While Thailand certainly has it’s own classical music genres that originated with the royal courts about 800 years ago, and folk music, don’t think that there are no modern or international genres enjoyed here. If we move chronologically through the development of music in Thailand we next come to the proliferation of jazz in the 1930s. Jazz continues to hold a special place in Thailand’s musical repertoire as the King is not only a jazz saxophonist but a jazz composer as well.
Jazz Beginnings in Thailand
But before the King began his compositions, Khru Eua Sunthornsanan was one of the pioneers of a new direction that music was taking in Thailand. Using his knowledge and understanding of Western classical music, Thai classical music and jazz, he began to combine elements of all three when he began composing scores for movies in 1936. The style of music became known as phleng Thai sakon (เพลงไทยสากล), which roughly translates as “international Thai music.”
Check out this video performance of one of his compositions being performed in 2010:
King Bhumibol, Jazz Musician and Composer
As mentioned, the King is an accomplished composer, but how did he get his start in music? The King was an international figure from childhood, being born in Cambridge, Mass. and studying in Switzerland. As a young teenager, he took saxophone lessons and read about music theory, teaching himself how to compose music.
In 1946 he released four compositions and continued through the ’90s, some of them being impromptu compositions, as he reportedly has the ability to compose without the assistance of an instrument and would sometimes write a few bars on a napkin to be finished later. In the ’50s, he started a radio station that eventually would hold weekly broadcasts on Fridays where he would play, along with other musicians, and take call-in requests.
He stopped performing publicly in the mid-1980s but continued to play with small groups at his palace in Hua Hin, and impressing people with his ability to switch instruments: from saxophone to clarinet to trumpet to trombone. He’s played with a number of big jazz names, the first of which was a jam session with Benny Goodman and he was the first Asian composer to be conferred membership in Die Akademic fur Musik und Darstellende Kunst (The Institute of Music and Arts of the city of Vienna).
Here is a video of the King’s first composition, Candlelight Blues: