Moments
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.41.1.06
ISSN1945-2349
Autores ResumoSince the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, I have been working on a memoir that reflects upon my experiences as a community worker and musician. A recurring theme is the lessons I have learned through my various personal and working relationships over the decades. I have begun to share these stories informally through a series of chapbooks. What follows are a few of the chapbook entries that explore how various influences have shaped my thoughts about a career—or rather, a life—as an independent artist.The first entry was read as part of a panel presentation with Jon Jang and Dr. Loren Kajikawa at the “Asian American Jazz: Past, Present, and Future” symposium. It discusses how I began my career under Jon's tutelage. The rest of the vignettes concern our development of Asian Improv Records and my experiences with dear friends, such as dance artist Sachiko Nakamura, pianist-composer Glenn Horiuchi, and multi-instrumentalist Tatsu Aoki. I also include a discussion of how my experiences as a student activist have influenced my approaches to working in the community.There is a song written and performed by Abbey Lincoln called “You Gotta Pay the Band,” which speaks to me quite deeply. As with a lot of her songs, there are profound messages here, especially the lines that say, “Everybody living / Pays their share of dues.”1 The song has a broader meaning—one needs to take responsibility for one's life, to “own it”—but it also has a particular meaning for musicians and other artists trying to sustain themselves and their work. For me—as a composer, bandleader, and producer—this has meant paying attention to where my support comes from, as well as my own responsibility to provide support.Although I played paying gigs as a teenage violinist, my professional career began at Stanford some time in 1981–82 when Jon Jang invited me to play with him at the People's Teahouse (by then, I was trying to play the saxophone). The Teahouse was an independent, student-run shop adjacent to the Asian American dorm. It served ramen, bao, siu mai, almond cookies, arare, and tea—and stayed open till midnight! The proceeds went to community organizations that the Teahouse volunteers would pick. It really was part of an amazing community-building process among Asian American students on campus during the early days of the student movement at Stanford, beginning in the early to mid-1970s.2 A poster at the Teahouse said something to the effect of “Food for the people, food for the soul, funds for the community!”There happened to be an upright piano in the Teahouse, and they sometimes hosted a band called Jazz-min (人). They even paid musicians who performed there! One night, Jon was invited. He said to me, “Come play!” I had just started playing saxophone, but Jon took a chance on me. Amid the bank of steamers with cha siu bao, shiu mai on hot plates, and rows of ramen steeping in bowls of boiled water (providing quite the fragrant ambience), Jon and I went through a program of standards (if you consider Ornette Coleman's “Broken Shadows” a standard, for example). Steam some frozen bao, cook a package of ramen, maybe put on Jon's Self-Portrait album: You're there! We were well received, in any case, which was nice. Just another night at the People's Teahouse.When the evening was over, Jon handed me $25. “Huh?,” I said. I'd just figured that here was Jon Jang, the conservatory graduate and gigging musician, whereas I was kind of a beginner. But with his grand generosity, which I have known now for 40 years, Jon said, “You're a musician; you get paid.” It was a transformative moment.Jon would school me on getting gigs and how to show appreciation to one's fellow musicians. Fundamental to the ethic was promoting the fact that we were in this together. Also critical was passing on the knowledge we'd learned about how to effectively lead bands, so that we could all contribute to our getting work. In this way, we created an economy of sorts.Back to Abbey Lincoln's song: Beyond the crucial idea that we need to be supported for our work, I also came away with new means of thinking about mutual accountability between communities and artists. And this has been essentially the way the crew at Asian Improv and I pursue support for our work. We are committed to our work because we understand that there are those out in the community—in our Asian communities and beyond—that believe, and are ready to demonstrate in meaningful ways, that “You Gotta Pay the Band!”