Part 3: The Men || Chapter Eleven: Tatsu Aoki/Asian Improv aRts

Part III: The Men

Chapter Eleven: Jon Jang, Francis Wong,Tatsu Aoki/Asian Improv aRts

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Part III: The Men

Introduction

A couple of years before I formed my own Pacific Rim Players (PRP), then worked with it and Andrew Hill to perform and present his American Nikkei Symphony in the Northwest, then with Anthony Braxton to help launch his Tri-Centric Foundation in New York—all as described in the Introduction and Chapter One—San Francisco pianist Jon Jang and saxophonist Francis Wong together formed, in 1987, a similarly conceived organization called Asian Improvised aRts (AIR) to produce, record, and promote their similarly composed-for-improvisers (and, for them, to morph Jelly Roll Morton’s famous phrase, “Asian-tinged”) music.[1] We had no contact with or awareness of each other’s doings then, though I would hear of and read about them and AIR in the grapevine over the years that followed.

Like AIR, PRP was informed and inspired by the models of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and its Saint Louis sister group BAG (Black Artists Group), and by other such African-American collectives and labels formed some two decades prior to further their members’ music and community-cultural agendas. AIR’s ethnic face was Asian-American, and PRP’s was (predominantly) European-American; we were all allies in an overlapping musical milieu/aesthetic; and our five organizations comprised a mostly male cast, especially in their beginnings, some notable exceptions proving the rule. I’ll return to this look at the five groups to do a thicker compare-and-contrast snapshot, after fleshing out and foregrounding the AIR history and its overlaps with the generally (and to me) better known AACM and BAG histories; I’ll say my piece about PRP’s blip on those three histories’ common screen, for the more-than-a-blip it was in my own history.

My interest here in that summary gloss lies in the different historical contexts of the 1960s—the launching of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA, NEH), the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the antiwar movement, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965—and the Reagan years of the 1980s, spurring the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson’s bids to win Reagan’s office, an Asian-American activism around the movement for reparations for WWII internment of Japanese Americans, a spike in anti-Asian violence, and the rise of multiculturalism in the arts and a world-music genre in pop music that fed the groups’ international connections. [2]  More precisely, my interest is in the different ethnic/cultural faces of that shared musical tradition-cum-paradigm. What were the founders’ respective visions and missions for the five organizations? What else, besides that shared love of the same kinds of music and its messages, was their common ground, and what different? How did those common grounds and differences line up with and complement each other, and how clash, never connect, overlap, or diverge? What were their different or similar strategies and tactics for finding and growing their natural and widest audiences, and serving them with the best practices and products of their art?

AIR’s history is the central focus of this section; the other four histories will serve to reflect the musicultural contexts both of most general interest and social-historical relevance (AACM, BAG) and of most personal interest to me (PRP and the Tri-Centric Foundation) to that focus. As Part II Intro’s longish look at Leo Records did for Chapter Four and for Part II’s motif of creative music as a world music, this look at AIR and its founders will set the stage for the chapters on Tatsu Aoki, Fred Ho, Jason Kao Hwang, Miya Masaoka, and Taylor Ho Bynum, which will bring further answers to the questions posed above, and for Part III’s look at the Asian-American movement and music scene as blossoming from local/national- to transnational/global-coalitional. As Part II also saw women fulfilling their potential beyond challenging gender norms, and that in full and fruitful collaborations with men, Part III will highlight markers in the history of mainly male cohorts opening themselves up to formidable women partners, muses, and models in their work and worldviews.

AIR

The triple-souled tradition all five groups share, of course, is what is commonly understood as the American jazz tradition, which has always included with its African-American heart a face from the Western musical legacy of scored compositional art, and another from any and every other world/folk/art music tradition; it has also always been an afrological synthesis open to feeding itself through improvisation on both those faces. From its beginnings, rooted and cultivated preeminently in African-American culture and history—first as folk and popular local entertainment going national and global through the 20^th-century birth of audio and audiovisual media and broadcast technologies, then as its flowering therein as an international musical force on a par with (and foil to) European art music-as-elite--it was the American music that spawned all five collectives’ founders’ and members’ different identities and agendas, and our profiles vis-à-vis each other.

The AACM and BAG were/are unarguably the first among these American equals, both in time (1965 and 1968, respectively) and pride of place. Said place might be called the point at which the informal tradition tipped into the more formal paradigm. The tradition is the art form’s soil, worked most proprietorially by African-American hands and voices, albeit also open to all to take in and join in, as many have done and do. It is a tradition Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Lester Bowie and the other AACM and BAG founders and members came up in before charting and chartering the missions and aesthetics governing their respective organizations, when they sat in and gigged in sessions private and public, did studio dates, and generally covered the usual round of such contexts for concert music, experimental music, jazz and popular local music in clubs, social events, arts venues, and concert stages in Chicago, St. Louis, then points beyond.

The paradigm comes through the mission statements and musical practices of the charters they then drafted to better and increase their opportunities and rewards.[3] The winds of cultural change back then blew both high and low; the NEA and NEH, both launched in 1965, invited all comers to make their cases for what “American culture” should most rightly reference and comprise. The groundswell of the Civil Rights and Black Power and Black Arts movements, in their various newly incorporated organizations, answered that call as part of the broader efforts to both push from grassroots below and pull from highest fruits above—via legislative, executive, and judicial acts—those most willfully-ignorantly stereotyped, shorted, neglected, and persecuted citizens into their rightful share of political participation (starting with voting), education, employment, public spaces—in general “liberty and justice for all,” not to mention “pursuit of happiness,” where all Americans are said to belong.

In music, this reach for full American inclusion generally meant shaking off the old baggage of the “jazz” rubric, with its redolence of ill repute and vulgarity, commodified cheap thrills and decadence, vice and racialized inferiority to both “high” Western art music and the more respectably “wholesome” popular genres from sacred to light entertainment (Herr Adorno should have approved). It also meant shaking off the regular business and economic contexts for same: hiring out to others with their other expectations and interests, hiring out for peanuts to the profiteers who didn’t make the music, doing so as “the entertainment,” or even “the artists”; it meant defining instead their own aesthetic horizons and thematic and social contexts, constructing a business model and system of their own purview to best serve them.

The AACM and BAG were just two of many such cooperatives of artists that sprang up throughout the country (and in Europe, where the music born in the US was also present, and responded to seriously by musicians and audiences there).[4] If their concepts and expressions were unabashedly, even exclusively, afrocentric, either in effect (the “creative musicians” “associating” to be “advanced” were a de facto group of African-American musicians—again, mostly men—in Chicago) or in name (the Black Artists Group), they were thereby also the most “race”-transcendently human, in the way that all best art has been throughout the world and time, by getting to a universal through a specific local/personal identity.[5]

Although their members were steeped most completely in the musical universe established by Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, the bop giants of the 1940s and ‘50s, up to the most immediate living legends (Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler) then burning and passing their torches for them to get their own new fire from, they did not therefore charter their collectives to say “Our mission is to use our 501(c)3 status to function as a musician’s union that will get gigs for our members as the ‘new jazz musicians,’ will help them rise from local peanuts and glory to international fame and fortune, through the usual commercial venues and channels of clubs, festivals, colleges, concert halls, and record contracts.” They rather laid down their respective variations on a theme of community service, self-reliance, and cultural recognition of their own self-definitions (including but not exclusively ethnic/cultural identities) and music-definitions (interdisciplinary with other art forms, multicultural, experimentalist, improvised, maverick, creative, etc.), to be funded less by the commercial entertainment and arts industries than by grants from private and corporate sponsors and donors and government arts commissions and agencies from county to state to nation, which themselves had mission statements theoretically open to the projects such groups generated and proposed in the integrity of their own creative and social visions and agendas, all while (also theoretically) keeping free of any hint of selling said integrity to said paymasters.[6]

That much itself would qualify them as sterling models for any new generation of musicians and other artists coming up behind them and wanting to plant their own new flags for, let us call it, assimilation into a sociocultural terrain via challenges of it to change. As it happened, though, both AIR and my PRP had even more direct connections to the AACM/BAG lineage. I traced PRP’s in Chapter One; in 1998, Jang and Wong alluded to theirs in an in-depth interview. Jang:

In the late '60s there was the Black Artists Group out of St. Louis. And in 1965, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) was founded in Chicago. AACM was founded by, led by, and created for African American artists. (Paget-Clarke, 1997)

(That much suggests only the “sterling models”; AIR’s more “direct connections” would come later, via Tatsu Aoki’s Chicago proximity to the AACM, and AIR’s to him, culminating in the coalescence of his organization Innocent Eyes and Lenses (IEL) with AIR into AIRMW [AIR Midwest] examined ahead.) Wong:

To me, what we were doing was continuing the process of being in the tradition of self-produced artists… We didn't really have a choice because we were excluded and disenfranchised. We needed to have something. It's not like Jon could make a recording and then automatically have an outlet for his work. He had to create that vehicle for himself so we collaborated together to form Asian Improv. (Paget-Clarke, 1997)

Before continuing on with AIR’s history and its founders’ music, I will share my take on the literature covering its larger historical-cum-cultural context, itself loosely covered by the rubric of the Asian American Movement. This literature is roughly contemporaneous with the post-1980s years of AIR’s existence, thus mostly contextualizing AIR’s own role in the movement; that said, encompassing as it does a healthy dose of the discourse of Asian-American Studies, it also includes much information about the bigger history of Asia and the West, and about Asian America leading up to that 1980s period. It is selectively shaped to my own points of interest more than collected and presented as a more objective and comprehensive literature review, and not all of it falls within the purview of the conventionally discursive category of Asian-American Studies. I share it for fellow researchers, with my comments to signal how I draw from it here.

I will subdivide it into four sections:

1.    earliest “big history” up to mid-19^th-century economic and military falls of Asian to Western powers;

2.    mid-19^th-century to 1960s history of Asian immigration in America;

3.    post-1960s history of the current Asian-American Movement to 1987 founding of AIR;

4.    post-1987 history of Asian-American Movement to present.

Earliest “big history” up to mid-19^th-century commercial and military falls of Asian to Western powers

We’ve already touched on some of the mythological tangles/reflections of the deepest East-West big-historical roots, in Chapter Two (via Grauer’s [2011] “Yellow Bell” story, Kingsley’s [2003, 2010] erudite meditations on Mongolia’s influences on ancient Greece). Some of my favorite parts of some of the recent scholarship from current Asian-American Studies are those that also glance back that far to set their stages. Okihiro starts his (1994) book Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture at Hippocrates’s (5^th – 4^th centuries B.C.E.) perception of the Eastern alluvial climes as spoiling its inhabitants with plentiful and easily harvested food and friendly weather, making them softer, less industrious, childlike Edenites less spirited than the Greeks, whom he saw as forged hardier and braver by the more environmentally challenging trials of rocky islands and sea. Okihiro traces that trope from Homer up through Herodotus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Xenophon, Aristotle, Alexander, the early Christians, all conflating barbarism both weak and cruel, femininity both feral and chaotic, animality both subhuman and dangerous with each other and with that Asian Other, to contrast with the norm of rational, civilized Greek patriarchy. He notes the terror-tinged descriptions of the Mongol invaders as swarming locusts, the successive European fabulisms from Marco Polo to Sir John Mandeville to Christopher Columbus that laid the foundations of the erotic and exotic that would support the later construct of Edward Said’s Orientalism, a mindset fitting as well the colonialist invaders’-cum-slavers’ perceptions of and agendas with Native Americans and Africans. His analysis of Shakespeare’s The Tempest as reflecting Europe’s transatlantic incursions is a revelation. He cites contemptuous accounts by late-17^th-century European merchants of their Chinese counterparts that amplify the worst of the more speculative slanders dating from the ancient Greeks. He ascribes prophetic insight to Herman Melville’s notion of the westward movement of Indian-hating white conquerors seamlessly plying that racist spirit to their transpacific reaches into Asia. He notes the history of the last couple of centuries as one of the humiliation of Asia by the Western world of Europe and America, ending with the Chinese student resistance of 1989 (when AIR was getting off the ground) as allying itself with the African-American hymn “We Shall Overcome” (pp. 8 – 30)…

[I’m continuing to work through the literature on the Asian American Movement; the rest of my review of it will be inserted here when complete. –MH]

…As with AACM and BAG, the central musical thrust of AIR was couched in a zeitgeist of social and political currents, from those stirring most locally in their ethnic Asian communities to those more national and global. The 1980s (Reagan years) saw the two presidential runs by Jesse Jackson, with his Rainbow Coalition reaching out to Asian-American activists and them responding in kind around the issues and events noted above. Wong and Jang both describe the impulse to incorporate AIR as driven as much by this decade’s surge in Asian-American consciousness and activism as by their own personal goals as musicians. As much as their personal artistic vehicle, the label was conceived as that movement’s “musical front”; collaborations with East Wind Magazine and the (non-Asian) experimental theater group Life on the Water signaled the AIR identity both as such a front and as that in solidarity (again, like AACM and BAG) with the broader global network of experimental and improvised interdisciplinary creative arts.[7]

Maeda (2012, p. 73, 141) describes the East Wind “collective [in 1972—M.H.] as community activists involved in efforts to combat drug abuse, secure better healthcare, and defend the ghetto” who “studied political theorists such as Marx and Lenin, but none more than Mao. They concluded that as part of the Third World, Asian Americans should work in solidarity with blacks, Latinos, and other people of color, though most of the members worked primarily in Asian American communities…East Wind was arguably the most self-conscious in its efforts to work with other people of color” (p. 73). By the 1980s, they had joined a couple of similar groups to become part of the League of Revolutionary Struggle (LRS), a national multiracial Communist party that joined with the Rainbow Coalition to try and make inroads to mainstream politics. That history of the group and that turn it took was in place by the time AIR came on the scene and worked with it.

Such a genealogy and identity of a music group always begs the question of the art’s relationship with both that mainstream and the mission to influence it. The elephant in the room is the history of theater, literature, music, art as agitprop in a socialist-realist framework. The tensions between the elephant and absence of talk about it lie between the integrity of the artist, the work, and the power it is both speaking truth to and pleading or demanding to be heard and accepted by; and between artist/work and that revolutionary activist agenda that would harness and command it. We’ll explore that in more detail in Chapter 12. For now, note that both Jang and Wong expressed their awareness and concern about such tensions, even as their work itself had and has demonstrated all along a balanced resolution of them.

Jang: 

Music is an expression of our minds and as artists we take the human responsibility to respond to the world around us and so we make statements. But I think that because most of our music is instrumental music that besides our titles and taking a stand if you just listen to the music it's not political music. The inspiration to draw upon people like Paul Robeson is the soul of the music. Sometimes it will be literate because he sang songs, but it's more the power of the music that interests me. Oftentimes in political music you make a political statement and then the music is the function of that. We will respond to certain events and the music will flow from that. Political and music seem kind of detached. It's always felt uncomfortable for me … the problem with political music is it forces one to think that is political. It can deny the full experience and power of the music.

Equally uncomfortable, he explains elsewhere in the interview, was the direction he saw taken by those he called likeminded white students more influenced by Dadaism and Existentialism, down a more apolitical introverted path.

Wong: 

I never looked at my music as political music. I see it as music. It's an expression of my soul. I know there is political music. I know that there is music specifically written to do certain things. We take certain political anthems and turn them into something else to make different artistic statements that are to me broader than the point of their original context.

It's hard. There may be a song that's written with a political impulse behind it but I think with the best music the impact is much much broader and actually speaks to humanity. I think the term “political music” is a confining term, so I don't apply it to myself. To look at myself I feel I have a certain level of political consciousness but I don't necessarily feel I'm a political person. I actually don't know what that means anymore. To me a lot of that's an anachronism. It's something that harks back to the '70s and '60s. Politics certainly exists, but being a complete definition of a person - I don't think so…

Those words from both sit right with my own memories of life as a working musician and journalist in Oregon during the time AIR was born. As both I had occasions to express political positions in solidarity with, specifically, the Rainbow Coalition for Jesse Jackson’s campaigns then. That attracted invitations from a local neighbor/acquaintance/fellow-traveler of sorts who was an organizer for the LRS in Eugene, to play at the group’s rallies. I instinctively shied away from his and all other such contexts, even as I expressed my own takes and versions of similar positions and statements in the regular club and artsy venues bands like mine played in. My own thoughts about the phenomenon more generally are collected here (p. 4). T-Bone Burnett said it even better in a 2016 keynote address at the AmericanaFest music festival.

A look at its discography reveals how AIR’s Asian-American identity has unfolded seamlessly through the political, personal, and spiritual to blossom over the last three-and-a-half decades. In a nutshell, its seven dozen-plus releases display from beginning to end a tight and thick weave between its Asian-American themes and sounds and

·         Asian-traditional repertoire and sounds;

·         their African-American peers/themes in creative music and organizations; and

·         the arts of composition and improvisation as developed in modern European and American concert music, jazz, and experimental music.

While it showcases the work of dozens of musicians, some switching their roles as leaders and bandmates for each other’s dates, I’ll focus here on the details of AIR’s two founders Jang and Wong, for the tone and posture their respective voices and visions set for the label. Those lines will extend and branch through the equally close looks at the “thousand flowers” then to bloom on and off the label, especially, again, those I devote chapters to here.

Jang started recording in 1982, releasing his first two (LPs) on another label before launching AIR. AIR started in 1987 primarily as a vehicle for his recording projects, which have grown from that year to 2006 to number 13. He had released four of those by 1993, at which time Wong, his bandmate on all four, released his own first AIR CD as a leader, Great Wall. (In 1992, Wong had become its artistic director and had begun bringing in other Asian-American musicians to the roster.) His most recent of 14 CDs listed under his name or as a guest on the AIR catalogue, The Wojtek Trio, was released in 2013.

Taking a week or two to listen to those two bodies of recorded work straight through, from first to last CDs, while taking in all their visual and textual contents, a picture emerges comprising their common ground, their overlaps, and their clear distinctions. (Speaking as one who’s played both trombone and piano a lot, the first such distinction that jumps out at me is one I sense shaped by their respective instruments.) The most obvious common-ground sound, of course, is that of American jazz in its most glorious history as an African-American genre-way-beyond-stronger-than-itself (to riff from George Lewis). The instruments, their combinations and roles, the ways they’re played and the material their players present hits the ear as clear constituents of that foundational tradition. The specifics of that foundation are signaled by tracks and bylines such as Jang’s originals’ titles such as “Lester Leaps Out (Dolphinology)” and “The Ballad of the Budbird Boogie” (nods to Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell) and covers of Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye, Porkpie Hat” and John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” along with dedications to Thelonious Monk and Malcolm X. Wong’s first CD includes a cover of the Billy Eckstine classic ballad “I Want to Talk About You,” with the influence of Coltrane’s equally classic cover of it richly suffusing his own. The more explicit homages of influence are in his liner notes, where he writes words that echo aspects of Jang’s similar sentiments and express well the Afro-Asian ethos/aesthetic at AIR’s core:

The music here comes from a desire to participate in the jazz/creative music tradition and to contribute an Asian American voice. I was attracted to the music as a teenager, particularly the legacy of Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. These artists and other great figures of the African American tradition embodied the struggle for freedom and self-determination. I was inspired by their vision in embracing and celebrating the music and people of the world.

The bio-blurbs of the other musicians on that CD specify the concretes of such influence at play in the work at hand, in Jang’s (“founder of the African-Chinese Sextet and the Pan-Asian Arkestra. He has brought some of the foremost artists in the field, such as Max Roach, James Newton, and David Murray with traditional Chinese instrumentalists Liu Qi-Chao and Zhang Yan”) and drummer E.W. Wainwright, Jr.’s (“founder and leader of African Roots of Jazz…worked with such notables as Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, McCoy Tyner, Bobby Hutcherson, Joe Henderson, Rhasaan Roland Kirk and Pharoah Sanders”). As African Americans mastered the Western-music universe/culture they were forced to engage, to then turn it so thoroughly to their own musicultural needs and ends, so this AIR front of the Asian-American movement of its time engaged (albeit with much more love than necessity’s stress) the African-American history and world to plant their seeds and flags in.

Thus firmly rooted in the African-American soil, the music proceeded to sprout its own more signature expressions, both sights and sounds from the early CDs: Asian/Asian-American-themed titles of CDs (Jang’s Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?, Tiananmen!, Wong’s Great Wall) and tracks (Jang’s “Year to Slay the Paper Dragon,” Wong’s “Autumn Moon Reflected on the Peaceful Lake”) and bylines thereof (Chen Gang and Ho Zhan-Hao, composers of Jang-arranged signature tune “Butterfly Lovers Song”; Liu Shie-Un and Hua Yan-Jun, composers of Wong’s CD’s title track “Great Wall” and its “Autumn Moon” piece, respectively). That “struggle for freedom and self-determination” found its particular voices and visions in Jang’s three Pan-Asian Arkestra CDs (all including Wong in the band), Never Give Up! (1989), Self-Defense! (1992), and Tiananmen! (1993). They elaborated musically and in liner notes on the internment/reparations theme, the Rainbow Coalition/Jackson campaign, and the progressive currents in China at the time.

The latter two CDs, though included in the AIR catalogue, are on the Italian Soul Note label, stepping the SF-local AIR presence out into the international arena, in the footsteps of the 1983 United Front release on the German FMP label.[8] The themes and guest musicians from China on Tiananmen! likewise reflected AIR’s expansion from local to global, itself reflecting that turn of the Asian-American Movement as a whole to its natural allies and coalitions abroad.[9]

Jang’s later AIR-catalogued CDs for Soul Note further explored themes vital to Asian-American, particularly Californian, and his own personal, history: Island Immigrant Suite No. 1 (recorded in 1995, released in 1997) took on the grim history of Angel Island’s harshly unwelcoming West-coast version of Ellis Island in processing Chinese immigrants, particularly women, in tandem with poet Genevieve Lim and historian Judy Yung; Two Flowers on a Stem (1996) joined Jang’s family history of loss and racism and expressions along the same lines from the black community, in tandem with flautist James Newton, reedsman David Murray, and drummer Jabali Billy Hart, and a Charles Mingus composition. Back on the AIR label, the international discourse continued with Jang, drummer Max Roach, and Chinese erhu master Chen Jiebing on their Beijing Trio (1999). More poetry and personal voices improvising than orchestrated historicopolitical statements, that, as also Jang’s solo piano CD Self Portrait, with yet the same thick Afro/Asian inflections, material, and themes, garnished with a tinge of pop culture (a Bruce Lee film, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the movie Carousel, Joni Mitchell’s “I Could Drink a Case of You”) on both. River of Life (2002, with flautist James Newton) and Paper Son, Paper Songs (2006) round out Jang’s work on AIR with more original and collaborative gestures along the same lines (details ahead on them and the other CDs just surveyed). Overlapping, parallel to, and beyond the recordings is his work in roughly the same timespan as a composer commissioned by various concert, theater, dance, and film producers, seen here, and ongoing participation in the annual jazz festivals in Chicago and San Francisco associated with AIR.

Jang summed up his work in that 2000 interview as that of a composer against the grain of his education, and even more with the grain of his personal creativity and his family’s oral culture:

You have to understand that music education does not nurture people to compose. It's about playing instrumental music, concert music, marching band music in the late afternoon, just blowing, following a conductor. You're not encouraged to even write eight bars of melody. At least in creative writing you have to write an essay, 'How I spent my summer vacation'. That's a personal statement, but music education in the public schools is not about personal creativity. In the classical music world usually you are taught to compose compositions that are based on musical techniques…

In our life we know who we are in terms of our personal expression but I think it's always going to be this searching and self-examination. Particularly, now that I'm in my forties, I see that we're at this crossroads where we have our parents who will be leaving us and we have our children. We're learning both from our parents and from our children. That also informs our music.

I think what 's enjoyable about the musical process is that it's a form of storytelling. What's always making it interesting is it is connected to our own Chinese culture. My family, my grandparents are storytellers, great storytellers. Our music is not literate, we're telling it differently. But we also are telling the story.

Wong’s AIR output has staked out a somewhat different path through the same Afro-Asian terrain. Jang’s projects add up to something like 75% composer’s concepts—those stories he wants to tell, his visions—served and complemented by the voices of his peers in the Asian- and African-American scenes mostly on the West Coast. The other 25% are gigs where he is one of the crew doing his bit for another leader’s project (eg. Anthony Brown), or (even more) like pickup games between master players (Newton, Roach, Chen), pooling their creative powers to collaboratively generate those less orchestrated unforeseen miracles of improvisation small and large, events more poetically defined after the fact.

Wong’s sequence of recordings led by his name rather reverses that 75/25 ratio, and in the process bridges the San Francisco and Chicago wellsprings of the music. His first three CDs (Great Wall, Pilgrimage, Legends and Legacies) with the mostly-SF circle (Wong’s Ming ensemble) include the mix of traditional Asian songs, jazz standards, and Asian-American-themed titles and poetry with a sociopolitical edge characteristic of Jang’s similar work. They also include tracks more distinctive of directions to come (“Conversations” on Great Wall, and much of Pilgrimage) for their saxophone-centered experiments with improvisational interactions and solo gestures.

I'm interested in process. The music-making process. For me, primarily, in a performance. How do musical ideas come to me? How do I process them and create music? You've heard the term being "in-the-moment." Being able to be in-the-moment, to be in touch with my own history and experiences, and also to be in the present and play whatever I feel like at the moment - that's the process I'm interested in…That's one part of my body of work - improvising, while drawing on different materials. (Paget-Clarke, 1997)

That process yielded Wong’s AIR output over the next two decades, in a musical reflection of the merger of the San Francisco organization-cum-label with bassist Tatsu Aoki’s similar Asian-American arts-based Chicago community organization IEL.[10] Chicago Time Code (1995) is his first of those, with Aoki and keyboardist Bradley Parker-Sparrow, with extensive and insightful liner notes by then-Playboy jazz critic Neal Tesser shedding light on that free-improvisational process and its different materials. Wong’s words to him there express well the auspicious nature of the collaboration from his musician point of view:

So many great musicians have gone through Chicago, there’s such a sense of history, and now of my being part of that history. Being invited to perform there was a very profound thing—like the music was saying “yes” and offering that sense of inclusiveness, which is always one of the great aspects of jazz. And then, sharing the stage with Von Freeman, hanging afterward and meeting cats like Fred Anderson [both in their own ways pioneering Chicago tenormen]—that’s the second aspect of why Chicago has meant so much to me and to other members of Asian Improv aRts [AIR].

Sparrow-Parker donned his other hats—executive producer with his wife singer Joanie Pallatto, sound designer/engineer, graphic designer, liner-notes poet—for the Aoki/Wong/Pavkovic Trio’s Urban Reception (1996) on his Southport label. Also AIR-catalogued, its addition of percussionist Dave Pavkovic widening the circle by one more. “We do not migrate,” Sparrow-Parker has his poem’s urban crows crow, from their perches “in a grizzled time code of Urban Reception.” Gathering of Ancestors (1999) joins Wong back in San Francisco with erstwhile bandmate drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee and bassist John-Carlos Perea, whose liner notes characterized the CD as

a compilation of the experiences of three urban jazz musicians whose cultural backgrounds provide a foundation of tradition and a fusion of diversity. Chinese, Jewish, Latin, American Indian, and Irish influences combine to create a unique hybrid of sounds and rhythms whose origins lie in the urban experience. As such this recording documents not only the creation and exploration of new musical avenues but the evolution of their parent traditions (emphasis mine, to keep in mind for discussion of the music’s Western lineage, just ahead).

A Symphony of Cities (2002, a Southport/AIR coproduction) is a duo CD by Aoki and Famoudou Don Moye, with Wong and flautist Joel Brandon guesting on two of its three tracks. Newcity Chicago critic John MacCalkies’s luminous liner notes report Aoki’s invitation to bring Wong in on a tribute to the late great Chicago bassist Wilbur Ware, and that “Wong’s tenor bludgeonings shape the mood on ‘TokyoMad Tonal Efficiency,’” and “he salutes and screams schizophrenically on survival isle.”

Graphic Evidence (2005) is an ear-opener of a CD for its array of instruments and master players who know how to milk them to maximum effect, both individually and interactively. Wong sticks with soprano saxophone on all eight tracks, as if knowing it will have more than enough to say with Jason Kao Hwang’s violin, Tatsu Aoki’s bass, and Wu Man’s pipa in its close matches to their deft massages of its range in their various timbres and textures. Lines blur between strings bowed high and rough and reeds blown likewise in sounds suggesting the beyond-human music yearning there. Genny Lim’s liner notes evoke its essence as expansively and knowledgably as its track titles do poetically:

One can hear echoes of Ayler’s Holy Ghost…or Coltrane’s hovering presence…Sun Ra’s innovative, intergalactic expeditions and the powerful eclecticism of Art Ensemble of Chicago in their sense of freedom and determined inquiry. What makes this blues-rooted synthesis unique is its rich Asian overtones.

Those overtones come through Wong’s full immersion in Chicago’s elder statesman of the tenor sax Fred Anderson’s open jam on Live at the Velvet Lounge, Vol. III (AIR, 2008). The African-American discourse dominates naturally, itself schooling both master and journeyman, and Aoki’s bass voice, and Chad Taylor’s drumming. That said, scales, phrases, rhythms, inflections come and go through the mix that pique the ear already primed to catch them from Wong and Aoki, those Asian overtones not heard in Anderson’s other variations of personnel in the Live at the Velvet Lounge series.

The Francis Wong Trio’s Early Abstractions’ (Estrada Poznanska MIC02, 2009) title and title track invokes the spirit of Harry Smith. Smith was an anthologist of recordings seminal to the postwar American folk and blues revival (a big influence on Bob Dylan), a jazz buff, and an all-around Renaissance man of lefty-bohemian culture who made several short animated films of the same title as this CD, right around the time Lennie  Tristano recorded his groundbreaking sets of free improvisation in the late ‘40s. Wong, Aoki (himself an artist and scholar of film), and Taylor improvised accompaniments to showings of Smith’s films at the First International Film Festival in Poznan, Poland, in 2008. Their own music’s links to those folk and blues traditions (again, in Ayler and Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman) Smith loved as much as his abstract filmic art centered its harmonic-melodic terrain in a single minor or major mode that anchors a given track. Play the mode’s pentatonic scale with one choice of passing tones, and Asian music is suggested; another choice, only slightly different, suggests rather Jewish klezmer.

Adding to the variations on the East-meets-West themes here, The New World (2009) marks more merging of San Francisco’s AIR and Chicago’s Southport families.  It is Sparrow-Parker’s first release on AIR with Aoki as a player. His piano brings in the gentle post-Impressionist lyricism that is Western music’s other big contact point with Asian aesthetics, through Debussy, along with edgier tonality-atomizers from post-Expressionist avant-gardism and the synth and sampled sounds of post/modernism’s most recent words. That, with the jazz vocabulary and inflections joined in with by the others, comprises the most obvious face of the keyboardist’s conceptual New World (among the informed collage of influences is Dvorak’s New World Symphony). That interpretation seems solid when the first two tracks of Old World instruments—Aoki’s shamisen (Japanese lute), Wong’s shinobue (bamboo flute), and Brazilian-born drummer Dedé Sampaio’s berimbau (ancient stringed folk instrument)—give way to the more modern instruments and sounds.

Jeff Chan takes us to that third node of the AIR/Southport network, AIRMW. Chan is its Director of Development, and worked with AIR and other community arts groups in San Francisco before coming to Chicago in 2002. His Horns of Plenty (2009) is an improvised art object like the others that are performed live; it is more a composed one like the Southport CD in its titles and captions that turn it into the sonic photo album Chan wants to show us: “Up Above” is “my acknowledgement of that entity that is larger than all of us...whatever it may be.” Other programmatic tags of these composed gestures and cultivated improvs allude to the Chinese immigration experience on Angel Island, a traditional Japanese song, a Taiwanese mountain, and Chan’s newborn niece. The overall sound is of tasteful-to-rollicking, with tight to poignantly open Western woodwind mixes between him, Wong, Edward Wilkerson Jr. and a couple of guests (hence the title) from duo to quintet with and without Aoki’s bass, with equal measures of blues, Asian scales and inflections, and jazz inside and out. West Coast meets Midwest meets East in it all, in many familiar senses.

Wong and Aoki join in with guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Kavee to present a quartet at the other end of the spectrum from the power horns. Like delicate art prints, or haikus, 3 Big Guys +1’s (2009) 17 short tracks showcase Wong’s floating melodic-linear thoughts and the fleeter improvs they inspire, making a scrapbook of riches. Parker’s shimmer-ringing sound, while far from Derek Bailey’s, does evoke the same floating-free-of tonal matrices or metronomic grooves, even as it dances and darts in and out of them. It effects thus a fitting double duty between Wong’s fellow single-line voice (often in unison) and piano-like comp to Kavee’s and Aoki’s riverbedrock patterns usually roiling at twice the speed or faster than the others. If this were a blindfold test, unlike much in the other CDs here, I doubt I’d detect any “Asian tinge”; it speaks more with a post-Wayne Shorter/Bill Frisell kind of sensibility. Situated as it is in the explicit AIR mission, however, it could also invoke a deeper point of reference, in the archaic-cum-living root of both Asian and Western music improvisation can access.

Francis Wong: Wojtek Trio (2013) is a concert recorded live in 2010 at the 2^nd Asian American Jazz Festival in Poznan, Poland. Wong, Aoki, and Taylor are back in that scene of Early Abstractions (above) and the Miyumi Project CDs (ahead, in Aoki’s ouevreview). Lauren Deutsch’s cover photo is of an architectural detail of two hornblowing angels sitting on the roof of an historical Western-classical building. Wholly apart from the music (will turn to details of that ahead too, in Wong’s oeuvreview), the event and visual evocation themselves signal some full circles they close to be noted in closing this overview of the music of Jang and Wong on AIR.

The early music culture and education of both men, very much like mine and other white and black Americans, was largely European and European American. Their coming of age through that when and where and how they did, to turn it to the service of the Asian-American and Asian-traditional materials and themes in the way that they did, and to form an organization and label like AIR as they did, constitute something like Joseph Campbell’s monomythical hero’s journey out of and through a darkness born into, to reach the light of a true self living where it should be and doing what it should be doing.

Wong describes his childhood exposure to the “march music…opera [and] French music” favored by his parents as “something that really helped them get through all the difficulties in life” (the Chinese revolution and World War II, the immigrant experience) as also sparking his own love of music. He started playing it on violin, classical music in a church orchestra formed by Czech immigrants. His violin teacher was a local German immigrant.

My introduction to the life of a musician was hers. She was the one who told my parents that she thought that I could be a professional musician if I wanted. That vision of an artist or musician was very different from what most of us think of. Especially once we go to college. The star influence of society, it's all about success. She had a working class community-oriented approach to being a professional musician. She was a great violinist. She was very well respected. At the same time her sense of purpose in the music was pretty clear. It wasn't about fame and fortune. The fact that she was more from the German, European tradition had some influence in the way I approached things, as opposed to a more elitist approach. So even though I was playing classical music it wasn't that elitist.

Jang’s beginnings were similar, both in music’s palliative role countering family traumas-cum-challenges and its Eurocentric cast:

I was raised by my mother, because my father died when I was only two years old. She sang a lot of music and I heard a lot of music, mainly classical music. A lot of the classical music was Tchaikovsky or Rossini and the melodies were played on the French horn, so that was one of the early instruments I learned… It was hard growing up in a white community with no father and a mother who came from the working class…Maybe it sounds cliché, but music became like a religion. It's more like music came to me, as opposed to me coming to the music.

Even the primal and lasting impact of African-American music came first through his mother’s love of Paul Robeson, who sang in the Western operatic style of black spirituals.

Developing as serious music students throughout childhood and adolescence, then, both had similar identity crises brought on by their college experiences. Jang speaks of his time at Oberlin for its happy mentorship under Wendell Logan, who founded and chaired the jazz program there. Through Logan’s African American history class, he got his first serious exposure to the music of Duke Ellington and William Grant Still, and (then-) Le Roi Jones' book Blues People. Less happy was his feeling of being a fish out of water in the Conservatory culture—for being one of only three Asian Americans in the school, for being the only one from the West Coast, for not being as locked in as others there to either the classical or the jazz genres and cultures he worked in. The effect of both happy and unhappy aspects combined to set him on his path to compose and play music that would “valorize the contributions of Chinese Americans” as his models did those of African Americans, and to realize that “music was about developing a personal voice” (Paget-Clark, 1997).

Wong describes a similar epiphany:

For myself going to college, it was a transformative period, a cultural shock…I wasn't going to be finding that kind of musical culture…I had to figure out who I was in the context of this elitist university. That was the period of my political awakening…I ended up being able to be a professional musician by rediscovering on my own those values that had brought me into music in the first place. (Paget-Clark, 1997)

In the time and place of their coming of age, then, it was no great leap or mystery to understand the way forward through such an identity crisis. They were standing on the shoulders of the heroes of 20^th-century African-American music on whom all Americans and the rest of the world drew as models of deep and brilliant artistry in the face of oppression and neglect, of the contemporaneous heroes who formed the AACM and BAG, as musical fronts of the movements for civil rights and respect in the 1960s, and of their Asian-American Movement counterparts from those same years. The struggle to forge their personal voices and to organize AIR to do its work was as much the challenge and reward of all such ways made out of no way, in the daily personal grind of making it happen, but the imperative and nature of the process itself was no burden they had to shoulder in the dark alone.

The Wojtek CD—not uniquely, but strikingly among others, to my eyes and ears and reflections—stands and sounds as a destination of that archetypal hero’s journey with resonance peculiar to me as someone who might have been their classmate and playmate in our SF Bay Area neighborhoods. Other CDs could signal just as well from another destination the same kind of resonance for them apart from me—the Pan-Asian Arkestra CDs where they teamed up with Chinese musicians, their collaborations with African Americans--but since part of their roots and identities are as Western and white American as mine, musically, culturally, materially, when that circle also closes in Poland, in Europe and the West, more broadly, it does so in a Venn diagram overlapping with my own hero’s journey.

Two myths spring to mind to compare and contrast their journeys with mine. I think of their coming-of-age as American “minorities” through the story of the tiger cub raised among sheep--to eat like the sheep, bleat like the sheep, generally grow to think he’s a sheep. Then when he’s well along in the course of that life, a grown tiger comes along, sees what has happened, pulls him aside and shows him his reflection in a nearby pond…even gives him a bit of raw mutton to chew on. Seeing his own face for the first time next to the full-grown tiger, he knows he’s no sheep, and sets about learning to be and become the tiger he is, from that moment on.

As the child of America’s white “majority’s” privilege, the myth that fits my similar (if ruder) awakening is more that of the ancient Indian prince Gautama, who came of age sheltered in security and luxury oblivious to the world outside his palace, only to find that world to be full of suffering, disease, poverty, and death when he finally saw it. The insult added to that injury in my people’s case is that we also had to see that our palace was not only a bubble sheltering us from that harsher reality, but was clearly implicated as causing and perpetuating much of its pain, and thriving at the expense of the people suffering there. The only course of good conscience and health for the prince was to leave the palace, delve into the world outside as deeply as he could, and try to make his way out of no way there into his Buddhahood.

Applying that allegory to the Wojtek CD leads naturally into its namesake and dedicatee. Wojtek Juszczak was a graduate of art history and philosophy and a longtime journalist for Radio Mercury in Poland. He was also a jazz fan, especially favoring the “Coltrane, Coleman, Braxton” sides of the music (Piatkowski, n.d.), who launched in Poznan in 2006 one of the largest European jazz festivals, Made in Chicago. Featured artists were drawn from everywhere, but a connection with Deutsch and her Jazz Institute of Chicago is what centralized presentations in Poland of the AACM cohort and others from that city as the festival’s heart. Aoki’s involvement with both film and music was a natural match for Wojtek’s passions.

Wojtek died after a long illness in 2013. His legacy stands with those Europeans and European Americans who have been drawn to the music created by African Americans as an apotheosis of Western music’s own aesthetic potential, as much as of its African roots. The journeys of Jang and Wong from the Western classical/Common Practice foundation of their formative years through the African-American extensions on that foundation to their own Asian voices and visions added to both mirror those of every African-American master who cut his or her teeth on Western instruments, pedagogy, repertoire, context, and genres, only to put them at the service of glories beyond the Western pale once those teeth started doing their own cutting. Many whites were left in their dust as that happened, in a thousand different ways, but others embraced it as the redemptive phenomenon it became when it commandeered that Western musiculture that passed as universal even as it excluded or exploited parts of its “universe,” thereby making the latter truly so by taking it above and beyond its deluded charade. The history of jazz has been one of the African-American hero/ine successfully riding, not slaying, the dragon that had bedeviled him/her. The (musical) gold hoarded in the dragon’s cave was then freed up, not burned up. The Asian and Asian-American artists on their similar journeys in the West with its music have as successfully allied with those riders on that dragon’s back.

Indeed, the dragon itself, thus tamed and retrained, has plenty of room still for its former slavemastering energies and tactics, by redirecting them into its own self-mastery. To mix metaphors and allegories wildly, the prince-become-Buddha closes his journey’s circle by confronting his Darth Vader (dark father). The mytheme of the dark father more precisely reflects the entity (male, female, beast) that has the power over the life and death of the hero; it thus can stand as well for each of several different parties in this play.

Most obviously, for so-called “racial minorities” in the West, it is that white-supremacist civilization that has both spawned and abused them; to “kill” that father is primarily to succeed in stopping the abuse, and to turn the civilization from abusive to nurturing. The same such father can be in the same need of such killing, so to speak, by his own presumptive heirs. European Americans whose family bonds and loyalties were overruled by their repugnance at being privileged citizens of an inhumane culture are confronted with what killing that father might look like. Many of the German musicians I interviewed for my second book spoke of such repugnance at their own biological fathers’ collusions with the Nazi machine.

Complicating that picture, though, is the way even healthy individuation from beloved parents can also have the feel of a ritual killing by the offspring, and a willing sacrifice by the progenitors. Those same European musicians spoke of “killing” the African-American musical fathers they revered, loved, and honored, not to negate or appropriate, but to move out of the shadow of the fathers to find that original personal voice and vision that is the goal of the musician’s hero journey. Many African-American master musicians I also spoke with about this understood that perfectly, took it as homage more than threat or appropriation, even if they pushed back critically against this or that musical or cultural aspect of it.[11]

Finally, for Westerners, the dark father can be the racialized beast their ancestors have conjured up to stand in for their various darker-skinned Others throughout history. Recalling Okihiro’s glance back at the Asians the ancient Greeks both despised as lesser and feared as greater powers, or the Egyptians and Persians similarly looming over them and early Hebrew tribes, and the racist template that history projected onto later European encounters with (both Moorish overlords and enslaved) Africans, Mongols, Indians, Native Americans, and South Sea Islanders, right down to the current conflicts flowering from such roots: the “white” hero’s journey includes a confrontation with the threats and fears that beast stirs up, to finally “kill” them/it within the Western soul and work through them in the outer world to the peace in Campbell’s understanding of “atonement”:

Atonement consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy… The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands—and the two are atoned. (Campbell, 1972, p. 110) (my emphasis, to file mentally to go with words below by Jang and Wong about the spiritual aspect of their music—a blues spirituality, resonant with that of the Book of Job, or Abraham when he thought God would love the sacrifice of Isaac.)

These thoughts call up Chapter One’s overhaul of the emic/etic binary, with which related binaries such as self/other, West/Rest, East/West, us/them, black/white, one/many have fallen into their places in scholarly discourse like iron shavings pulled into patterns by magnetic fields.[12] Wu Man has remarked that there is no East or West on a globe, and T-Bone Walker has said this: “But everything interesting in life—everything that makes life worth living—happens between the binary. Mercy is not binary. Love is not binary. Music and art are not binary. You and I are not binary” (Chandler, 2016).  We are, rather, each centers of the circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere, individuating from it and each other only to merge with same in the very act of detaching.

All of which is a circle back to the music of Jang and Wong on AIR, to end this introduction to it on the aspect both have invoked as “spiritual.”  That, of course, is a term that means different things to different people, but Jang and Wong have defined it in terms of their music rather precisely. Their mutual definition is notably less abstract and more unified than my “hero’s journey” riff, but the comparative concreteness of theirs complements, doesn’t refute, the abstraction of mine, as transcendence and immanence go hand-in-non-binary-hand. Their definition erases any separation between the sociopolitical, the personal, and the spiritual. While both express discomfort with the idea that their music is “political” in a classically (specifically Chinese) socialist-realist kind of way, their distance from the suggestion of agitpropaganda veers not toward art-for-art’s-sake so much as to politics-is-personal-is-spiritual (recall Jang’s words about this above. In the same interview he noted the seamlessness of the black church history and spirit in the movements for social justice.)[13] As we’ll see ahead, Jang’s most deeply personal statements about his own family’s pain carry the same celebrations of beauty-from-tragedy, life-beyond-death as do those about racial injustices reported in the news—then in the ‘90s, and as I write in 2016—and history, and the same resonance with the Christian theme of victory over such evils.

Wong cites Jang’s composition “Eleanor Bumpurs” about an African-American grandmother in the Bronx murdered by police and adds his own “Prayer for Malcolm Truss” about a similar murder from the news as illustrative of what he suggests as a blues spirituality, one inseparable from the more theological tradition:

On the surface it may seem like a political composition but you listen to it it's really a celebration of life, not just the joys of life but the tragedies as well. Which is the whole tradition of the blues. … You could say 'oh yeah that's political,' but when you listen to the music it's really about passage. Passage from this world into the next. At least part of it, that's what it is really about. The solitude of that passage. The other part is really about how people feel about and relate to that as a community.

Jang ties the African- and Asian-American concerns and expressions in the music together so:

[F]or Francis and myself it's looking at the Chinese folk music, Chinese sorrow songs. Looking at the power of that—sorrow doesn't necessarily mean that the songs are sad—but as in “Eleanor Bumpurs” it's about celebration of life, about beauty and also tragedy. It's going through constant reexamination.

That seamless integration of the musical with the personal, social, and spiritual is in sync with China’s Taoist tradition. The ancient court and folk music both theorized a chromatic palette of pitches in terms of cosmic and natural cycles; each tone bore its distinct living signature, some yin, some yang, and all to varying degrees on the vibrational spectrum. The octave-comprised One and its Many pitched divisions, and the Oneness of a composed song and the Many improvisations all performances of it inevitably were were mined and plumbed for optimum equilibrium—and the timbres and textures of the twelve tones, like tonality in Chinese spoken language itself and in some African drumming, bore poetic and semantic charges and meanings such as Western music developed more in the intervals between the tones than in the tones themselves—a musical analogy of the difference between abstract transcendence and concrete immanence, and that difference as one of complements rather than opposites, suggesting a conflation of all the binaries and their poles—here, specifically, East and West, blues and gospel, and Christian and Taoist.

It is impossible to say whether such roots and unities are what I hear in these fruits of AIR, but safe enough to argue that the fruits do express the character of the roots. If there is indeed that much more than meets the ear here, it suggests the seeds of something deep flying high and far into a future as formidable as its past. All heroes’ journeys are about something new coming to light from them. They also feature reconciliation between the conflicting forces that propelled them. The vision of universal justice, peace, and good will continues to loom larger and live longer than the histories of people trying to realize it by eliminating or subjugating their bothersome “others.” Finally, their telling comes with a misconception too easy to overlook, and easy enough to address.

That is the notion that history, the good life itself, is a battle between those conflicting forces that must eventually result in one prevailing over the other—an apocalyptic climax that must resolve into either good or evil triumphant, each ruling a realm separate from the other, whichever side prevails. Truer to reality is the Taoist symbol of dark and light intertwining in an endless tangled hierarchy, where their struggle never ends and only their balance wins. Death and this way death dreams we call life both spawn the grounds, the waters, and the fires of our home, and encircle each other’s dances and music in our home’s air.

Jon Jang on AIR

Jang’s AIR releases were preceded by two on RPM (Jang, and Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?), an artist-run label started by the band United Front. Formed by George Sams (trumpet, miscellaneous instruments), Lewis Jordan (alto saxophone), Mark Izu (bass, sheng), and Carl Hoffman (percussion), it was the clear creative-music torchbearer of the Asian-American movement in the early ‘80s before AIR, which itself then formed in part because RPM ceased operations by 1987.[14]

Jang’s collaboration with that band thus established his presence on that particular front line as well (as a musician; he had been active in the movement outside of music before). The track lists for both recordings reflect the mix of standard jazz fare (Ellington, Mingus, and Coltrane classics; a Billie Holiday hit) and his own original homages to that tradition (to Lester Young, Eric Dolphy, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker), Asian-American-themed (Jang’s “Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?”, “Sheng Illusion” “Wazo’s March”), art-music repertoire (both African American and European, from his Oberlin mentor composer Wendell Logan’s “Five Pieces for Piano,” and Olivier Messaien’s “Le  Chocard Des Alpes From Catalogue D'Oiseaux”), and personal (“For Sister Deanna,” “Sweet Sweet Spirit”). Although these weren’t his first records, they are his first on the AIR roster, and stand there as a kind of young debut statement. The homages to mentors and models are clear as such, as is the signal that those influences are the resources feeding one’s most original voice and emerging visions, not shadows hanging over one.

Those two auspicious precursors were followed by his first two for the newly launched AIR label, the 1987 LP The Ballad or the Bullet, with The 4 in One Quartet (Jang’s bandmates are Fred Ho and Francis Wong on saxes, bassist James Lewis, and drummer/percussionist Eddie Moore); and the 1989 CD Never Give Up!, with the Pan-Asian Arkestra (P-AA).[15] In their sequence, both show a crescendo of the Afro-Asian weave of musical and social themes and of the Asian-American voices and statements sounding them collectively.

The title and first track of The Ballad or the Bullet tweaks Malcolm X’s famous “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech, and is dedicated to Thelonious Monk.[16]

Francis Wong’s “Prayer for Melvin Truss” memorializes the shooting of an unarmed 17-year-old African-American youth by a white policeman; it is in the mold of Coltrane’s similarly conceived and inspired “Alabama,” the latter’s response to the 1963 bombing of the Birmingham church that killed four little girls (we will examine it with the rest of Wong’s work, ahead). The second and longest (14:14) track joins two famous international revolutionary songs, one from Chile, the other from the Philippines. “Bayan Ko” began as a song in a Spanish-language zarzuela, a lyric-dramatic genre comprising both spoken and sung scenes. It took hold in Spanish colonies, and was turned against Spain’s occupation by Filipino playwright Severino Reyes in his 1898 Tagalog-language zarzuela Walang Sugat (“no wound”). It served the same anthemic function against the later American occupation, and again, in AIR’s time, for the democratic Aquino and against the dictatorial Marcos family rule in the 1986 revolution. “El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido!” (“the people united will never be defeated”) was composed in 1973 by Sergio Ortega (music) and Quilapayún (lyrics); the Nueva cancion chilena (New Chilean Song) movement propelled it to slogan status for the popular unity government of Salvador Allende.

The playlist thus sounds in its programmatic themes the notion of international solidarity between the Asian American community and movement with their counterparts in Latino, African American, and Asian peoples beyond America. It does so in its musical gestures and vocabulary as well.

The pan-human solidarity evinced in the above three playlists sounds a keynote on which those to come will build that suggests to me a singular success distinguishing AIR’s (especially Jang’s) aesthetic project of cross-cultural synthesis. The strong spirit of coalitional politics spearheaded by the African-American activist communities is reflected musically in AIR’s recognition of the examples set by the AACM and BAG for how to organize and present its music. The music itself is likewise following the lead of jazz’s African-American history and vernacular and of the Western art music discourse that history/vernacular has also engaged, in select African-American and European voices. Despite that robust embrace of allies and influences, it is just as strongly asserting its own original voices, statements, and styles to take the music where it needs to take its makers and hearers. Such hybrid strategies are not rare, but arguably also not easy to achieve. They either hover at the level of one genre at the bedrock, seasoned by another as its “tinge” (jazz with an Asian scale, or a Western concert piece with a twist of jazz sound in its score); or lumber along too awkwardly and forced (think of Third Stream’s problems, or any number of well-conceived but underdeveloped one-off such experiments). On the other end of the spectrum, think of the long history and presence of such gestures that just don’t reach beyond their local culture, whether by design or otherwise, resulting in an audience and sound that is iconically white, black, Latino, Asian, etc. My suggestion about AIR, and Jang’s work, is that the synthesis of influences and originality is such a richly balanced and fruitful one, in a way that reflects aspects of its Pacific Rim and California history and multiculture I will explore ahead.

Jang’s second AIR release, Never Give Up! is also the first of three featuring the P-AA (the other two are on the Italian Soul Note label). Variations on the “Arkestra” rubric (think Noah’s ark, or the Ark of the covenant: a vessel preserving, securing, protecting something fragile, sacred, threatened) were also deployed by Sun Ra and Jang’s fellow Californian Horace Tapscott, for the same kind of resonances. The P-AA itself was also resonant with the large ensembles led by those two, as well as similar groups—players who could improvise freely in every configuration from solo to collective, and could also play the scores of the composer(s)/arranger(s) among them—of the time formed by Alexander von Schlippenbach (Europe’s Globe Unity Orchestra), and Anthony Braxton (including my own Northwest Creative Orchestra, launched the same year as P-AA). Jang:

The ensemble had been formed in 1988. There were two reasons for that ensemble. One was to have an ensemble that was large enough to perform the work of Concierto for Jazz Ensemble and Taiko, Reparations Now! Prior to that my group was the 4-in-One Quartet, which performed in collaboration with the San Jose Taiko Group. But I needed more instruments to complement the sound of the taiko. So the first reason why I formed it was an artistic one.

The second reason had to do with cultural identity politics, recognizing the Asian American creative music movement. The Arkestra was a large ensemble that had Mark Izu, Anthony Brown, Francis (Wong), and other Asian Americans like Melecio Magdaluyo, John Worley, Jr., and Susan Hayase on taiko.

Like its name, the band’s repertoire furthered the notion of a solidarity between ethnic Asians across national identities with other peoples of color in African and Hispanic/Latino worlds struggling against oppression. It further highlighted the “composer” part of the “composer-for-improvisers” role, with Jang’s four-part suite and other original pieces and arrangements built around the band of leaders and their singular voices.

In 2006, the Chinese Ministry of Culture proclaimed Four Great Folktales to be part of China’s Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. One of them, “Butterfly Lovers,” is about an ill-fated pair living in the time of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (265-420 CE). Historical records of the story date to the late Tang Dynasty (618-907). In 1959, on (my 11^th birthday) May 27, a better-fated pair of 20-something students from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (He Zhanhao and Chen Gang) premiered their Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto there to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Its popularity soared internationally in the late 1970s as the country began opening up to the outside world, establishing it as something of a musical reflection of a China in transition.

Jang’s “Butterfly Lovers Song” is his arrangement of that piece’s melodic heart. He opens this CD with it on solo piano, lush broken chords and tremolos evoking the guzheng and pipa voices down its distinctively Chinese line. That quickly gives way to a lilting vamp in the winds, bass and drums loping easily along to underpin Melecio Magdaluyo’s sweet capitulation to the tune and his soprano saxophone solo on it. As the tale’s end is suicide-bitter, so Jang’s song’s sanguine affect ends abruptly on its one and only dissonant chord. (This piece reappears on three of his subsequent CDs, suggesting a kind of signature arc of deepest tradition integrated seamlessly with its freshest expression.)

The “Reparations Now!” part of the title will likely evoke for many the classic 1960 Max Roach LP We Insist! and its “Freedom Now Suite.”[17] Subtitled “An Asian American Concerto for jazz ensemble and taiko,” its four movements, spanning tracks 2-5, continue the themes of Jang’s oeuvre in their titles and dedicatees.

“Redress/Blues” features Jeff Cressman’s lowing trombone (plungered growls, shakes, punches, all speaking up and out) calling other softer winds of bandmates in on a stately sail of breeze shifting Asian-easy chords to…Mark Izu’s bass bowing, scratching, running, blowing out the lights—all for Akira “Jackson” Kato, Japanese-American/Californian agricultural artisan, interned with his family in the Gila River War Relocation Center in Gila, Arizona, for that crime of being a 16-year-old Japanese American during Pearl Harbor, and surviving to then live long and lead his professional community as landscape artist and gardener.

“Ganbaro!” picks up the pace, a gentle resolve of that same California-dreamy sound (flutes and other high winds topping a small big band of horns and chord-clouded crafty lines astride sunny grooves that swoop to their stops, their reprises…): eight bars of modal blowing alternating with eight of changes running through every two beats, to pirouette back out into the eight-barred window on that Asian-tinged scale’s open sky.

This honors Tsuyako “Sox” Kitashima and Bert Nakano, two elder activists, also former internees. Nakano and his late wife Lillian, both native Hawaiians, were prime agents of the change from no apology to forced one, and from no reparations to some (far from proportional to the harms, but a thought that counted, and an important precedent suggesting possible more of the same. Lillian was also a shamisen master, and aunt of AIR recording artist the late pianist Glenn Horiuchi; see Woo [2015]) Kitashima, Hayward-born in 1918, started her internment with her two issei parents and five nisei siblings in a Tanforan, California horse stall; all eight were later given a single room in Utah’s Topaz War Relocation Center for the rest of the war. She married in 1945, and went on to work with the Nakanos to force that apology and those monies ($20,000 to each internee), with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. (The final payments were made in 1993.) She died of a heart attack in 2006, at age 87. (More on her ahead.)

“Reparations Now!” picks up the pace, energy, and volume to peak in accord with its demand of a title—with a Fred Ho hurry of a line, and a unison shout of solidarity, followed by another slow-against-faster counterpoint of riff and broken chord from that overarching Asian scale voiced in all the winds.[18] Taking center stage after supporting Jim Norton’s high-stress bass-clarinet glossolalia lights into a flux of lower flutters, screeches, and gutturals duetting with Susan Hayase’s taiko drum; he intones out, plays the full-band interlude again to transit to her soloing, then adding her lone female voice’s shouts to the “Now!”’s insistence. Anthony Brown matches the taiko talk with a solo stretch of his own trap set and talking drum, taking the movement out.

This one saluted the organizations formed by individuals such as Kato, Kitashima, and the Nakanos, the collectives effected and effective in turning their personal traumas and grievances toward a more just social policy—the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations (NCRR), the Nihonmachi Outreach Committee (NOC), and the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) (note that the five music organizations discussed here were conceived around similar concerns, only in the realm of cultural/musical rather than social reform).

Included with them was “40 acres and a mule”—not a chartered organization, but a rubric deep in American cultural history that has loomed large and endures as a promise still unfulfilled and resonant through many small steps forward and more such back (more on which also ahead).[19]

“Tanko Bushi Celebration” opens with John Worley Jr. playing his trumpet alone, hitting those distinctive intervals that suggest the Japanese scale in a free-ranging improvisation; then he plays the melody of this Japanese folk song about coal mining against a woodwind gaggle of suspended dissonances designed to clash with it in a cracked and cockeyed way (think Charles Ives, or a Braxton march). The tune then gets run through a jaunty wringer of a fractured-circusband loop of rollicking rhythm, riff, and happy honks.

Often sung and danced to (with special choreography miming motions of labor), this popular song was first recorded in 1932, and re-recorded since, on the Victor of Japan label. The dedicatee for this final movement of a piece called “Reparations Now!” is not a person or organization, but an abstract concept: “Victory!!!!!”

Jang and comrades bring an extra splash of panache to this treatment of the Dizzy Gillespie classic “A Night in Tunisia”—Jang with his quirky-cum-smooth arrangement, and Fred Ho, Magdaluyo, and Francis Wong with their tri-centric (bari/alto/tenor) run through the saxophone family’s paces to a full-band jubilee catharsis—plunking the tune into Jang’s zesty-pensive solo pianisms, rubato to rhythmning and back, and forth; Susan Hayase’s taiko in the Afro-Cuban tinge of this tune musicalizes the interleaving lives lived by Latino and Asian and black people in the SF Bay Area.

(Although the one track with no dedication, and no explicit political statement, this track brought back a memory of life back in that time and place telling of its ethnic-political vibe. In my East Bay town of Richmond, lower-middle-class whites like my family were a minority group, outnumbered about two to one by other groups, mostly African Americans and Latinos and Hispanics, and some Asian Americans. Looking back, I believe the reality of white privilege—more a psychological than an economic or social reality, in my family’s case—kept my generation from feeling unsettled by that. For me and many, it was the opposite: black and latin music were clearly more exciting and hip than anything considered “white,” which is what got me into jazz early on. And when I was 16 that fact led to a kerfuffle with my Republican mother.

I was a big Dizzy Gillespie fan, and had somehow gotten a “Dizzy Gillespie for President” bumper sticker, which I surreptitiously applied to the back bumper of her car. After parking it all day at her job as a secretary at the nearby Union Oil refinery, she came home livid and embarrassed, ordering me to remove it. She was mortified that it had been on display to all her fellow coworkers, who apparently included less than a few Dizzy supporters.)

We land with both feet back in the sociopolitical swim with the final two tracks. The track list itself dedicates “Never Give Up!” to then-presidential candidate Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Coalition. Asian Pan Airlines producer and Unity newspaper staff writer Gina Hotta’s liner notes further associates the track’s/CD’s title’s message with a 1989 school shooting of the kind that has continued to be headline news over the decades since. This one, however, was also a racial hate crime, by a 24-year-old white man with a criminal record, who targeted elementary school students from the Southeast Asian immigrant community, killing five from ages 6-8, and wounding 42 others. Hotta exhorts the grieving parents and others not to give up fighting such hate, even in such grief.

“Let Us Not Forget”…“the trauma experienced with evacuation; the loss of property both real and personal; the loss of earnings; the loss of human and civil rights during WWII.” So speaks the woman who first penned and spoke those words in her “famous speech, August 12th, 1989 before the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations and at a later forum sponsored by Unity newspaper in San Francisco” (liner notes). Mark Izu’s bass bowing and plucky, and Susan Hayase’s witness-bearing taiko taps stand behind and with her here as she delivers choice passages with the authority of the survivor and elder she was.

The P-AA’s next CD is one of two on the Italian label Soul Note. Self-Defense! is a live performance of the same program as Never Give Up!, minus Kitashima’s reading, and plus two pieces by fellow AIR artist, drummer/composer Anthony Brown. Tiananmen! then reprises only the touchstone “Butterfly Lovers Song,” to bring the rest of its far-reaching program home. The title covers the six movements of Jang’s next ambitious suite, each its own track. Both, in sequence on the international label, suggest an act that has been gotten together on its local home turf and is being taken down the road.

It is interesting to note the difference in nuance between a studio performance on the band’s SF home turf and a live one in a Seattle venue hosted by both the progressive music front there (Earshot Jazz) and the Japanese-American community (the Nippon Kan Theatre). The tracks are generally a bit longer—more improvisational stretching out here and there—and Jang’s piano presence, as Monk’s often was, more cymbalic, especially in the high register, to be heard (in effect if not intent) amidst the ensemble of louder horns and percussion. Cecil Taylor has described the piano as “88 tuned bongos”; in Jang’s hands it might be described as 88 tuned cymbals, or compared to an 88-stringed hammered dulcimer (Chinese yangqin). The distinctively Chinese buzz of the dizi (bamboo flute) and the free-reed winds of the sheng (bamboo mouth organ) afford another expansion of both sound in the suite and information in the liner notes.

Yet also, the second hearing drives home, it sounds forth and full-throated as the conventionally Western composer’s sketchbook. Like Ellington, or Monk, Jang’s ideas and feelings sound out both in his role as the band’s pianist and as its composer/arranger. And what seems to characterize that fact most pithily is the smooth aplomb and balance between the different gestures and styles that turn on their dimes within the suite’s parts. Modal lines and blowing, traditional scales and melodies, modern (as in pre-postmodern, pre-1960s) jazz chord progressions and voicings, and postmodern art music and free improvisations, Asian instruments and inflections and their Western counterparts —all unfold in turn as on a carousel crafted well, of a piece, summing greater than its parts. (Anthony Brown’s two short pieces evince the same aesthetic feel and big-bandleader skill, in his “Monk’s Strut” and his arrangement of the Japanese traditional “Ichikotsu-chò.”)

SF Bay Guardian writer Derk Richardson articulates that think-global/act-local ethos in the CD’s liner notes. He contrasts the band favorably with the then-ascendant neocons—not the political kind, but the “essentially conservative” “young men in suits” planting jazz’s flag firmly as “America’s classical music” in the decades before the 1960s, when, as George Lewis deliciously characterized their perspective as “something like this: John Coltrane went mad in 1965, and a mysterious virus that he and others were carrying killed hundreds of musicians until Wynton Marsalis arrived in 1983, carrying a powerful mojo from the birthplace of jazz that put the deadly germ and its carriers to flight.”[20] He notes Jang et al. as rooted there firmly too, but also in their own living moments and terrains, branching and flowering through their own timelier expressions of the tradition—specifically reflecting their California syntheses of Pacific Rim cultures from Korea, Japan, China, SE Asia, the Philippines, Canada, and Latin America that were on track to graduate from the category of “ethnic minorities” to comprise the state’s new majority. He notes the other groups led by some P-AA members—Francis Wong’s Great Wall, Mark Izu’s Circle of Fire, and Anthony Brown’s Uptown Showdown and African Eurasian Eclipse—and their coalition’s working alliance with African American artists not aligned with the neocon young Turks, such as Jang’s collaborations with flutist James Newton,  saxophonist David Murray, composer/reedsman Henry Threadgill, and elder mentor composer/drummer Max Roach, who gets special mention as a way to contextualize Jang’s “far-reaching and forward-looking activism,” musicalized here for the redress and reparations movement as Roach and his then-wife Abbey Lincoln, like Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp and others, used their compositional and album concepts to promote the Civil Rights movement.

Richardson also nods to Jang’s 1990 collaboration with Latin percussionist John Santos and Roach, and poets Sonia Sanchez, Genevieve Lim, and Victor Hernandez Cruz, W Billed as a celebration of cultural diversity, its Jang-composed main theme was inspired by Roach’s “It’s Time,” on We Insist! Jang and his Arkestra, the liner notes conclude, have redeemed and restored the “visionary and activist substance” of the “multiculturalism” rubric, which the author suggests has fallen from shining ideal to code talk for easy grant money for shallow opportunists more than for serious artists.

Interesting too that this foray away from home is mirrored by the move from the AIR to the Soul Note label, an international platform with a strong roster of similarly jazz-rooted creative musicians from around the world. The reprise of the suite on a close follow-up CD suggests another of that series of steps from the local to the global context.

Tiananmen!’s liner notes likewise mirror their CD’s expansions of both musical and political reaches begun and furthered through the others. Most obviously, they do so by being bilingual, with San Francisco journalist and musician Larry Kelp in English, and Dr. Anna Wei-hua Zhang (a Chinese academic teaching in America, and closely involved with the creative-music scene) in Chinese. Kelp plays up the cross-cultural, global thrust of the suite, and its music’s reach beyond such labels as “Asian-American jazz” and even “Asian-American creative music.” He sees both those rubrics as lacking the full rainbow coalition specific and organic to the Golden State, and fleshes that out in his words about “a music that speaks for Asian Americans specifically, and for common elements shared by people everywhere.”

The musical bases the work covers do indeed substantiate such a claim beyond general hyperbole. If the “Concerto for Jazz Ensemble and Taiko” was a pastiche of sophisticated and grassroots styles and genres, Tiananmen! is a sonic hologram in which each of those parts contains all the information of the whole. The more familiar one is with both its direct influences and similar expressions—with the music of Messaien, Stravinsky, Ives, as well as Ellington, Mingus, and Monk; with Chinese and Japanese traditional music, with Gershwin, with French Impressionism’s Asian tinge, and free jazz-cum-creative-music’s vocabularies from Albert Ayler folk hymn to Art Ensemble energy circus to Anthony Braxton’s labyrinthine lines—the more one hears each of them reflected in and enhanced by the others as they play out their respective roles so integrally.

The composition also marks what Jang called his commitment to incorporating Chinese folk songs into his musical vocabulary’s amalgam of jazz and contemporary art music. Inspired by Duke Ellington’s technique of playing with simple motives whimsically rather than within a rigid system, it was also part and parcel with a turn from the identity politics of the Asian-American arena—historically Chinese and Japanese, mostly, with the issues local to their communities—to a truly pan-Asian internationalism reflective of both a surge in Korean and Southeast Asian immigrants and a greater concern for the Chinese diaspora beyond America. The fall of Soviet Communism and that ideology’s evolution and related internal issues in China were also central to the music’s process and thrust at that point.

The “Introduction” of the suite (track 1) sounds like an American jazz band being hosted in some grand Chinese-imperial court by that venue’s own royal house band. The Western woods and brasses declaim, gagaku-like, long tones into their Most Regal State of Anthemic Intone, to lay it down like a red carpet upon which the Arkestra’s two China-born guest musicians (Liu Qi-Chao on suona, a Chinese double-reed horn, oboe-like; and Zhang Yan on guzheng) debut by strewing flowers of improvisation and recitative, timing their gestures to the carpet’s unfolding. Anthony Brown plays more the Asian than the American percussionist with these flourishes, on multiple drums and cymbals ranging from low thunder to metallic showers.

“Tiananmen” translates as “Heavenly Gate,” and the second track, “Tears From the Heavenly Gate,” evokes the tragedy there associated with our time. Jang laces the phrases of the popular Chinese folk song “Mengjiang Nu” with harmonies reflecting both his Oberlin and his United Front schooling. Liu’s heartstrung erhu sings the song’s sad story, of a woman crying over her man’s conscription to spend the rest of his life laboring to help build the Great Wall, never to return to her arms. Jang’s piano and the band’s interjections of figures and filigrees flying both through and free of the traditional tune invoke the larger life of time untroubled that swallows all such songs and their plaints.

“Great Wall, Gold Mountain” gives the energy and solo spots over to the American side of this pan-Asian band of brothers and one sister. Jang’s compositional art goes into rhythms and voicings that channel the American mythos of trains. That is a trope fully plumbed, of course, by virtually every American musical genre since the mid-1800s, from black and white blues and folk to popular, jazz, and concert music then and since. This track’s quotes of Asian scales and passages bring to that quintessentially homegrown theme a rare musical reminder that the same ethnic labor force that built China’s Great Wall also shed its sweat and blood to clear the way to lay the tracks for America’s first transcontinental railway.

Zhang Yan’s guzheng opens “I Feel the Thunder in My Heart” with a robust and rousing expression of that title. Jang was inspired to its words by a concert he and the band played for Chinese students at the University of California/Berkeley’s International House. It took place on June 4, 1989, the day the Chinese government put a violent end to the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square that had been going on since April. He was moved by an audience member who called out in joyous praise of the “Butterfly Lovers Song,” “Jazz! Very democratic!” He was similarly moved by Zhang’s fresh and powerful way with her ancient instrument, and enlisted her especially for this part of the suite. Teaming her up with himself and flautist James Newton, an African-American Angelino who had been closely involved with Jang and the Asian-American music scene generally from its beginning, their core of an improvising trio and its stretches with jazz rhythm section grooving showcased their skills and the unique sounds of their voices, instruments, and styles in play together.

The thunder comes rolling out of Anthony Brown’s heart to open “Come Sunday, June 4 1989,” (subtitled “the red in my blood is the color of the flag”…a resonance with both Chinese and American flags) through (say the liner notes) “multiple percussion (including Chinese percussion).” He crashes metal and skin through pitching patterns of pitched beats tumbling, down into a roll circling closer, then finally falling to, silence…from which Jang’s piano takes the first notes of a 1984 patriotic song from the China-Vietnam border war, itself taken up by the pro-democracy students for their cause. Liu carries it on in the guzheng (piano’s Asian ancestor); both renditions couch the sunny-simple melody in and against harmonies complex beyond its original context—youthful idealism engulfed in the dark and roiling clouds of power politics. Liu returns to the pure song (“The Red in my Blood is the Color of the Flag”) on a tremulous sheng (American harmonica’s Asian ancestor), a candle of sound wavering in the wind of the storm, to be cupped from a snuff by the supportive fellowship of Newton’s recitation of Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday.” The whole band comes in then on a gorgeous rapture of the Chinese song, led by Liu’s top-voice suona over Jang’s rolling drone of a second partial. The effect is of some Celtic bagpipe choir blowing a bittersweet victory paean after all blood is shed.

“Fifth Modernization”—democracy—is dedicated to human rights activist Wei Jingsheng, who wrote an essay of the same title in response to Deng Xiaoping’s Four Modernizations (of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology). Posted to Beijing’s Democracy Wall in 1978, Wei’s essay claimed that without individual and political liberties and rights, the other four modernizations were of no value—which earned him a prison term until 1993 (the long brick wall was erected by Deng to encourage criticism of the previous regime, but shut down in 1979 when dissenters criticized his as well).

The music conceived to signify on that history and ideal is built around the core of traditional Chinese song, here and throughout the suite; this part feels like a dreamy summary of motives and forms, floating through a harmonic weave (in piano, winds) bent to warp their primal designs, then a vibrant guzheng solo on them, then a jazz chart/jam to give Jang a run on, around, through and outside them. After a jittery chitter of a climax on the suona over Izu’s sawing bass drone, the whole band takes the piece out as (to quote Jang) a “loud, violent…cry for democracy.”

The last concert by the P-AA, at the Chicago Jazz Festival for 15,000 people, was in 1994. I’ve taken such a close look at its three CDs and those leading up to it for the chapter they comprise of something parallel to my own work in those years (more on which ahead). [21] My look at the rest of Jang’s work on AIR and elsewhere includes a few other similar personal/musical overlaps of our histories.

Jang’s next projects as leader turn farther into Chinese musical material and style with as much the contemporary composer’s as the hard-blowing improviser’s aesthetic; also as much the woman’s as the man’s thoughts and words, and both at the heart of the music as much as are women’s voices and poetry in much Chinese traditional music (although channeled through cross-dressing men in Beijing opera). Thematically, their poetic treatments of the woman’s immigrant experience at sea and then Angel Island (Island Immigrant Suite No. 1 [Soul Note, recorded in 1995, released in 1997] and No. 2 (not recorded, premiered by the Kronos Quartet and [prerecorded] Cantonese opera singer Eva Tam, at San Francisco’s Cowell Theater, 1996) and of Jang’s own family history of immigration (Two Flowers on a Stem, Soul Note, 1996) explored the human face and heart of diaspora and its lives in America.

Poet Genevieve Lim reads some of her own original work and some poems carved onto the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910 and 1940.[22] Because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Island (as it was called by the immigrants there) functioned through the years of jazz’s childhood, World War I, the Jazz Age, Prohibition, and the Great Depression more like its neighbor San Francisco Bay island Alcatraz than like its Atlantic counterpart Ellis Island, detaining long and deporting many, more than processing most for quick and streaming entrance.

Immigrant opens with its longest track, “Diaspora Tale No. 1,” a leisurely unison line Jang wrote for erhu and soprano sax, tickled along by pipa chittering and clunking, cymbals swelling and ebbing in the improvised sidelines; the sax then solos along with the cello plucked (like a jazz bass) and wooden percussion clicked, all more slip and scurry than measured walk or run, as too the pipa muted, muffled, metallically scraped and banged around the sax’s careful phrases. They all run each other up, down, and around for a bit beyond that caution…then the flute cues in the poet with the interval (a rising fourth) of her first two words: “the ship.”

“The ship I came on” and “from” is the object of her speech-song, and the crowds human and spirit it carried, and what her time on it in the water did to her young and tender heart. The players and instruments from China, and Chinese- and African-America, hear and listen to her, and respond unscripted in kinder-than-words with the sounds of their meanings. Jang then rings in with a riff to be ridden, which Norton and Wong do ride—the former on phrases scripted to float like boats on the main, the latter flashing and surging through his blistering improv the volcanic ocean fire voiced in Lim’s lines and anger—and then to ride its own waves around that lava’s coldsea-hardening into treacherous rocks, to the beacons of its own charts safely harboring her into the poet’s reprise. The ship she came on “was a hand” that gripped the air, a “wheel” spinning into space, a vessel of memories wanting much else and better.

Min and Wang Hong are on traditional soil for Jang’s “Burial Mound.” Rather, he wrote it to sound like a traditional naamyam-style sorrow song, with Western musicians playing Chinese percussion with the pipa and erhu for the Beijing-opera effect. Wong and Lim follow that up with a melody-text counterpoint, semantics and semusics, sounding their meanings like twinings. Her lyrics invoke and honor the ancestors who helped build America’s transcontinental railroad, as she walks on in their shadows and footsteps. The players resume the song like a second line—brighter, livelier, a dance with the ghost of Albert Ayler—for the poet’s heartier reprise.

“First Interlude/Yellow Woman,” sequencing two separate pieces, is the second-longest track. Two flutes sing it in, high consonants stepping down, met by a piano starting low and stepping up, all wandering from their consonance by a note or two in their meet in the middle. Min’s pipa strings in with an answering motion and pause, which they fill with a greeting cry; more brief silence...then flurry, then silence—then erhu voices lyrical traditional melody veering off into quick shots and flashes of more jarring piano chords and a run of jangling pipa with similar (simmering, shimmering) cymbals, wood, and skins. Hartigan and Min, as in “Diaspora,” tear into this one with a tense and edgy rapport, wild and free, settling while swelling into a speedy roil over and against which Wong’s tenor sax and Norton’s English horn sound in with slow, suspicious intervals, later leaping Dolphy-cum-Braxton-like into lightning-shaped lines. Pipa and drums gallop and lurch, the two horns move back into slow unison half-steps, pause, shift to a hocketing ostinato, rush its tempo to gradually squawk it off, while Min and Hartigan explode and burn. Left alone, mostly, the winds then wrap it up by working the jumpy motif into a splaying freejam duo, soon to be sealed off with a four-note closer motif to cue the next poem.

Lim chimes back in with “Yellow Woman,” now sounding as black as yellow, over and through her new blues feel. She declares herself the daughter of seafarers and a litany-list of working-class-actors, declaims painful memories of her childhood’s cruel bedeviling taunts. Wong intones melodic his empathic commiseration over that ambling ostinato out...

…and into an unleashed run on “Second Interlude/Appendix, Poem 399, Random Thoughts while Staying in the Building.” Again, the interlude preludes Lim reading a poem, this one from the Island collection. Wong and Hartigan now, in a desperado duall (spelling intended) to the deathless; Norton’s double-reed makes it a trio, but Wong’s still unleashed, in moments alone, self-driven to burst into a phrase from Francis Scott Key with as much savage irony as Jimi Hendrix brought to same. Norton takes it down a notch, then steams it back up a bit, with Hartigan (throughout, his drumming is marked by a metal presence redolent of China’s luogu [“gongs and drums”] ensembles). Other winds come in with spaced five-note statements punctuating their free duo…then with a melody capped lightly with a woman’s voice to wrap up the piece.

Wong takes a softer line, and slower, for Lim to recite/inflect with. Through her, the immigrant poet voices his authoritative insight into the rise and fall of power(s)/fortune(s) in the world. His once-mighty country now weak, he wines and words himself as best he can to blunt the restless desperation of his confinement and that of a fate forged by merciless barbarians. The band responds with a dramatic full-ensemble postlude out, both that empathic tenor from Wong and fury-crazed interjects by others, in solidarity.

Lim’s “Yellow Woman” reprise over Jang’s loose improv with rhythm and ostinato bears more anger, less pathos, a more determined stride forward from the blues, off both ship and island. (There are more than a few such repeat performances in Jang’s discography; they point out something about improvised music’s kaleidoscopic malleability, most obviously, but also, more deeply, about how some hurt, tangle, or sweetness can be worked through, gotten over, magnified in the process of repetition and reiteration.)

The CD ends with erhu, piano, and drums on a lovely intro line that gives way to perky-plodding pipa with quirky-ticking wood walking their line with the final short poem (39) from the Island—again, a plaint by a weary traveler confined by the weakness of his country as much as the strength of the barbarian, and his call for solidarity to “turn back this wild wave”—then turns back to that intro line’s sweetness tinged with bitterer, grittier resolve struck by final cymbal crash.

I initially thought to gloss over this CD more cursorily, as with the rest of the post-P-AA work, in keeping with my main threads here…but it pulled me in closer despite that—partly because of the poetry, my first contact with Ms. Lim and the Angel Island poems, and the cinematic way Jang plied his composer’s art and craft to it; partly because of the integration of the Chinese players, instruments, and aesthetics with the jazz guys, especially Francis Wong; partly because it made me reflect on how close to San Francisco and Chinatown, and Angel Island, my childhood was, and how far from my awareness. But most immediately, because of the presence and interaction of Royal Hartigan and Min Xiao-Fen in its mix.

Hartigan had graduated from the PhD program in Ethnomusicology by the time I entered it in 1993, but he was still a presence in the Wesleyan University community in Middletown, Connecticut. That meant I got to see him at work as an educator leading student workshops there, got acquainted with his recorded music and writings, and got to know him personally. We worked together on two of my own CDs of music running along the same general lines as AIR’s catalogue, of jazz-rooted composition and improvisation. Min I didn’t meet until some years later, and never played with, but her name was in the air then and there too, as a presence on the New York scene who played with others I did play and record with, most notably drummer Pheeroan ak-Laff and violinist Jason Kao Hwang.[23] Since then, as my chapter on her here summarizes, I’ve listened to and studied her recorded work so thoroughly, and interviewed her enough, that I feel like I’ve played with her. Both such personal and musical contacts make for a greater dimension of nuance, depth, and richness when I hear them play together in Jang’s music.

I’ve noted the quality of seamless integration between European (the Oberlin tinge), African-American jazz, and Asian elements in Jang’s Asian-American work. Some such syntheses (most famously, Third Stream music) have garnered unfavorable critical reception as wrongheaded and failed attempts, both from the European and American sides of its multicultural ring. Some of the critics have been wrongheaded themselves, even racist, in panning long-form works by Ellington, or later by Braxton, or dismissing or neglecting African-American composers such as William Grant Still as derivative. Jang’s art and craft cues his bandmates to embrace the hybrids where he plants his flags—and Min and Hartigan show how deep that embrace can dig and how high it can fly, by dint of their similarly adventurous choice of musical paths.

While no “jazz purist” would confidently quibble with my assessment of Jang, Hartigan, and Min in this instance, the aversion to such gestures by similarly credible musicians as awkward failures has often felt on firmer ground. Some that spring to my mind (at a mental glance, shy of looking them up) are Sun Ra with John Cage, Cecil Taylor with Mary Lou Williams, Anthony Braxton with Ghanaian drummer and Wesleyan colleague Abraham Adzenyah (in stark contrast to similar stunning duos with Max Roach). I also recall the strong antipathy to Third Stream and any kind of scored music I saw personally expressed by European champions of free improvisation such as Günter Sommer, Jost Gebers, Wolfgang Fuchs, and Peter Brötzmann. Part of my take on Jang’s work is a sense of its connection to the Western composer’s tradition as much as to its other roots, and that as something the West Coast jazz scene has always been more relaxed about than some others.[24]

In Min’s case, as seen in Chapter Six, it was a complete embrace of the improvised music scene spanning the globe, from the height of her command of Chinese traditional and Western contemporary art music. Hartigan likewise, as both scholar and artist, has started from his American jazz corner and put his drumkit art and craft to the service of engaging as an equal and honorary insider with African and Asian musicultures. Through their choices of friends and families within the music, they’ve forged something in the lingua franca of improvised/creative music that is as far beyond cultural tourism or world-music pastiche as an American or biracial child in a multicultural society of immigrants is beyond the respective origins of her or his parents.

Two Flowers on a Stem (Soul Note, 1996)

In a seamless turn from the political to both the personal and the spiritual, Jang explores his own such family history in a pair of CDs a decade apart. Two Flowers on a Stem opens with its title track, a poetic reference to his immigrant parents. Their promising bid for the American Dream was shattered in 1956, when his father died in an historic midair collision of two commercial airliners over the Grand Canyon. (The event led Congress to establish the Federal Aviation Administration, and a new and improved air-traffic control system.) With a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, Jang’s father had been a vice president at the Fluor Corporation, but had also been unable to buy a house due to anti-Asian discriminatory practices. The same spirit barred him so even in death, when the cemetery in Glendale, California—the same city where my own white father lived and died, with whom I lived there in his final five months—refused his family’s request to hold the funeral service, for the same reason.

Jang’s mother raised him and a daughter she was still pregnant with when their father died, alone and through her grief and pain. The CD’s title track was originally part of the music for The Woman Warrior, the Berkeley Repertory Theater’s adaptation of two books by novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. Calling his mother the “lily that can endure the swamp,” Jang dedicated it to his mother, who had sung Chinese folk songs and was a fan of Paul Robeson. Those two influences breathed in new ways through this CD. The first one did so through Jang’s own engagement with folk songs from the northern and southern regions of China, on which he’d started drawing in his earlier work. Here he wrote his own melody for the erhu that resembled such songs, while also sounding as a jazz ballad. That hybrid essence played out in the rest of the tracks in various ways, resonant with both the Chinese folk and that other side of his mother’s influence. It is Jang’s own more extensive bond with Paul Robeson’s broadest musiculture that joined his Asian and that African flower at the same American stem.

Two eminent voices also graced the music from the stem of the liner notes: Japanese-American poet David Mura penned “Father Blues for Jon Jang,” singing in print his feel of the life going down as the boy might have seen it; and African-American composer Hale Smith, singing praises of both the music and the musicians Jang put together for his most personal statement: west coast colleagues David Murray on reeds and James Newton on flute, and Oberlin colleague Jabali Billy Hart on drums—three African-American masters—with China-born Chen Jiebing and New York bassist Santi Debriano adding erhu and daluo (Chinese large gong), respectively. Smith rightly notes that of the six tracks, Jang’s arrangement of Charles Mingus’s “Meditations on Integration” and his own composition “Eleanor Bumpurs” are the two African American-themed, the rest more centered on the Asian side of things. That said, the two identities effectively sound throughout in the voices of a single family.

“Two Flowers on a Stem” is a gentle confab between these stellar players, commiserating over and commemorating Jang’s family’s traumatic loss and heroic struggle in the sacred space of the music at its soul-sweet richest, where such emotions may mean the most. “The Procession/Woman Shaman of Alishan” sounds the Chinese side as an exhilaration that is high-octane fuel for the players to turn from volcanic-fiery to cool-breeze fly on dime after dime (the procession alluded to was the funeral procession denied his father). A postlude as tenderly composed as the rest of the piece takes its gallop and prance out in style. “Variations on a Sorrow Song of Mengjiang Nu” re-invokes (from Tiananmen!) a woman’s lament over some version of patriarchy’s cruelty. Jang’s explanation of this variation has the woman transform into a silver fish after flinging herself into the sea to escape marriage to the emperor who killed her husband. As with “Butterfly Lovers,” the theme is woman’s/love’s power beyond life’s most crushing blows. Jang: “By linking it with African American spirituals such as ‘Wade in the Water’ and ‘Deep River,’ water symbolized freedom.  I remember playing a recording of the traditional Chinese melody from Jiangsu Province for Max Roach and he became very moved by the feeling” (Open Sky Jazz, 2010). Again, the commiseration/solidarity in that cross-familial grief. Jang called Eleanor Bumpurs, an African-American grandmother murdered by the police in the Bronx, an “embodiment of beauty” akin to the one he celebrated in his mother with his title track. A lush Ellingtonian/Coltranean kind of ballad, elaborated on at length by David Murray, is the poignant celebration in this one.

That integration of the African- and Asian-American at its most viscerally akin is matched by other integrations that are called to (my) mind by “Meditations on Integration.” When I first heard this performed at the 1964 Monterey Jazz Festival by its composer and his band of 12 equally stellar monster players, the meditation on my mind at the start was the one the composer intended, between black and white Americans, so burning in the news of the day. By the end of the half-hour set I was more blown away by the integration of the arts of composition and improvisation in the jazz context of more personal burning concern to a 16-year-old music student: standing and clapping for a good ten minutes in the California sun with the rest of the capacity crowd, hearing Mingus responding hoarsely into the mic something like "I did it for love!"

This piece is an excellent match between Mingus the composer (LA-born, with his own Asian ancestry in the family tree), his fellow Angelinos, and Jang, all West Coast. It isn’t something typically covered, like other Mingus fare, but makes great sense here. The improv section is open and delicate, flying in wild formation like starling murmurations, and landing in fields to peck around restfully too. Jang plays a wandering free solo, joined by the more orchestrated whole band; less orchestrated interactive improv blows like a wind where listening is heard in the give-and-take between Murray, Newton, and Hart. A big driving section takes the music out full bore over Jang’s comping and drums/bass walking/tripping along tight and hard, then back to the next theme in the suite, then more collective blowing. As in the original, a lot of outside voice on this, bracketed by the gorgeous insides of the written parts. The thing that was so amazing in its 1964 birth was that seamless integration of highest jazz energy and art of improvisation coupled with compositional sophistication, both on the edge of the present then that was cutting sharpest and deepest into the future.

Listening these 52 years later to that future’s offering from Jang et al. 32 years after the work’s debut, I’m beset by an expansion of those two integrations, racial and musical, out to others—between Asia, Europe, America black and white, in a uniquely Californian vernacular of their musical discourses, touched on above in Derk Richardson’s liner notes and elsewhere here; between the male and female, yin and yang; all in an integration of the many sides of Mingus that include the cinematic composer redolent of Romanticism’s program music, and the Hollywood studio-level musician’s reading proficiency redolent of that era’s virtuosi soloists. This is not a piece of music easily covered; Jang’s background in both the California jazz culture and the conservatory one of Oberlin, along with his Mingus-like syntheses of multifaceted ethnic musical influences makes his reach to arrange and perform it both credible and viable.[25]

I’m also recalling, in the light of Jang’s words ahead about the spiritual aspects of his Two Flowers CD, things I read Mingus say about the piece later on (in Mendelowitz, 2013):

Sometimes I call it Meditations on Integration and sometimes Meditations on Inner Peace...Anyone could play Meditations on that day in this time of ours when everyone is fighting everyone else all over the world. Man, woman, religious sects, people in general, colors. I felt like I was playing for God. Well, it's time that people get together and try to fight their way through to love with something that warms them and brings them together. . . . I give you the Monterey music as a token of love….

Jang:

I think one of the lessons I try to learn from Paul Robeson was that he said that when technology developed there was a split between man and science, between science and technology and spirituality. We're seeing this now in the 1990s with the development of technology. The unseen aspect of spirituality is becoming lost…I also look at what was happening inside of Coltrane as he was becoming more religious and making a commitment towards God. You have to remember that Coltrane passed away when he was forty years old. And according to Hale Smith, who wrote the liner notes to my Two Flowers on a Stem and who knew Coltrane, he said Coltrane was still searching, just like Eric Dolphy. In our life we know who we are in terms of our personal expression, but I think it's always going to be this searching and self-examination. Particularly, now that I'm in my forties, I see that we're at this crossroads where we have our parents who will be leaving us and we have our children. We're learning both from our parents and from our children. That also informs our music…”[26]

Indeed, Mr. Jang, say I, pushing 70. That child Coltrane is father to this old man Heffley. As also to Mr. Jang, pushing the same number just a few years behind me, who kindly added these words about that CD:

During the recording session, we ended early so that Santi Debriano, who performed on double bass on Don Pullen's last recording Sacred Common Ground, could attend Don's Celebration of Life Memorial. David Murray's friend and collaborator Julius Hemphill also passed [see footnote 19, above—M.H.]. In David Mura's poem “Father Blues for Jon Jang” on the Two Flowers on a Stem recording, I made a mistake about the date my father died. It wasn't June 29, 1956. It was June 30, 1956. But June 29 (1964) was actually the date Dolphy died and I was studying composition with Hale Smith and he glowingly talked about Eric with much affection. Two Flowers on a Stem is also influenced by Joni Mitchell's “A Case of You” from the Blue recording. "I am as constant as a Northern Star" line at the opening of “A Case of You” is a reference to Caesar gloating about his immortality in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. It is the second to the last line before Caesar is assassinated. (Comparing the length of “A Case of You” and “Two Flowers on a Stem” share a strikingly similar length of 4+ minutes!)

(Anyone who’s read my writing enough to know my own mind and style will see the strong resonance Mr. Jang and I enjoy around making such connections in complete organic integrity, down to the instance of the name “Julius” in the two flowers on its stem, and the working musician’s hyper-awareness of duration and its singular identity in a musical expression.)

Jang describes lessons he wishes he’d never had to learn from his parents when he was a child, in his words about Paper Son, Paper Songs (2006). In this case, the turn is from the personal back to the political (not that they’ve ever been far apart): “From the unexpected passing of my father when I was two years old to being confused about the status of my surname as a descendent of a ‘paper son,’ which was an act of resistance against the Chinese Exclusion Act, the trajectory of my whole life has been about discontinuity and recovery, which is very similar to the modes of regeneration, new beginnings and symbolic transformation found in many of the Chinese folk songs such as ‘Butterfly Lovers Song’ or ‘Mengjiang Nu’ ” (Bridging the Asian Connection, 2010).

As should be clear by now, the journey through Jang’s work is as much an historical, literary, and autobiographical as it is a musical one. This CD is no exception. Ethnomusicologist Deborah Wong’s liner notes put it best: “At some level, Jon’s work is always about history, memory, and making culture—it’s always about the necessity of reclaiming history in order to fashion a better present and a more informed future.”

The phenomenon of “paper sons” was made possible by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. That disaster destroyed both Chinatown and most of the Chinese-American birth records there. That opened the way for Chinese immigrants to start claiming the family relationship necessary to their legal right to enter the country. An underground industry of “papers” identifying them as the sons or daughters of Chinese-American citizens filled the void left by the destruction. Jang’s grandfather was one such paper son.

The CD’s title signals the one composition in three movements spanning the first three tracks. Commissioned by Oakland’s Eastside Arts Alliance and funded by the Fund for Artists @ East Bay Community Foundation, it is also arranged and directed by trombonist Wayne Wallace and performed by the Jon Jang Seven (longtime bandmates Wong, Norton, Worley, and Wallace joined by David Belove on electric bass and Deszon Claiborne on multiple percussion, for a compact feel of snappy funktuated lines). Rippling out further from those East Bay people and groups, the piece’s first movement’s title roots in other layers of “East.” Wong’s liner notes say of “Flower Drum Song” (Fengyang Hua Gu) that it is “an old street dance performed by poor performers who were often migrants into the cities from poor regions (especially Anhui in East China).” The People’s Republic gave it new life and lyrics voicing hope for a better future beyond feudalism. For Americans, Paul Robeson sang that version in solidarity on his 1941 recording Chee Lai! Songs of New China, which Jang first heard when he was five. The song continued its penetration of both Jang’s life and American culture from that stage left toward the latter’s center in the 1958 stage then the 1961 film version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical based on the book of the same title by Chinese-American novelist C.Y. Lee, about intergenerational conflicts between an immigrant patriarch who had fled the Communists to San Francisco’s Chinatown, but was resisting assimilation even as his son was attracted to it. By the time the song morphed further down the generations into Jang’s distinctly West-Coast-cum-Asian-American-jazz version, it blossomed from that even deeper musical and ethnic hybrid to effect his own life’s project of Americanizing Asia and Asianizing America in his music.

Jang explains track two’s “Sweet Whisper of a Flower” as one of many allusions to the Chinese culture’s central symbol of the flower in his titles and concepts, which is better explained in the context of another CD it appears on, ahead.

Also recorded here for the first time is “Jasmine Among the Magnolias,” a down-home Southern country church bloom of a tune dedicated to the Chinese of Mississippi and that state’s gift to the nation of the first African-American senator to serve a full term, Blanche Kelso Bruce.[27] The rest of this CD comprises reprises of Jang’s other such re-purposed Chinese songs touched on in CDs discussed above. They effect here something of a blended redux, consolidating the younger energies from those previous into a fragrant ripening with a wider, broader appeal.

Deborah Wong, again, capture best in her liner notes something subtle and hard to describe in that plum bouquet, something I hear as plainly as she, as perhaps only one who’s come of age in the same vicinity as this musician and his music: “Jon’s sensibilities exemplify a certain West Coast (and perhaps specifically San Franciscan) attentiveness to how the present moment, musical and otherwise, is stitched together out of many histories.” I’ve been hinting at the nature of this phenomenon as I’ve noticed it, with allusions to the seamless integration of Asian, African-American, West Coast jazz, and European art music elements in Jang’s (as in Mingus’s) work; also, to a certain “cinematic” aspect.

Songs from movies, of course, are standard fare for jazz musicians everywhere, but they have a special cachet and feel in West Coast hands. Jang’s playlists don’t feature many of them, but when they occur I detect a closeness to the Hollywood culture I also grew up around (parents were divorced, Dad was an actor, I shuffled back and forth between the Bay Area and LA a lot in adolescence). More often, the highly programmatic-cum-pastiche nature of his work—much like Mingus, and his musical father Ellington—suggests a sensibility that makes a little movie, tells a little story, with each musical creation. This is something different from, say, John Coltrane’s treatment of “My Favorite Things,” to cite an example of a piece that enjoyed as much mainstream acceptance as an award-winning jazz soundtrack, but for its sheerly musical power more than for any integration with film culture in the round.[28]

This intuition about Jang’s process got some extra-musical corroboration when I saw something he posted on Facebook about one of the Hollywood 10 screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo, around the time Bryan Cranston’s portrayal of him was released. Jang pointed out that Trumbo’s 1944 screenplay Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo featured bits of the nascent PRC’s national anthem.[29] The association of the movie’s screenwriter with that piece of political-music trivia suggested to me Jang’s exposure to the same Hollywood culture and history as I had by growing up around it, including Trumbo’s role in the Hollywood Ten during the McCarthy era, thus his natural association as a “fellow traveler” with Paul Robeson. As I write, I have yet to interview Jang, having decided to write all I can about what’s publicly available before doing so—but I did make an initial connection with him as a fellow-traveling Californian myself, when I told him my actor father was Trumbo’s friend who played a leading role in his famous antiwar movie, Johnny Got His Gun. Our brief exchange about that left me feeling he had something of that same kind of closeness to the film-industry lore and trade news there as I and my family did.

Self-Portrait (1999) marked Jang’s return to the AIR label after his decade of work abroad on the Soul Note label. I will mark it here as (not chronologically) the fourth after the three CDs surveyed just above that especially honors “women warriors” in his life and purview. Every track comes with a nod to either a woman from Jang’s family or a woman who performed and/or composed the tune he’s covering. His liner notes about the whole list define the soloing “self” he is portraying as that of a man fully and safely moored in himself as son, husband, father, and brother to sisters from other mothers (and as the child of number-as-meter-as-mater-of-time peculiar to musical minds): “Although this recording is about myself, I have never felt the feeling of walking alone. Born on the eleventh day of the eleventh week of the year, I offer this collection of eleven pieces to you.”

The list includes seven originals and four covers. The latter include Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want” (hello Laurel Canyon, ca. 1970s) and three familiar standards that Jang associates with specific performances of them “pouring into [his] soul” for his own such: Aretha Franklin doing “Amazing Grace” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone” (hello black gospel and movie musical) and Mahalia Jackson doing “Come Sunday” (hello, Mr. Ellington; loved your Sacred Concert at Glide Memorial Church when I was a spring chicken, then performing it as featured trombone soloist myself under the direction of the great vibraphonist/AME Christian Jay Hoggard decades later). Again, a “self” defined as essentially by music he didn’t compose as by the works he did.

