Cosmopolitan Sounds and Intimate Narratives in P. Ramlee's Film Music.

This article illustrates historically, how the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Malay musical practices operated in tandem with the cultural intimacies of vernacular Malay film narratives to express the complex interconnectivities of a fluidly linked and diverse region. The film music icon, P. Ramlee, employed a cosmopolitan approach to making music; merging Anglo-American jazz and Latin American rhythms with regional Malay and Javanese folk music, themes and cultural references. When screened, heard and reproduced in contemporary contexts, such films and music illicit nostalgia for an idealistic era during which the nation was in-the-making. A narrative of pity for P. Ramlee is affectively instrumentalised by the Malaysian state, local cultural producers and multinational corporations; recalling his image and works to appeal to the Malaysian public. An analysis of the film music in Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (1961) directed by P. Ramlee unravels the threads of cosmopolitan musical practices and culturally intimate expressions that challenge the rigid boundaries of the nation-state; expressing a unique inter-regional, multilinguistic and multiethnic collective identity. This paper argues for a conceptual approach that examines the cosmopolitan intimacies of cultural production; revealing the complex cultural, political, national and transnational constestations and connections of a postcolonial Malay world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]