. . . And so, Poston Sonata, Glenn Horiuchi's first CD, featuring him and his aunt Lillian Nakano, was born (he had already made three critically acclaimed vinyl albums). It was 1991. He would record everything at home, even mastering the recording to analog tape there, before sending it to the factory for duplication. He had already, like so many of us, purchased keyboards, software, and recording equipment, setting up his home studio. With the low cost of digital recording and CD manufacturing, one could produce a project for less than half the cost of producing a vinyl LP.We were pretty nerdy, engaging with the new technology, in a new phase of our creative work. It was our way, along with other do-it-yourself (DIY) peers in the field, to act as independent producers. We would not wait to be discovered. We would be artistically productive, directly reaching out and building community around our work. I remember Glenn being particularly excited about a software program he bought for about $10 called My Mailing List!Underlying this way of working, of course, is what is called the entrepreneurial spirit. But added to this was his community's own history of ethnic economic support in the face of racist and exclusionary atmospheres in any field of work. While I was already learning Jon Jang's way, I would also learn Horiuchi's, based upon his particular genius and background, when he joined the Asian Improv movement.I learned so much between 1984 and 2000 while playing in his bands: Main Force; Unit A with William Roper; Shamisen Quintet and Trio with Lillian Nakano; the Octet. Gigging in grand venues like the Japan Society and the Asia Society in New York, and the Berliner Philharmonie, as well as the Little Tokyo Village Plaza, the Japanese American National Museum, and Harbor College in Santa Monica, along with so many recording sessions at Pacifica Studios.I cherished all those visits to Los Angeles, flying into Burbank at least a couple of times a year for rather intense week-long gigs, doing our work while hitting the colleges, community spaces, KPFK radio. And, of course, there was hanging out in bookstores, record stores, all sorts of hole-in-the-wall places—like the Thai taco joint we went to before recording sessions. Outlines of a culture—how we would sustain ourselves. I was so lucky to head out there two or more times a year. Somewhere to go; to do our thing.Glenn was such a productive person. How did he get it all done? He had his ways—various procedures and methods that he repeatedly carried out. Upon leaving for a gig, he would undertake his rituals, making sure nothing was forgotten. He wanted to ensure that, once out the door, we could focus on getting to the gig—especially in the case of those really long drive-times crisscrossing L.A., or heading to Orange County, or north to CalArts, in Valencia.Beyond his attention to detail in his projects, Glenn was a formidable strategist. All on his own, he entered arts administration, writing successful grant proposals at the local and statewide levels in order to support his creation and self-presentation of new works. He went even further in building his own traditional arts community program teaching shamisen in Little Tokyo with his aunt, Lillian Nakano (1928–2015). Lillian had been trained and certified as part of the Kineya tradition on the shamisen under the professional name Kineya Fukuju, and was a notable Japanese American movement activist who, formerly incarcerated herself, had played a key role in advocating and winning reparations for Japanese Americans interned in World War II concentration camps.3 She had been a profound influence on Glenn's musical and political development, and joined his band (myself included) on tours to New York, Seattle, Denver, Vancouver, and Berlin. Her husband, Bert Nakano, himself a noted redress and reparations activist (who was also formerly incarcerated) and a supporter of the arts, would join us on these trips.In so many ways, Glenn modeled the self-reliant and sustainable strategies that made for an exemplary, committed, and impactful career. Moreover, if one were to tag along with him through his weekly rounds, as I had the good fortune to do, one would get a deep sense of how many people and communities were, in turn, sustained by his contributions. The present-day nationwide Asian Improv arts community is certainly among them.More nerdiness: One time when I visited Glenn, back in the 1980s, he had just come back from an East Coast tour playing solo piano. It had gone well, but what he mainly wanted to talk about was a conversation he overheard between two other passengers. Apparently one of the passengers owned an art gallery. What Glenn gleaned from his eavesdropping was how they talked about artworks as investments for collectors. This was fairly common knowledge, of course. But it inspired Glenn to think about how to discuss our work as possible investments.We had a running conversation for the next few days about the financial implications of our work when seen as investments. We had to overcome some hurdles. First, no one was in the market to “invest” in our compositions. Sure, people could buy our CDs, but our sales never really recouped the direct cost of recording and manufacturing. More than that, the price of the CDs was fixed by the market and could be $20 at most. Furthermore, at that stage in our career—or even now—no one wanted to own our work