The most notable aspect of the CD, however, is well described in the notes by Francis Wong:

Both the label and Jon have developed extensive work and have established Asian American creative music as an essential expression of our time. And it is fitting that after performing and recording the world over with his many ensembles throughout the past two decades, Jon is returning to the solo piano. We have all been impressed with the majesty and sweep of his many compositions but we have only seen a glimpse of his particular mastery of the piano. With this collection, Jon brings his unique cultural sensibility to the piano. In so doing, Jon truly speaks through the instrument in a way that we have not heard before.

That way features Asian scales and melodies (and here, also “Amazing Grace”) unfurled through rubato tremolo articulation evocative of the pipa, and arpeggios suggesting the guzheng—a piano honoring its own stringed ancestors even as the pianist honors his human ones. It matches with its low register Paul Robeson’s bass voice to invoke that, and the sweet sunny side of 1971 Blue-vintage Mitchell with the jaunty warmth tinged with fellow San Franciscan Vince Guaraldi’s style. It hugs the lush flowerings of Strayhorn and Ellington and their simpler roots both like the old, close friends they are (“Come Sunday”), wistfully yearning, reaching for the same redemption of a good religion from its worst angels. It voices the chords of contemporary Western composition (“Two Flowers on a Stem”) with the sure touch of one equally at home in that milieu. It resurrects from the depths of primal personal memory, emotional and musical, a song (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”) to be redressed in the garment of the strong improvisation called adulthood.

Remaining for honorable mention are two CDs in which Jang appears not as leader of his own date, yet in roles adding other special substance to the profile sketched here. The first such role is that of Duke Ellington on the piano part of the Far East Suite co-composed with Billy Strayhorn, for fellow AIR artist and longtime bandmate drummer Anthony Brown’s arrangement and production of that work (recorded in my East Bay hometown of Richmond!). Since it is Brown’s project, I’ll look at it in most detail in a later chapter; here I’ll glance at Jang’s part in it, and that to make a point about the kind of Afro-Asian bond it expresses.

It is tempting to go overboard on Joycean wordplay (not least for that author’s last name’s resonance with the woman-honoring Jang’s wife’s first one)—like numbers, a natural playground for the musical mind, one Jang himself enjoys often on social media, where language puns, clangs, and sings phonically as much as means semantically—against Jang’s name to evoke his sound in the band through most of the suite. Like Duke’s own style and presence, it jangles on the high end like flashes of harmonic beacons on that wine-dark sea, stings on the low and middle like the string-singing rhythm instrument it is to punch and push the ship along, splashes when it can with some gorgeous out-of-time chords, like the sea itself speaking to spray and sprinkle its colors along with the other shipshape sound-painting sailors. He’s most in the foreground on three tracks: “Mount Harissa,” “Amad,” and (especially) the one piece bylined by Duke alone rather than with Strayhorn, “Ad Lib on Nippon.” These have him stating heads and leading other moments in the music, affording the chance to demonstrate his most thorough absorption and integration of one of his major influence’s musical thought and voice with his own. The latter track—the longest at over 15 minutes, and the last, functioning as a kind of climactic reprise/denouement of the suite’s tours and travels, with its pianist/composer/captain musing with his crew in the composer/improviser’s tongue over what they’ve all been through, just before they come ashore. It’s a piano showcase, with Jang moving through changes of tempo and mood with various combinations of other players, reflecting and concluding.

The one thing I will say about the musical elements beyond his pianist role is to note the effect of the addition of the Asian instruments and their statements to the overall faithful-to-the-score instrumentation, notes, and sound. It is the sound of old wine in new skins, which, counter to that parable’s original point, is both viable and edifying. The condition for its full impact is to have lived, either in real time or as a retrospective researcher, through the moment when the old was new, then to move on from it into the new sounds that make it old—from Bach’s Baroque to the Haydn/Mozart/Beethoven trifecta, from Louis Armstrong to Roy Eldridge to Dizzy Gillespie, from Coleman Hawkins to Charlie Parker to John Coltrane—THEN, to hear one of those newest voices step out of the stream of time and history to step back to the ancestor’s point in it to re-invoke his or her spirit and time, not merely as one doing homage to a world long gone from one’s living world, but as an ancestral voice truly, which without artifice resonates with the same DNA, shows how the “new” thought and emotion and vision that seemed to have moved on from the “old” was in fact carrying it all along in its scoutings-out of time. Moments like that—Mendelssohn reviving Bach, Wynton Marsalis playing early Armstrong, Armstrong singing Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan” with Leon Thomas, Coltrane playing ballads with Duke and Johnny Hartman, Archie Shepp or Anthony Braxton playing standards—are epiphanous, as the expanded consciousness and information of the new floods over that of the old material. The deep truth of William Faulkner’s oft-quoted line “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past” springs to mind at such moments.

In this instance of it, the most obvious “old” voices are clearly neither dead nor past. The ney that opens the music, the sheng, suona, dizi, karna, goshme, daf—most of which have been introduced here in earlier chapters at play in their original cultural contexts—are all meeting with the Western Industrial Age instruments of the American jazz band to embrace and carry the music forward not as resurrected ghosts, but as older instruments from another part of the world. That said, without getting all teleological about it, there is a history of diffusive spread and evolution from Asia through the Levant and Mediterranean to Western and Northern Europe behind these old and new instruments. The music encodes it, for those who have ears.

The messages in musical code here run something like this: American identities were born in this “New World” just a few generations back, in the Europeans, Africans, and Asians (to focus only on those, for this discussion) who ended up here. White Americans individuated from Europe to start out as the majority, self-assumed/professed definitive cultural-cum-racial group in charge of the government. Africans and Asians both, in their different histories, struggled throughout the new nation’s first couple of centuries to get beyond enslaved and undesirable alien statuses to full citizenship. In the process of doing so, their peculiarly hyphenated American identities were born, as “racial minorities.” That common designation made for a natural and peculiarly personal alliance and kinship in their politics, but one that could be seen more as convenient than deeply joined at the root, forced as it was by the hand of cruel power plays on two groups from widely disparate histories and cultures.

This iteration of Duke’s musicultural diplomacy gives the lie to that view. To shift the metaphor from ship to iceberg, the visible tip is the American history and its actors, but the unseen bigger history beneath it, its mass and shape interacting with the ocean currents to provide the tip its direction, momentum, and fundamental stability, is the one singing here, along with the tip of Duke’s statement. As transcendent as both Duke and Strays were, most regally in their late stage here, they were also men of their time. That was mostly the modernist period, when African-American music was coming into its own through them and others as a branch of white American entertainment culture that was indeed the old skin to their new wine in that originally biblical sense. Jazz itself started out as American music with an African tinge in the white cultural mindset, and projects such as the Far East Suite were similarly reduced to that with an Asian tinge. It wasn’t until players of that generation were on their ways out, in the 1960s, and those like Jang and Brown were being born, along with “free jazz” and its peculiarly postmodern breakdown of barriers between hierarchical musicultural (classical/art, popular, folk) and multicultural (West and Rest) categories, that the whole iceberg, as if sonographically sounded by the new music, revealed its hidden shape and size.

That bigger history stretches back to our species’ first forays out of East Africa and north and east into Asia. We saw it mythically suggested in Chapter Six’s look at another musical son of Ellington and Monk, Randy Weston’s musical allusion to the prehistoric Shang Dynasty’s links to Africa, in duet with Min Xiao-fen. It is a history of ancient dynastic states and civilizations that throve in their separate spheres relatively untroubled by European powers for millennia until just five centuries ago, for the Africans; only two, for the Asians. From that perspective, the connections between African- and Asian-Americans in their culture and politics, as those between those groups and their African and Asian cultures and histories beyond America, present more clearly in their full human depth.

I’ll conclude this oeuvre-view with a CD that saw Jang’s work as composer and player well served by legendary drummer Max Roach and Chinese erhu master Jiebing Chen. Jang returned the favor in the opening track, “Moon Over the Great Wall,” recorded at night, in salute to Roach as the “Great Wall.” Again, Jang’s most signature pianisms are so often redolent of piano’s androgynous affects in tremolos and arpeggios; here, as sensitively to its current partner, his more percussive aspects play perfectly with and against Roach’s own famously signature melodic-linear patterns and constructions, punching and jumping as much as flowing and intoning in their dance together: pitched drums and cymbals singing with rhythms struck from strings.

As if to endorse that conceit, Jang mentions Roach again in his comments on the closing track, “The Flowing Stream” in the same breath as an iconic striker of blows. “This is dedicated to Bruce Lee and his depth of feeling and Max is always like a flowing stream, always doing something about now.” Which flows naturally into the other of Jang’s three pieces specifically referencing Roach, “Now’s the TIME!”—the CAPS added to reconfigure the classic title he worked with Charlie Parker to reclaim its timeless timeliness: “Now’s the time with Jon Jang and Jiebing Chen!” he wrote.

For the rest of the tracks, I will riff on the Chinese word introduced by Han Mei in Chapter Seven. She defined jiahu as “adding the flower” to the “bone tune”—improvisationally ornamenting an existing tune. This CD itself riffs on the image of the flower, as one iconic and profound to Chinese cultural history, as indeed we’ve seen it to be in Jang’s work. The ample liner notes to Beijing Trio (also 1999) were by the late Dr. Herb Wong—along with fellow ancestors Ralph J. Gleason and Philip Elwood, one of the three SF-local journalists who steered me and many of my generation there into the world of such music—who wrote this about Jang’s “bone tunes” here: “…a basic rationale for the predominantly floral titles is derived from the inspired symbolism of flowers in Chinese culture.” To Wong’s observation of Billy Strayhorn’s similar pattern of such titles (“Passion Flower,” “Lotus Blossom,” “A Flower is a Lovesome Thing”), Jang notes, “For me, it comes off first from China. It’s a kind of intersection with Strayhorn.”

The “first flower” is as mythical a thing as the “first human,” of course—but China does have a claim to fame as its mythical birthplace. The PBS science show Nova aired a show called “The First Flower” in 2007 that looked at the work of Professor Sun Ge, from China's Jilin University, who thinks that early flowers first appeared and evolved in northern China 100 million years ago. From there they spread to the Hengduan Mountains, “which span the regions of Sichuan, Hunan, and Tibet. This is the most biodiverse temperate forest in the world. But to a plant lover it feels strangely familiar, because this is where many of the flowers in your garden came from.” They were all about sex, as “the birds and the bees” has so famously phrased it, and as the birds and the bees themselves have sung their praises, prayers, and powers in our own cultures of romance and Eros (First Flower, 2007).

Fitting titles, then, for this music’s cross-cultural fertilization of Asian, Asian-American, and African-American flowering bones. In keeping with the fulsome balance between integrated elements generally noted throughout Jang’s body of work, this CD adds to it a new level to the phrase “composer for improvisers.” Jang’s contributions include three flower-themed titles, and four other kinds; all, though, have much more the feel of three masters of their idioms meeting on their field of flowers with no bone tunes at all, or at least none that can be distinguished as distinct from the flowers. Which is perhaps the very picture of a perfect marriage between the art forms of composition and improvisation (even on “Heart in a Different Place,” of which Jang writes “I just thought we were all in different places,” and Dr. Wong writes, “Obviously they were in the perfect ‘places’ opening up new possibilities for heart and soul”).

“Sweet Whisper of a Flower,” Jang says, was inspired by Chinese poetry; “Fallen Petals,” for a Roach-Chen duet, was conceived in memory of Chen’s recent loss of her father and brother; and “When the Blossoms Bloom” was Jang’s tribute to figure skater Michelle Kwan’s beauty and grace on the ice. The erhu sounds forth in the first of those, the CD’s second track, like the first flower opening its petals. Jang’s piano chimes in like the second delicate bud on that stem, joining its like in the sunny breeze…and Roach’s rhythms on skins, woods, and metals follow hearty and hale when the new plants are in full bloom and rooted strong, the wave of flying and sure-footed life forming its great and busy symbiosis of love and life with them for the ages to come (through, of course, the rest of the CD).

Roach: “This is one of the most refreshing and enjoyable experiences in my career. For me, everything has to have a true meaning. In this cross-cultural artistry, I heard and did things musically I had never done before.”

***

The process of almost five decades of writing/publishing journalism and scholarship about music naturally produces a mix of short and long views. The journalism—reviews, interviews, features for music-specific and general magazines and newspapers—happens on tight deadlines, from daily to only a bit longer, to share what information and insights one has on the fly of recordings and gigs as they hit. The deadline window for most scholarship, by contrast, can stretch out for years, and usually puts this or that aspect of some musician’s work under a microscope, for a readership of a small coterie of fellow academic specialists.

Book-length monographs enable replacement of the microscope with a telescope. I came to this, my third such book, after learning how to use that telescope on the subjects of Anthony Braxton’s body of work from the mid-1960s up to the mid-1990s and several similar overviews of European musicians’ such 30-year output in both my PhD dissertation and second book. That experience primed me to organize and frame such “oeuvreviews” as what I’ve called “biographies of music”—not musical biographies of the music’s creators, but biographies of the music itself, as if of an entity (the Muse) with a life and agenda of its own, not necessarily always wholly consubstantial with those of its creator.

Jang’s oeuvre is unique among those I’ve done before in a couple of ways. First, its political, cultural, and personal themes and motives are explicit from the beginning and throughout. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t more “music-biographical” data beyond those aspects to mine, simply that no such mining is necessary to glean those; they are there to see plainly, telling their own story, like nuggets of gold strewn about the surface, there to pick up, not buried to be dug up.

What does have to be mined, by me anyway, is twofold. The first part concerns those traits of the music I’ve been intuiting as something expressive and redolent of the region of its origin—the physical geography and climate, the urban and rural cultures, the histories of the peoples and their interrelationships that all converge in individual artistic statements such as Jang’s and his colleagues’. What makes that unique for me is that this is not the first biography of a music I’ve delved into as a researcher, to immerse myself in such traits to hear and tell the best story—but it is the first I’ve tackled from the place where I too was born and came of age, by an artist around my age who cut his teeth on many of the same musical and cultural influences I did, even worked with some of the same musicians, living through our overlapping histories. The Asian and Asian-American parts were as relatively new to me as were the African, African-American, and Continental European aspects of the studies I’d done before, just by virtue of my different ethnic and cultural profiles, but the many subtle features having to do with the music’s place, in time and space, were something that I recognized as familiar, in ways that I couldn’t have when schooling myself about such places as New Orleans, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, to name the sites I learned by reading about rather than being born and raised in.

This singular fact leads me to try and get to the bottom of what is still only vague intuition, stirred by only my first toes in the waters of Part III. That I will do by digressing from this close look at the three AIR principals into a meditation, up next, on the “big history” of the Pacific Rim since Europeans appeared as one of its major actors in the late 15^th century. I will zoom in through that to more detail as I approach the present, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The second sirenic song Jang’s music is singing me to try and hear with more definition is the one I’ve been dancing around with general descriptors such as “balance” and “integration” between elements such as Asian, Asian-American, African-American, European, West Coast jazz, and male/yang and female/yin, composed and improvised, personal and social healing. Most of the music I’ve been drawn to, and drawn to study and write about, has been of a hybrid nature that requires such terms, to get at the contours and organic soundness of its hybridization. As noted above, it’s not always easily or successfully achieved. Whether it is so achieved or not, however, it is usually easy to perceive the implications of such musical experiments for the larger cultural/social/political spheres.

For this discussion, I can start from where I live, by returning to the oft-cited fallacy of whiteness “passing” as universal. That phenomenon, in music as in culture in the round, has been called out, exposed, and challenged from various corners only as recently as the postmodern years since the 1960s of Jang’s and my adult lives. It begs the question, most urgently for me, of what is the proper role and profile of that white Western identity in the more multicultural global garden of a thousand flowers blooming now? Where is the healthy, happy medium between supremacist and abject villain my own place in the garden can contribute? I will add to the Gautama/Buddha mytheme above my most personal answer at the end of the upcoming big history, with some thoughts about the few years in it (1988-1995) when my Northwest Creative Orchestra was active. I’ll revisit the Pan-Asian Arkestra for its parallels to the latter—the two ensembles, rather than their organizational homes (AIR and PRP)—in terms of their similar and different musical and demographic profiles, as two West Coast big bands sharing the same cultural moment.

Much more extensively and centrally, I will try and shed light on the inchoate but strong feeling that Jang’s work exudes notably strong such balance and integration of its disparate aspects, avoiding the threat of their potential incompatibilities or failure to produce good fruit. I will do so by using it as a keystone feature of the AIR aesthetic and project, struck by his tone, against which to examine the other artists in Part III (as also Masaoka, in Part II), all of whom came through the AIR universe to varying degrees while branching as freely and idiosyncratically down their own paths as people like Braxton, Threadgill, Wadada Leo Smith, Mitchell, Bowie, Hemphill and others came through the AACM’s and BAG’s vision of the universal/global with their particular/local. As I queried the balance and integration of the traditional Asian elements with the new-and-improvised Western-born musical scenes effected by the Asian women (with some men) in Part II, I will do the same about the similar and overlapping hybrids of the elements mentioned above initiated by the Asian-American men (with some women) in Part III.

