Eastern front

Asian-American artists forge new fusions

by Norman Weinstein

Louis Armstrong's "Oriental Strut" is one of many jazz records from the '20s and '30s with a title alluding to Asia. But any meatier connection between Asia and American jazz was dormant in my awareness until I attended this year's Asian-American Jazz Festival in San Francisco. It was a heady experience to realize that the Bay Area has been a seedbed for cross-cultural musical experimentation led by Asian-Americans for decades. There's still little national awareness of this scene's musical vibrancy, but a recent spate of recordings may change that.

Perhaps no Asian-American jazz voice has done more to define the uniqueness of the form than pianist and composer Jon Jang. Two Flowers on a Stem (Soul Note) features him in a sextet with two familiar African-American masters, saxophonist David Murray and flutist James Newton. But the most distinctive voice on the album is Chen Jiebing on erhu. Traditional Asian instruments are plentiful in this music; the erhu is a two-stringed Chinese violin without a fingerboard, sounding a bit like a viola or cello. In Jiebing's hands it sounds like a ghostly woman's cry in a Chinese drama. And it's downright startling to hear it in the context of Charles Mingus's "Meditations on Integration," an album high point transforming the black gospel undercurrents of the piece into a jazzy mutation of Peking opera. Part of Jang's artistry involves knowing how to work effectively with non-Asian musicians of enormous flexibility and cross-cultural imagination. Newton makes his metal flute sound like bamboo. On the title cut, Murray and Newton blend with the erhu's vocalized cry, sparking a stunning synthesis of East and West. It's a consistently mesmerizing album.

Jang's composing and piano playing reflect his love of Chinese folk and dramatic musics; pianist and composer Glenn Horiuchi works with his Japanese roots through an unsettling and stimulating exploration of the samisen, a traditional Japanese banjo. Although he performs on the samisen on just one of the eight tunes that make up Hilltop View (Music & Arts), his piano playing sounds like an odd blending of samisen riffs created by a Cecil Taylor disciple. Dissonant crescendos and fractured dance rhythms permeate this high-energy album where he is capably backed by bassist Roberto Miranda and drummer Jeanette Wrate. But for listeners interested in hearing more of Horiuchi's jazz Orientalisms in clear outline, his 1992 Soul Note disc, Oxnard Beet, is a better introduction.

The most memorable performer I heard at the San Francisco festival was bassist/composer Mark Izu, leader of a new bass quartet. His next album is in process, but his Circle of Fire (Asian Improv), from a few years ago, is a completely alluring showcase of Pan-Asian influences married to rhythmically bracing original compositions. The opening "Come On Let's Go" is a natty bit of Korean jazz funk, the Korean touches added by Jin Hi Kim on komungo (zither) and chang-ko (drum). Izu's forthcoming album will feature a piece I heard at the festival, a musical setting of a traditional Chinese folktale, its images evoked by four basses, a drum, and a koto (a traditional Japanese zither with movable bridges).

The koto shares with the samisen a dry metallic tone akin to the banjo, but in the hands of Miya Masaoka, who often performs with Izu, it takes on some un-banjo-like sonorities. Masaoka's Compositions Improvisations (Asian Improv) showcases her idiosyncratic koto technique. She yanks at its strings, violently strums and plucks strings tuned unconventionally (by Japanese standards): yet it all makes musical sense as a means to express the narrative flow of her original compositions. "Still/Motion/Ness," her duet with flutist James Newton (the African-American musician recording most frequently with Asian-Americans), is true to its title: an ideal soundtrack for Zen meditation. And her cover of Duke Ellington's "Come Sunday" is a novel and majestic musical hybrid: Afro-Japanese gospel jazz.

Masaoka is one of 17 artists featured on Sounds like 1996: Music by Asian American Artists (Innocent Eyes & Lenses), a double-disc compilation that is the best Baedecker to this new music. Like Amy Tan's novels or Lawson Inada's poetry, these recordings stirringly convey the sorrows and elations emerging from the artful exploration of Asian roots penetrating American soil.

Write to Asian Improv Records at 1433 Grant Street, Berkeley, California 94703, and Innocent Eyes & Lenses at Suite 127, Box 4505, Oak Park, Illinois 60303.