exclusively, in the way a person or museum owns a painting.We took an idea that had been floating around: music is a public good that can be owned by the producers (us), who earn revenue from the compositions beyond the fees for placement in film or other media. One of the higher-level administrators from the California Arts Council (CAC) once analogized the arts to roads or other infrastructure. He used this argument to explain why there was public funding for the arts. Following this argument for public funding for the arts, community members could see how they could join the cause by contributing financially or materially, understanding that artistic works could benefit them without personally owning the work. A great example of this was when San Diego Japanese American community members and their friends banded together to raise donations to commission Glenn's Poston Sonata, a work for piano, shamisen, flute, violin, viola, cello, and trap-set drums. It was a way of thanking Glenn for his role in organizing that community to speak out for redress and reparations. The work would become known as one of Glenn's signature works, its documentation serving as a concept in our subsequent grant applications. Today, the work stands as an example of a musical work providing a lasting public benefit. The model of the Poston Sonata could also justify individuals supporting a work that the public could enjoy or benefit from. Our takeaway: our work was of lasting public and social benefit.We thought that if our bodies of work could, over time, be perceived as a public good—that is, seen as fulfilling a public social need—we could get paid for them, beyond our providing the initial one-off service, such as an event performance. In this way, each of our works would contribute to our overall value to society at large, qualifying us for higher fees, grants, and donations. Our portfolios and works catalogs symbolize our position as an asset to the community at large.What exactly are the public benefits of our work, then? This is where we had to be somewhat more visionary, or at least counterintuitive. We had to make a case that works expressing our own community's history and perspectives were worthwhile and essential to a better society. We would have to break through quite a bit of skepticism (at best), indifference, and often hostility, because we grew up in the era when assimilation was the encouraged mode of survival. I remember being told, “you're so good—good enough to ‘make it.’ Why do you insist on emphasizing that you are ‘Asian American’?” I feel so lucky to have been part of social movements that allowed us to hold on to the belief that we were about changing things. I would even say that I was motivated to be an artist precisely to lift up my Asian American-ness.But on what levels was our work of use to the broader public? Beyond the usual discussion of the role of art in enhancing quality of life, we would (and continue to) argue that our work represented and helped bring about social justice and racial equity. Our work resists the cultural erasure of our communities, raising issues that must be addressed. Moreover, our work keeps whole microcommunities employed and socially engaged.From then on, we not only sought opportunities for paid performance but also financial support for composition. We strategically documented and cataloged our works, so as to encourage an increase in their value over time. Glenn began to get commissions for new works from individual donors, as well as from foundations or governments, most notably the CAC and the City of Los Angeles. He would secure fees for performances that, along with their documentation, would become the proof of concept for those compositions and future commissions, as mentioned above. This, of course, made documentation of the musical works through recordings even more important. It would also make reviews and scholarly analysis significant means of securing value for a work. We had to engage in all sorts of efforts that might make our case for the value of our work. But what else is new? It's the way of the world. (I must also take a moment to recognize perhaps the most important fact of this process: Glenn was an extremely intelligent, creative, and committed “thought partner” as we made our way in our careers.)Sometimes, when asked about my college education, I say, “I learned so much as an economics major that I decided to become a musician!” Ironically, while they have not led to riches, my economics studies did provide me with frameworks that helped me contribute to the community.When I got to Stanford, there was still a culture of Third World radical intellectuals among the faculty and graduate students. I like to think of it as the “other Stanford.” There were lots of political education events and movement actions to attend, from anti-apartheid protests, to film screenings like The Battle of Chile, to lectures by visiting scholars such as the late Walter Rodney (1942–1980), a prominent