I want to elaborate on the distinctions of Francis Wong’s profile from Jang’s in the AIR story with an equally close look at Wong’s musical details. Wong’s discography also leads well into that of Tatsu Aoki, and into AIR’s expansion into the Chicago scene, figuring large in the next chapter, making Wong’s ouevre (for its resonance with the then-burgeoning sociopolitical arm of the Asian-American movement) the logical second one to Jang’s first to present here.

After, that is, the historical digression promised above.

References

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Braxton, A. (1999). Small Ensemble Music (Wesleyan 1994). Splasc(h) Records World Series (CDH 801.2)

Bridging the Asian Connection. (September 10, 2010). Open Sky Jazz. Retrieved from  http://www.openskyjazz.com/2010/09/bridging-the-asian-connection/ 

Brown, A.  (2010). John Coltrane as the Personification of Spirituality in Black Music. In Leonard L. Brown (ed.), John Coltrane & Black America’s Quest for Freedom. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 55-72

Campbell, J. (1972). Hero with a Thousand Faces (Bollingen Series, No. 17), 2^nd ed.   Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chandler, S. (September 22, 2016). “Music Confounds the Machines." In No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music. Retrieved from http://nodepression.com/article/music-confounds-machines

Coates, T. (June 2014). “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

Dessen, M. (2003). Decolonizing Art Music: Scenes from the Late Twentieth-Century United States. Dissertation completed for the PhD in Music with an emphasis in Critical Studies and Experimental Practices. University of California/San Diego. Committee: George E. Lewis (chair), Anthony Davis, Nancy Guy, George Lipsitz and Bennetta Jules-Rosette. Retrieved from http://www.worldcat.org/title/decolonizing-art-music-scenes-from-the-late-twentieth-century-united-states/oclc/65638824

______. (2006). Asian Americans and Creative Music Legacies. In Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études critiques en improvisation (1/3). Retrieved from http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/56/89CachedYou

First Flower. (April 17, 2007). Nova, PBS. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/3405_flower.html

Gray, J. (ed.). (1991). Fire Music: A Bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959 – 1990. New York/Westport CT/London: Greenwood Press.

Heffley, M. (2001). European Free Jazz: Whiteness as Friend, or Same Old Foe? Presented on panel with Eric Charry, Franya Berkman, and Michael Veal: "Innovation, Upheaval, and Renewal: Exploring New Directions in African American Music in the 1960s" at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Detroit, MI. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/2338872/European_Free_Jazz_Whiteness_as_Friend_or_Same_Old_Foe

Heffley, M. (2016). Dialogue of the Avant-Gardes. In The History of European Jazz: The Music, Musicians and Audience in Context (Francesco Martinelli, ed.). In press.

________. (2013). Songs of Nature and Love. Retrieved from http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/mikeheffley2

________. (Spring 2011). Improvising the Good Well. ISIM Newsletter (7/1). Retrieved from http://www.improvisedmusic.org/newsletters/ISIM.Newsletter.07.1.2011.Spring.pdf

________. (Summer 2011). Review: George Lewis’s A Power Stronger Than Itself (University of Chicago Press, 2008) for Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 64, No. 2: pp. iii-iv.

Lai, H. M., Lim, G., and Yung, J., eds. (1991, 2014). Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Lateef, Y. (1981). Repository of Scales and Melodic Patterns. Amherst MA: Fana Music.

Lewis, G.E. (Fall 2004). Review of Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz (Yale University Press, 2005). In Current Musicology (78). Columbia University. Retrieved from http://currentmusicology.columbia.edu/article/review-of-mike-heffley-2005-northern-sun-southern-moon-europes-reinvention-of-jazz-new-haven-yale-university-press/

 ________. (2008). A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press.

Looker, B. (2004). Point from which Creation Begins: The Black Artists Group of St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press.

Mendelowitz, E. (June 2013). “Mingus at Monterey: Meditations on integration.” In Society for Humanistic Psychology Newsletter. Retrieved from http://www.apadivisions.org/division-32/publications/newsletters/humanistic/2013/06/mingus.aspx

Miyoshi, M. (2000). A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State. In Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (eds.). Asian American Studies: A Reader. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Omatsu, G. (2000). The “Four Prisons” and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s. In Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (eds.). Asian American Studies: A Reader. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Paget-Clarke, N. (1997). “A Conversation with Jon Jang and Francis Wong.” In Motion Magazine, San Francisco. Retrieved from http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/jjfw1.html

Piatkowski, D. (N.d.). “Wojciech Juszczak.” In Jazz Forum: The European Jazz Magazine.

Retrieved from http://jazzforum.com.pl/main/artykul/wojciech-juszczak

Robbins, B. (October 27, 2016). A Starting Point for Politics: The radical life and times of Stuart Hall. The Nation. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall/

Stryker, M. (January 20, 2009). "Ellington's score still celebrated." Detroit Free Press. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20090212210625/http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200990120016

Tenzer, M. and Roeder, J. (eds.). (2011). Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

United Front (band). (1983). Live in Berlin (CD). Berlin: FMP/SAJ-45. Retrieved from https://www.discogs.com/artist/2158138-United-Front-2

Wilson, C.R. (2000-2016). Chinese in Mississippi: An Ethnic People in a Biracial Society. In Mississippi History Now: An online publication of the Mississippi Historical Society. Retrieved from http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/86/mississippi-chinese-an-ethnic-people-in-a-biracial-society

Woo, E. (March 7, 2015). Lilian Nakano Dies at 86; Sought Redress for Interned Japanese Americans. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-lillian-nakano-20150308-story.html

Work this in somewhere?: Retrieved from https://theorizingmusicalculture2015.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/lies-we-cant-stop-telling-jon-jang-and-the-ecology-of-the-musical-metaphor/

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[1] As I wrote in Part II about the women discussed there contributing more than an Asian “tinge” to the originally African-American music, so here will AIR’s Asian-American contributions constitute its similar more-than-tinge. (Note my liberal use of Wikipedia as a go-to source for certain kinds of information, as with these and many links to come. I am well aware of its suspect reputation as a credible source in academic writing, and some entries here are more developed than others. That said, I use it when I judge it useful to alert readers and researchers to mostly uncontroversial information, profiles of people mentioned, and common knowledge worth touching base with. Even the sketchier ones have links to better sources, as I also do elsewhere in this text. Wikipedia is in this mix with the more academically acceptable sources on the assumption that readers will discern how to treat and understand both kinds.)

[2] From 1820 to 1965, Asian immigrants numbered around 1.5 million. After the 1965 act was passed, more than 10 million Asians immigrated to the US. The convergence of Asian people and African-American movement then and since reflects one of the major themes of this musical study: “Were it not for the centuries-long struggle led by African Americans on behalf of all excluded communities, we as a nation would not only have a lot fewer civil rights, we would not have nearly the racial diversity we do today” (Punongbayan, 2015). Dessen’s PhD dissertation (2003) and a summary account of its second main topic (2006) affords a comprehensive look at the Asian-American movement and its issues as the context in which AIR emerged and developed.

[3] See my review of George Lewis’s book (2008) for my take on his account of the AACM’s profile; and Looker (2004, pp. 35-62), for his look at BAG’s beginnings.

[4] See Gray (1991, pp. 41-58) for those specific to the jazz-rooted experimental/improvised music discussed here. See Heffley (2016) for my take on that. Europe’s many “hot clubs” and black America’s plethora of all-black musician union locals, publishing companies, record labels, and booking circuits before integration formed their rich historical background.

[5] I wrote this (2011) about AACM elder trombonist/composer/scholar George Lewis’s account of the AACM’s profile: “Lewis paints it as one among several births of black identity in a time of black power’s search for self. The result was arguably closer to an expression of classical American identity (rugged individualism, freedom from government strings) than anything like black victimhood or resistance. Abrams: ‘We’re not fighting a racial fight. We’re promoting ourselves and helping ourselves up to the point where we can participate in the universal aspect of things, which includes all people’...The AACM’s mission statement was, explains Lewis, ‘an attempt to counter...widespread stereotypes about black musicians that had infected not only the academic world, but the dominant culture generally’.” Looker (xiii) presents three “primary initiatives” in BAG’s birth that resonate with Lewis’s characterization of the AACM.

[6] See Anderson (2002) for a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the music and its potential funders, including this about its central tension: “The music's ambiguous relationship with the established sponsors of high culture makes it difficult to assess whether jazz further subverted America's cultural hierarchy, as many of its supporters insist, or merely accommodated itself to an ongoing process of stratification” (p. 133). Looker (Chapter Two) alludes to the same dynamic manifesting variously in AACM and BAG.

[7] Paget-Clarke (1997). The choice of “musical front” wordage was intentionally resonant with the classic political rubric (and the name of the pre-AIR Asian-American band Jang worked with) of “united front,” reflecting the deep coalitional impulse stemming from the 1955 Bandung Conference that gave birth to the Non-Aligned Movement (a.k.a. “Third World”) of Asian, African, and Latin American nations banding together to counter the concentrated powers of “Western” (First World) and “Eastern” (Second World) Cold War blocs. By the hotter years of the 1960s, it was rippling from a newly surging Asian-American Movement out to both kindred African-American, Latino, and international pan-Asian resistance-cum-revolutionary social and cultural political actors; even more so by the 1980s, especially in the music.

[8] Live in Berlin (FMP/SAJ-45). Eugene (1989) (1991), the NCO’s concert with Anthony Braxton, came out around the same time as the P-AAs on Soul Note on the latter’s sister label Black Saint.

[9] Omatsu’s “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation: Asian American Activism from the 1960s to the 1990s” and Miyoshi’s “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State” in Wu and Song (eds., 2000) give substantive glimpses into the evolution from an Americentric to a more global movement with the increased immigration from Asian countries other than Japan and China, the end of the Cold War, and the rise of the notion of a “Pacific century” with the growth of globalization.

[10] From Aoki (Executive Director; on the AIR-MW Board of Directors, Wong is also listed there as Creative Director of AIR National), on the AIR-Midwest website: “After 20 years of working as IEL, we made the decision to change our name from Innocent Eyes and Lenses to Asian Improv aRts Midwest in 2004. This change was made in order to reflect the community that IEL has been serving since its inception as well as to recognize the partnership that has been established with the San Francisco-based Asian Improv aRts. Founded by musician and community activist Francis Wong, Asian Improv aRts has been a leader in building community through the Asian American cultural arts on the West Coast for two decades and we are honored to be a part of the Asian Improv family.”

[11] See George E. Lewis’s review of my Northern Sun, Southern Moon (Yale University Press, 2005) and his suggestion about a specific European recording’s derivative relationship to John Coltrane’s Meditations in Heffley (2001)

[12] With the advent of comparative musicology in the late-19^th and then ethnomusicology in the mid-20^th centuries, those binaries have played out in the contexts of colonialism and Western supremacism, grand narratives and universalisms imposed on culture and music like melting pots more than, say, dim sum buffets. Tenzer and Roeder (eds., 2011, pp. 415-38) present current analytical discourse about such things that has learned from former overreaches, implicit biases, power plays, and the reactive fear of committing same that chokes a balanced correction of them in discussing any (which is to say all) local music as also “universal,” “spiritual,” in the sense John Coltrane understood the terms.

[13] On a more secular side, Jang also proudly cites on his website’s bio his affinity with leading cultural theorists, especially the late Stuart Hall, who have cultivated notions of the “functional” intellectual and artist who integrates such aspects, rather than identify with one at the expense of another: “In London in 1997, Jang was one of four artists selected by the British Embassy in Washington DC to participate in Reinventing Britain, a conference of prominent international scholars featuring Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Homi Bhabba as speakers.” See Robbins (2016) for a pithy current glance at Hall’s work.

[14] See Dessen (2006; and 2003, pp. 185-91) on United Front and its RPM label.

[15] He also appeared on AIR’s third release, Fred Ho’s (Fred Houn, then) LP A Song for Manong. We’ll look at that in Chapter Twelve.

[16] Jang relates the allusion to Monk to what he calls his “Arts Apartheid experience at the Oberlin Conservatory of 18th and 19th Century Western Classical Music, when I was a Piano Performance major student and the back cover of my first recording Jang [1982] on RPM Records, where there is a photo of me and a placard that reads: Monk, Yes! Mozart, No... Being mindful of the Mostly Mozart Festival, I was prescient when I wrote the statement on the Jang recording that someday there will be Thelonious Monk institutions. Years later [1987], when The Ballad or the Bullet came out, I think, the Thelonious Monk Institution was established.”

[17] Jang was indeed inspired by Roach’s work, and would later work and record with him.

[18] Yusef Lateef (1981) lists it as “kokin-Chosi (Modern Japanese Scale)” (p. 78).

[19] See Coates (2014), and others related from The Atlantic.

[20] Lewis (2008, p. 526, fn. 15).

[21] As it happens, the year of PRP’s last concert too, a tribute to Julius Hemphill, then recently deceased, at Wesleyan University, featuring his widow pianist Ursula Oppens; saxophonists Tim Berne and Marty Ehrlich, a longtime close friend and colleague of Hemphill’s, who also arranged the Hemphill pieces we played; vibraphonist Jay Hoggard, bassist Mark Helias, drummer Pheeroan ak-Laff, and me on trombone.

[22] See the website Poetic Waves/Angel Island for a multimedia history and presentation of the poems. See also Lai, Lim, and Yung, eds. (1991, 2014, University of Washington Press) for the definitive English translations and academic study.

[23] Braxton (1999), track 4; Heffley (2013).

[24] See Wong’s (2004, pp. 39-50) excellent and thorough exegesis on this recording and composition. See “Bridging the Asian Connection” (2010) for a snapshot of Jang’s Oberlin history and the commissioned composition that came out of the first Immigrant Suite.

[25] Mingus’s widow and manager of his music speaks authoritatively about his many facets: “I remember when interviewers used to ask him despite the breadth of his legacy how he fit into traditional categories that included European classical forms, bebop, Dixieland, gospel, Latin rhythms, and the blues--all genres of music he drew upon in his compositions and then transcended. He would look up and sigh: ‘Can't you just call it Mingus music?’ More than two decades later I think he'd be pleased—if not at all surprised—to know that we can…Any musician will tell you that Mingus music requires multiple skills. A drummer once described it as a three-ring circus; he should have said four. You need to read like a classical player, improvise like a jazz musician, play well in the ensemble, and, on top of everything else, have a personality. I have seen how behavior that causes trouble in one context may, in another, provoke the explosive magic and exultation that bring a concert to magnificent life and the audience to its feet. The music grows and expands with such contradictions” (Sue Mingus, in Mendelowitz, 2013). 

[26] See Anthony Brown’s “John Coltrane as the Personification of Spirituality in Black Music,” in Brown (ed. 2010). Jang on his own similarly inspired Two Flowers music (in Paget-Clarke, 1997): “These are examples of recontextualization of Chinese folk songs in different kinds of musical contexts, whether they are jazz, in-between, or classical music.”

[27] This track was an example of the many musical entry points to historical knowledge I’ve encountered in Jang’s and similar artists’ work. My mother’s people migrated from Missouri, not so far from this post-Reconstruction Chinese-American community in northern Mississippi. Bruce—like Jang, an Oberlin alumnus—is a classic example of the biracial lineage of many Americans, especially Southerners.

[28] Ellington’s long list of film-soundtrack credits mostly comprises already-recorded music adopted for such use—which in itself testifies to its already-cinematic quality--but he and Strayhorn did start scoring directly for films in the late 1950s. Director Otto Preminger’s 1959 Anatomy of a Murder was one such, which film critic Mark Stryker (2008) marks "as a landmark – the first significant Hollywood film music by African Americans comprising non-diegetic music, that is, music whose source is not visible or implied by action in the film, like an on-screen band." Mingus’s list  isn’t quite as long, and includes more documentaries, but the handful of mainstream movies there also attests to the soundtrack-friendly nature of much of his work. Jang’s website features a page of his works as a composer, including a section subheaded “Film/Silent Film Scores.” Its entries signal links to such projects most natural to one most local to the industry. The other compositions listed there include most surveyed here, as well as others commissioned and performed but not recorded. They all feature the same programmatic aspect of an Asian-American historical or cultural theme.

[29] Chi Lai/Cher Lai, the Chinese National Anthem is referred in the scene where the Chinese guerilla fighters are carrying the wounded US soldiers through the mountainside, as well as in the scene where the US soldiers leave on an airplane after Van Johnson acknowledges to the Chinese doctor that "you're our kind of people." Notably, the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943) ended shortly before the film’s release.