This project investigates black/Asian musical collaboration in order to illuminate a broader history of interracial and intercultural musical and political interaction in the post-Civil Rights era United States. Media coverage of events like the 1992 riots in Los Angeles has often portrayed blacks and Asians as culturally disparate and in a constant state of antagonism. In reality, the two groups share a long history of joint labor organizing, anti-racist mobilization, and cultural confluence that provides a counter-narrative to this tension. Musical performance has been a particularly fruitful venue for this merger, providing a forum through which artists have explored shared experiences of oppression, cultural similarities, and tactics for political struggle. Blending ethnography and performance and music analysis, this project traces a genealogy of black/Asian engagements, focusing on three contemporary case studies that suggest the diversity and complexity of this development. These artists combine texts, instruments, and techniques from African, Asian, African American, and Asian American musical cultures, placing them into dialogue through composition and improvisation. These bands also incorporate musicians that reflect a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds and their rehearsals and concerts become intense sites of interracial and intercultural negotiation. Exploring these contemporary nodes of Afro Asian musical history, this dissertation explicates the ways in which this conversation is musically depicted, how its performance has the potential to engender diverse audiences, and how it is shaped by the local cultural economies of the two cities. The ultimate thrust of this research is to query how the black/Asian racial divide is present in the music industry and suggest ways it simplifies musical practice, to render popular music history beyond a black/white dichotomy, and to challenge popular and scholarly narratives of African American/Asian American antagonism.