scholar and activist from Guyana.I was particularly impacted by a Rodney lecture concerning his 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It was the first time I heard an African scholar's theory of the impact of colonialism on Africa. The feeling in the room was pretty intense, in that we were not attending just any academic lecture. We were bearing witness to Rodney's revolutionary practice. Sadly, just a few years later, in 1980, he was the victim of a political assassination at the age of 38.I soon became passionate about studying politics and economics, finding a mentor in Professor Tetteh Kofi (1939–2015). A Ghanaian, he had grown up in the period of the Gold Coast's fight for independence from the British (the nation of Ghana was founded in 1957). Kofi had come to Stanford in 1971 through the efforts of the Black Student Union. He was appointed to teach economics within the Black studies program at the school and in the East Palo Alto (EPA) community. (EPA was an unincorporated part of the county, and there was a movement to make it a city; some wanted to rename the town Nairobi.)Kofi's teaching in economics was an extension of the Nkrumah movement's efforts to realize a kind of African socialism rooted in indigenous culture and practice. He, like Rodney, spoke of the damage that colonialism and neocolonialism visited upon Third World countries. In addition to teaching, he worked with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, as well as other international agencies. His 2008 book with Asayeghn Desta, Saga of African Underdevelopment, documents his views.Unfortunately, Stanford was quite a hostile place for Kofi, and he was denied tenure. He would say, “if they were to give me tenure, I would be able to bring folks like [Jamaican economist] George Beckford here.” We studied Beckford's book Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World, as well as the works of Theotônio dos Santos (a Brazilian scholar). Kofi was trying to create a foothold for an economic theory emanating from Third World experiences. I was part of a group of students who tried, unsuccessfully, to fight on his behalf. This was during that period in which the gains of the civil rights movement were beginning to be rolled back in earnest.Kofi had a large impact on me, nevertheless. He invited me to parties at his home and activities with other radical faculty. It's pretty amazing to see your economics professor dance! He really cared about the students, sharing his experiences as a young activist and football [soccer] player. We stayed in contact after he left Stanford, and he encouraged my music-making. I gave him a copy of Jon Jang's Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? and he put it on his turntable immediately. Nodding his head, he said, “Hey! That's pretty good!”From Kofi, I learned how to look at culture and practice within our ethnic economies as sources of strategy. He often talked about repairing “disarticulated linkages” between segments of a national economy. I conceptualize this in my own work as “building relationships” that are lasting, mutually beneficial, and internal to our artists’ economy—part of our “healing” from past traumas.My first exposure to Asian American dance-making—actually, to any kind of Asian American art-making—was in 1976, my last year as a teenager. The Asian American Dance Collective, later Asian American Dance Performances (AADP), which was founded in 1974 and would last for more than 30 years, had been invited to perform at Stanford in the Asian American theme dorm. I kind of wandered and wondered into the show, which took place in our dorm cafeteria. They folded up the dining tables and pushed the chairs to the edges of the room. Sadly, the room still had that cafeteria smell from all the meals cooked and served that day. (Oh, man; so fragrant!) I saw them dancing in their bare feet on the tile floor and became kind of worried. I had done my share of shifts mopping that very floor as part of my work-study financial aid package, and I hoped that my fellow kitchen workers had done a decent job.Nonetheless, the show went on—and it was amazing! There were around ten dancers who really filled the space, doing work that related to our experiences as Asian Americans. The first piece that got my attention was by Sachiko Nakamura (1941–2004): Food Fantasies, I think, was the title. They started dancing like chow mein noodles, then jiggling around like this gelatinous dessert called kanten. The crowd-pleaser was called Two Baddest Dudes, using the Village People's “Macho Man” as an accompaniment. A young Kelvin Han Yee, now a veteran actor on stage, TV, and film, was one of the “bad dudes,” performing in his now-iconic black leather jacket. The two dancers pretended to be on a motorcycle and sidecar representing takuan and kimchi! On a more serious topic, there was another piece by Sachiko with four dancers called Cadre, which seemed inspired by an idealized archetype of a revolutionary activist.It was