Asian American Jazz Festival Converges on Japantown

By Titania Leung Inglis
Special to AsianWeek

Over the weekend, San Francisco’s Asian American Jazz 2002 festival rode a heat wave into another triumphant year. Musicians from the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Chicago, from Asian Pacific and African America, converged on Japantown and entwined melodies in tribute to this year’s theme, “The Spirit of Improvisation.”

As the festival drew to a close Sunday night at Locus 1640 Post, the mood was celebratory. The weekend’s performers gathered jubilantly after the show, congratulating one another on their performances, while percussionist Jimmy Biala — still beaming after performing three nights out of four — handed out Cuban cigars. Festival executive director Francis Wong paused, saxophone in hand, to declare it “a very successful festival. I think the audiences uniformly had a great time.”

Romeo 5 Art Cafe and Bar hosted two standing-room-only performances Sept. 20 and 27, by the Jen Shyu Trio and the Rudy Tenio Jazz Vocal Trio respectively. A new venue for this festival, the hip, pricey Japantown bar has quietly lent its support to community events such as the Asian American Film Festival and the Living Room.

A last-minute addition to the festival schedule, the Chinatown Beacon Center was another first-time venue, taking over the Jean Parker school gym for an open house Oct. 3. The multigenerational audience of about 60 ranged from fidgety middle-schoolers to gray-haired jazz buffs, including staff, teachers, students and families from the school and Beacon Center.

Jeff Chan on saxophone and Jon Jang on piano warmed things up with their mellow, lyrical jazz tunes, and then percussionist Jimmy Biala literally got the audience on their feet. Accompanied by Lenora Lee and Jen Shyu, Biala led the room on a musical world tour to Nigeria, Cuba and finally to Brazil, where he taught the giggling audience to dance to samba.

Festival organizer Dina Shek expressed her pleasure that the jazz festival had returned to Chinatown, saying, “This is where Francis (Wong) and Jon (Jang) grew up, and they were really integrated into the community. So it’s nice to come back with a new generation of artists. It’s heartening that so many people came out for this.”

Legendary bassist Malachi Favors Maghostut.

Saxophonist Chan started the evening off with his work-in-progress, “Continuum,” an extended composition sponsored by an award from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Jazz greats Jang and Tatsu Aoki, director of the Chicago Asian American Jazz festival joined Chan’s Turn of the Century ensemble for the piece, a celebration of the legacy and continuity of jazz history. In four mesmerizing movements, the suite showcased the virtuosity of each performer, including Dohee Lee, John Kim and Sunmin Ahn on Korean p’ungmul drums.

Aoki returned for the second half of the program to join Chicago jazz legend Malachi Favors Maghostut in a summit of innovative bassists. The set began, quite naturally, with the two master bassmen playing percussion — Aoki on taiko, and Maghostut playing an odd assortment of small percussion instruments and mouth organs. In an impenetrably abstract set, the duo proceeded to lead the audience on an odyssey through the possibilities and impossibilities of their instruments, as Maghostut’s deft fingers molded the bass’s sound into the trumpeting of an elephant, the drone of an airplane engine and the twanging of a sitar; Aoki created electronic-sounding effects that would have been at home in a sci-fi movie, then grabbed a water bottle and played bottle-neck bass.

Smiled festival director Wong the next night, “It was very special to see Malachi Favors, at his level, playing in the gym, coming to perform in our community, when at this high level, most opportunities to perform are outside our community.”

Sunday night, the festival’s final show brought Wong, the East Bay’s Avotcja and Los Angeles’ William Roper and Bobby Bradford to another community-oriented space, Locus 1640 Post. The venue’s floor-level stage made it difficult to see the seated performers, but otherwise, its lounge-like intimacy made it an excellent venue for the evening’s very personal agenda: a tribute to the late pianist, composer and activist Glenn Horiuchi.

Avotcja honored her departed friend with a magical set with her group Modupue, featuring Destiny on harp, Tarika Lewis on electric violin and Jimmy Biala on percussion. With Lewis’ violin soaring and wailing over the harp’s lush, sparkling landscape of notes and Biala’s rhythms, the group’s songs had all the charm of a fairy tale. Wong, Jang and koto player Miya Masaoka joined in for a rendition of Horiuchi’s composition “Oxnard Beat,” preceded by Avotcja’s poem about Horiuchi.

“A sansei jazzman pounding out taiko rhythms on piano keys... stomping on stereotypes... Glenn was a major nail in the coffin of the passive Asian,” she recalled.

The weekend concluded with an all-brass set by Wong, cornetist and trumpeter Bradford and tuba player Roper. Their colorful hats, reportedly supplied by the dynamic Roper, added a clownish touch to the proceedings, and the music often followed suit. Between more traditional jazz songs, Wong and Bradford accompanied Roper’s deep rumble of a voice as the tuba player wove a tale of the time he asked Horiuchi for advice on his love life, sending the audience into peals of laughter with his comic timing. Roper’s other antics included playing piano and tuba at the same time, and using his tuba as an unsettling, echoing megaphone to announce, “I hear voices.”

The San Francisco festival is over, but the Chicago, San Jose and Los Angeles Asian American Jazz festivals are still to come, so festival director Wong won’t be taking much of a break. He feels energized, he says, as he is on the verge of heading out to L.A. and San Jose — “Busy, busy, busy,” as he describes it. In other words, it’s business as usual for the tireless leaders of Asian American Jazz.

For the first time this year, the Asian American Jazz 2002 festival will be in San Jose. The show will feature Asian Pacific American spoken word collective isangmahal from Seattle, Robbie Kwock & the Melecio Magdaluyo Sextet and a special guest performance by Marc Pinate. The performance will be on Friday, Oct. 18 at 8:00 p.m. at the Montgomery Theater, located on Market & San Carlos in downtown San Jose. Tickets are $12 - $18. For tickets, call 408-298-2287 or contact info@asiantheater.org. For more information, go to www.asianimprov.com.