into entrepreneurship, like Borromeo would do in the 1920s, by establishing their own theater companies with audiences mostly from the colonial elite and the growing middle class.

Keppy's historiography emphasizes the participative role of music consumers in the success of a musical star, which he corroborates with historical accounts unearthed from various sources. The important concept of stardom legitimizes the profit-oriented processes of market development and mass consumption, which are integral to capitalism. In most cases, the stars are determined by popularity that is marred by a discriminatory banal quality attached to mass entertainment. Keppy contradicts this view of popular music in his book by bringing to the fore the two popular cultural brokers – Borromeo and Riboet – who commanded a strong presence and appeal that allowed them to exercise an influential position in the development of the music industry during their times. However, in telling the tale of market-oriented production and consumption of popular music in the Philippines and Indonesia in the Jazz Age, Keppy needed to center his narrative on the agency of individuals, which hints at the progression of history through the intentions of men/women typical of traditional historiography. Nonetheless, although focusing on the careers of the two leading cultural brokers, the book contextualizes Philippine and Indonesian societies not from a top-down perspective, but takes into account the importance of communities in shaping and creating their musical experience, thus exercising distinct forms of modernity. In the process, as argued by Keppy using the concept of participatory pop, a new genre is established and it shows how the people use music as a tool in asserting a new identity, perhaps as a generation, or in general, as a people of a nation.

The huge quantity of data gathered by Keppy in the major archives and depositories in Southeast Asia and Europe to establish Luis Borromeo and Miss Riboet's significance, apparently unnoticed by earlier major Filipino and Indonesian historians who focused on an elite-oriented “high-art” musical historiography, provides a compelling defense in positioning them as cultural brokers. The flow of narration is engaging, and the explanatory footnotes add interest to the fresh and enlightening information about Philippine and Indonesian histories during the 1920s and 1930s. The inclusion of other popular music practices in both the Philippine and Indonesian scenarios also helps substantiate the historical picture, and provides a more educational contextualization of the presence of these marginalized players in history, e.g. cabaret dancers, minor female vaudeville performers, and local journalists. In exposing these, Keppy's work is commendable for his inclusion of a thorough description of the contradictions within the Philippine and Indonesian societies – political and socio-cultural – during the ambiguous colonial periods, particularly in the Jazz Age, as he traces the contributions of Borromeo and Miss Riboet.

The inclusion of analyses of a few of their works – songs and opera synopses – furnishes a glimpse of their artistic attempts to uncover social and political undertones, which represented the strong colonial sentiments of the 1930s. Keppy's application of pop cosmopolitanism in interpreting Borromeo and Riboet's works lends a strong framework for understanding their transcultural/hybrid nature. The textual examination of Borromeo's songs and Riboet's Malay operas highlighted the social and political meanings of their works in their respective contexts. However, the absence of music structure analyses – e.g. melodic lines, harmonic progressions, overall forms – counters the possibility of determining the deeper meanings intended by the artists, meanings which are usually hidden in the musical elements. Were the melodies composed and the harmonies and rhythms used simply catering to what was popular then in order to ascertain market success? Or were they also used to express deep sentiments and hidden aspirations, probably through borrowed socially meaningful tunes in the form of musical quotations or juxtaposed chordal progressions and rhythms? Keppy's reading of the social importance of Borromeo and Riboet through looking at their works, mostly through textual analysis, may be complemented by including the musical aspects of their creations to substantiate how these songs helped shape the social and political consciousness of the people in these two Southeast Asian colonies.

In addition, the theories of popular modernity and participatory pop are equally enlightening in situating the role of their audiences – the mass consumers of their cultural products – in complementing the artists’ role in creation through their collective taste. In understanding the transforming taste of the two colonies during the Jazz Age, popular modernity as a theory strengthens the idea of the empires’ capitalist intentions wherein the colonial subjects were made to prefer products coming from the West, and regard them as markers of an attained modernity, including music.

The work is well researched and the amount of information on the musical milieu of the Philippines and Indonesia during the Jazz Age presented by Keppy provides a comprehensive picture of the life and musical culture of these societies, particularly how patronage by the colonial elite, and the local upper, middle, and upper–lower classes contributed to the emergence of a “popular” music culture. This exemplary book provides a model for similar studies for scholars of popular culture and transcultural music of post-colonial Southeast Asian nations.