one of those revelatory moments: a group of Asian Americans in movement art, realizing works based on Asian American experiences, in one of the early waves of Asian American arts organizations, providing a partial foundation for the arts community we have today. Later, in the 1990s, I would work closely with Sachiko, who was one of the founders. A pioneering choreographer, Sachiko was among the first generation of artists who were also arts administrators and activists. She was present at the founding of the Asian American Political Alliance, which was one of the first organizations to advocate for the use of the term “Asian American.”I worked with Sachi on three of her later pieces: Layers I, Layers II, and Rice. Layers I filled the stage with garlands made of white tissue, with Sachi “swimming” in and out, telling stories of her coming of age in West Oakland, including attending elementary school with Huey Newton. I played a one-person score and, as a dramatic foil, her brother. It was an opportunity to show my own, seldom-seen mischievous side.Layers II blanketed the stage with hanging blood-red fabric and was subtitled “Object of Desire.” The theme was cycles of womanhood from birth, menstruation, and childbirth to menopause through death. She spent large portions of the piece tangled in knots she improvised with the red fabric, depicting life's dilemmas. Once again, I got pulled into the action, playing a sperm! You should have seen the costume! In rehearsal, I had to be reminded not to be too campy—it was hard to resist.We actually got to take Layers on tour, with residencies in New York's Chinatown, in H.T. Chen's space, to a Chinese American audience; and in El Paso, of all places, at the Chamizal National Memorial outside the town, on the border with Mexico, to a largely Chicano audience.In New York, we stayed in an apartment on the Bowery, just down the street from the legendary punk venue CBGB's, where I played with this crazy band, President's Breakfast, in 1989. It was pretty amazing working in H.T.’s historic space and also spending spare moments hanging with icons in the dance field. I once cooked for Sachi and H.T., with H.T. saying, “Hey! You can't speak Chinese, but you can make Chinese food!” (Thanks, Mom!) Sachi introduced me to another of her peers, Theodora “Teddy” Yoshikami, a choreographer and taiko artist with the group Soh Daiko. Teddy had actually done her graduate project at NYU on Glenn Horiuchi's grandfather! We also shared a mutual friend and artistic collaborator in Jason Kao Hwang. Even though I was already in my late 30s, I came to realize that this experience with Sachi was my apprenticeship in Asian American arts.A few years later, Sachi invited me to be part of a new project commissioned by AADP called Rice. It was a new kind of work and methodology for me, in that Sachi had gathered a group of younger artists to create a piece together. It still had Sachi's fantasy elements, though: a giant rice grain performed by Chester Yoshida and a rice “rocket” that ascended at the end of the show, pouring out a trail of rice. Donna Lee Kwon, playing Korean percussion, and drummer/cellist Elliot Humberto Kavee joined me in the band for that one. Sachi had wanted me to help her remount her Food Fantasy dance series and had even received some commitments to present the project. It was so sad that we lost her so soon.I believe that, through this work with Sachi, and other interdisciplinary work that I undertook in the 1990s, I really grew from my foundation as a musician into a fully developed artist engaged with Asian American perspectives and experiences. I connected to the lineages of artistic practice that launched our Asian American movement and gained valuable experiences in producing innovative work. In learning methodologies and developing relationships within the web of collaborators and resources, I would gain an awareness that my work is but a contribution to this web, this network, this community.It was 1990, and we were on tour in Europe: Jon Jang and the Pan-Asian Arkestra, along with Kulintang Arts (now Kularts), under the leadership of choreographer and Executive Artistic Director Alleluia Panis, had been invited to perform in Italy and Germany. Together, the two ensembles included more than 20 musicians and dancers, most of whom were Asian American. We performed at the Verona Jazz Festival and the Weltmusik Festival.It was a major undertaking. Headlining the Verona Festival were icons Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, and Max Roach. Also featured was the historically significant M-Base Collective. And us! We performed an afternoon concert in the courtyard of a Renaissance castle. The Arkestra performed Jon's Concerto for Jazz Ensemble and Taiko: Reparations Now!, his reimagined version of Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia, as well as James Newton's tribute to Nelson Mandela, and Romulus Franceschini's Wo Liang (Romulus, who would die in 1994, is known for his