Bridging Cultural Boundaries

The cover of Berkeley percussionist Anthony Brown's first solo compact disc, “Family,” features a portrait of his parents on their wedding day in 1950. His father, part Choctaw and African American, stands next to his mother, a Japanese woman seated on a chair. Both are in full kimono.

Brown chose the portrait because he felt it depicted the harmony and mixture of cultures in his music. Along with a few other noteworthy Bay Area musicians, Brown is unique for bringing Asian concepts into his jazz compositions.

“It's a new dialect,” he said. “Personally, I look in the mirror every morning and I see it. I think the mixes are what brings out those things that are special. Jazz is a mix. And now it's universal.”

Brown and San Jose Taiko performed at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center last February with an opening by koto player Miya Masaoka. Performing with Brown will be Mark Izu on bass, Francis Wong on saxophone, Liu Qi-Chao on Chinese instruments and Wayne Wallace on keyboards.

They perform ed the first piece on Brown's compact disc, “E.O.9066: Truth Be Told” — a piece that was recorded live last year at the Asia Society in New York City.

“E.O.9066” stands for Executive Order 9066 — the order given by President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, banishing more than 110,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps.

“I see it as a powerful subject and it's been on my mind ever since I found out about it,” Brown said. “The whole phenomenon of having first the government remain silent about it and then the victims themselves taking on the burden of silence is, I think, a great part of the Japanese culture. It was disgraceful.”

As a musician, Brown said he wants to give a voice to that pain and suffering. The song commemorates the courageous spirit of Japanese Americans while surviving in the camps. Brown also brings gagaku — traditional Japanese court music — into the piece.

“In Japanese classical music, one finds a very unique voice in gagaku,” Brown said. “That's a voice that's thousands of years old and it's such a unique sound, with pacing that is very measured and very stable.”

Family is important to Brown, an internationally renowned percussionist, composer and ethnomusicologist. He recently left his full-time post as curator of American Musical Culture and director of the Jazz Oral History program at the Smithsonian Institute so he could spend more time with his six-year-old daughter.

At the Smithsonian, Brown played in the Smithsonian Jazz Trio with pianist Sir Roland Hanna and bassist Keter Betts. During those months, walking daily past a traveling exhibit on the Japanese internment camps helped inspire the creation of “E.O.9066.”

The five-part composition includes a “Prelude,” followed by the lively rhythms of Taiko drums in the second movement, “Locomotif/Taiko Trane.” The third movement, “General's Order,” was arranged in collaboration with Shanghai-trained composer, Liu Qi-Chao. The last movement, “Rhymes (for Children),” breaks into a rhumba and celebrates hope.

EXCERPT FROM “RHYMES (FOR CHILDREN)”

“You get inspired, you get renewed,” Brown said of the last movement. He wrote it “with hope for a future in which children would never be imprisoned again.”

Brown understands what it's like to be labeled as “different.” He was born in San Francisco, but he and his three brothers grew up on an American military base in Okinawa, Japan. While they never encountered prejudice on the military base, they felt it when they moved to North Torrance, Los Angeles, five years later.

“It was our first real immersion into mainstream America and it was very, very unsavory,” he said. “We really only had each other until we made friends with a Chicano family. There was only one other Asian family and no other black families.”

His father, Willie Brown, met his mother, Sumi Ogita, while jitterbugging at a dance club in Okinawa. They fell in love and got married, despite having to overcome some barriers.

“The American government had made it virtually impossible for an American serviceman to marry a Japanese woman,” Brown said. “So my father decided to honor her culture by marrying in the tradition of Japan.”

Brown's mother was about to be disowned by her father for marrying a non-Japanese until her mother stepped in and forged peace between the two parties. She made them realize they had more in common than they thought; both were stubborn and temperamental. Father and son-in-law would eventually become good friends.

Brown said he does not choose one ethnicity over another. “The whole issue of whether you see yourself as Asian or black is the same as asking whether you're a father, a husband, a brother, a musician or a composer,” he said. “We're all of these different things. You can't decide ethnicities along one arbitrary line. That's what America is all about.”

After moving from Okinawa to Los Angeles, Brown's parents now reside in Savannah, Georgia, where his father is retired.

“I was really, really pleased with it,” said Brown's father about the CD. “When I saw it, I said, `That's real fine.' We are a close-knitted family, so it made me feel good to think that he thought of us when he came out with this album.”

“Music was always in the home,” his father said. “I would have my favorite albums playing and as a kid, he would always come in and ask, “Who's that?'”

Brown's mother was not surprised, either, that her son became a musician. “Oh, yes,” she said. “When he was young, he liked to play drums and sing. So much noise. So much energy.” Sumi comes from a musical family. Her older sister is a professional folk dancer while her older brother is a professional player of Shakuhachi — a Japanese flute. She sang folk songs to her sons as they were growing up.

“It's those deep-seeded memories of my mom singing those songs to me and actually hearing them around me in school with other Japanese kids,” Brown said. “That had the most profound effect on me, as far as my preference for Asian music.” Brown incorporates the sounds of children singing “Furi Furi,” a Japanese folk song about rain into the second piece on his compact disc, “Never Again!”

In the Bay Area, Brown leads a multicultural, musical ensemble called African Eurasian Eclipse, which was inspired by a Duke Ellington Suite. The core members include Liu, Wong and Izu. Brown often plays in their musical ensembles, as well. They all know one another as longtime friends.

“I play very differently with Anthony than with any other drummer,” Izu said. “We understand one another's musical vocabulary and I don't have to explain things to him.”

Izu said Brown introduces interesting rhythms from many cultures into the group's compositions. What distinguishes Brown from other drummers is his knack for working with odd meters and making them sound “groovy,” Izu said.

Brown in turn credited Izu for helping him explore Asian concepts in jazz when they first played together in a musical group called United Front 15 years ago. The band toured Europe numerous times, where they gained a loyal following while remaining low-key in the United States. But Brown believes that their genre of music is now growing more popular in the U.S., particularly here in the Bay Area with its “pronounced Asian culture.”

Currently in the works is another compact disc, “Suite: Oakland,” which Brown is preparing for the Festival 2000. The disc is a “musical portrait of Oakland.” Two of the first Native Americans in the Bay Area lived in Oakland — a community that once spoke more than 80 different languages, according to Brown. The portrayal includes Asian, Latino and African music.

“Even in its unfamiliarity,” Brown said. “Some things are so beautiful I think they transcend all cultural boundaries. For a composer, it could be any sound in the air, any thought, feeling or new experience. To create something new every time – that`s what rules jazz.”