collaborations with Cal Massey and Archie Shepp and the new music ensemble Relache). Kulintang Arts performed Alleluia's dance theater work LM'EHEK: at the heART of the sharpenINg stONE, commissioned by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, with live music composed in collaboration by Jon and the company's kulintang (traditional Filipino gong ensemble). Especially when looking back, this was an incredible artistic moment.Since Jon was already working with Max on the SenseUs project, a few of us were able to visit backstage for the mainstage performance in the Coliseum featuring bands led by Miles, Dizzy, and Max! My clearest memory is of Max's band, with a chorus singing the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”Most of the logistics for the tour were organized by Kulintang Arts. The organization also did additional fundraising to supplement the fees paid by the presenters, including securing a major grant from an agency called Arts International. At Freiburg, we performed in a huge tent, following a group led by famed vibist Gary Burton.Alleluia had hired me to work in the office a year earlier in my first arts administration job. There, I received serious professional training from her as she ran an innovative company of dancers and musicians. (This was on top of her role in pulling together the different elements into a cohesive, ambitious artistic vision!)For the European tour, there was a lot of planning and advance work. One of the biggest tasks I remember was securing visas for everyone on the tour. Another was booking the flights for such a large group. (And this was before you could do this work online.) I also helped package the grant proposal to Arts International.I remember it as a really busy couple of years. The company also made a historic tour of the Philippines, in addition to giving home season performances at the Cowell Theater and participating in an artist-in-the-community program. We even secured the first of our own rented studio spaces in Oakland. Alleluia led (and, of course, still leads) a very productive team of artists and production personnel. I feel blessed to have been a part of the action. Everything I've ended up doing in my subsequent work is an extension of what I learned there, from submitting grants to supporting financial recordkeeping.I would be remiss if I didn't mention the crucial role that Al and the Kulintang Arts team played in the campaign to create the Cultural Equity Endowment of the San Francisco Arts Commission and in movement-building among BIPOC arts communities. As Kulintang Arts was one of the few small organizations to have an office, it became the center of groundbreaking organizing activities. Other Asian American artists and activists were always coming through to chat or attend meetings there, as were key arts community activists, like Jeff Jones, Ellen Gavin, and the late Edsel Matthews. In addition to its work toward winning the Arts International grant for US Artists in International Festivals and leading the fight for one of the first local funding programs directly addressing BIPOC arts communities, Kulintang Arts played a central role in one of the first Asian American arts conferences, which took place at the San Francisco Arts Institute and the University of California, Berkeley, amid the national crisis set off by the Rodney King verdict.Al was and still is encouraging of my own career as an artist, to the extent that she essentially sent me on my way to focus on my music, ending my time in the office. It was pretty incredible to have a veteran creative artist say to me that I should go do my own work. As is the case for a lot of my colleagues, I struggle with imposter syndrome—but this push, along with Jon's and Glenn's confidence in me, moved me along the path.I can never forget the lessons learned about the role of organization as an infrastructure for art-making. And I remain accountable to this knowledge and grateful to those who have given it to me. Soon after leaving Al, I joined her board of directors, on which I would serve for almost 30 years.Around the time when I was starting to get serious about my own work (in the 1990s), composing and leading a band, I struggled with balancing my own artistic work against managing both the emerging nonprofit, Asian Improv aRts and AsianImprov Records (AIR), founded in 1987 by Jon and me to produce, present, and document artistic works that represent the Asian American experience. During this period, my wife, Yumi, assisted in running that operation out of our apartment. Just imagine having boxes of CDs, folders and folders of files, office supplies, mailing supplies, and, by then, several generations of computers in the living and dining rooms. I was the graphic designer for some of the early releases, most notably Hafez Modirzadeh's landmark In Chromodal Discourse. Hafez came over to the apartment several times to supervise the process of layering into the
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