Alliance for Improvised Music |
New Show |
Jason Kao Hwang's Far East Side Band
(Hwang - electric violin/electronics, Sang-Won Park - kayagum/ajang/voice, Joe Daley - tuba/electronics, Satoshi Takeishi - percussion)Fri. Jan. 15, 8 pm, Nelson Music Room, Duke East Campus, $12/$7 students. Advanced tix available at Page Box Office (684-4444), Schoolkids Records (Durham & Chapel Hill), and Roots Records (Carrboro). Co-sponsored by Duke Institute of the Arts and AIM.
FAR EAST OF THE BLUES
Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and many other jazz greats have borrowed from Asian music to add some exotic flavor to their music and to express certain spiritual and philosophical ideas. The last decade or so has seen a renewed interest in connecting jazz (especially avant-garde) with traditional Asian music. Asian and Asian-American musicians have been at the forefront of that movement, largely based around Asian Improv records (and its founders, Francis Wong and Jon Jang) in San Francisco.
But the East Coast has its share of such artists too, and violinist/composer Jason Kao Hwang leads the pack. His early musical history includes Commitment, a quartet including William Parker and Denis Charles (and later Zen Matsuura); a series of duets with Japanese percussionist Yukio Tsuji in the early 80's; working again with Tsuji as co-arrangers and original cast members of M Butterfly; and performances and recordings with Parker, Butch Morris, Billy Bang, Kalaparusha Ken MacIntyre, Sirone, and others. More recent credits include "sideman" appearances with Reggie Workman, Vladimir Tarasov, the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra, Mark Dresser, Anthony Braxton, and Diedre Murray as well as composing numerous soundtracks for documentary films.
After meeting and hearing Korean kayagum virtuoso Sang-Won Park, Hwang and Tsuji were inspired to form the original Far East Side Band in 1993. The trio released Caverns (New World Records) in 1994. In 1995, after performing with him at a festival, Hwang asked tuba player Joe Daley to join the band and that version of the band released Urban Archaeology on Victo. Tsuji recently returned to Japan and he has been replaced by Satoshi Takeishi. The Far East Side Band has performed at the Beijing International Jazz Fest, the Chicago Asian American Jazz Fest, the International Festival de Musique Actuelle (Victoriaville), the duMaurier International Jazz Fest (Vancouver), as well as numerous gigs throughout the East and West coasts as well as Europe.
Joe Daley is a veteran of the free jazz scene who's played and/or recorded with Charlie Haden, Sam Rivers, Ellery Eskelin, Gil Evans, George Gruntz, Carla Bely, Muhal Richard Abrams, the Smithsonian Masterworks Orchestra, and many others. His Ebony Brass Quintet recently released a cd on Mapleshade. Park has toured Asia, North America, and Europe extensively, released two albums (Le Kayagum de Park Sang-Won and Song of a Drifting Soul), and recorded with numerous musicians including Laurie Anderson, Henry Kaiser, and Bill Laswell. Born in Japan, Takeishi has also spent four years in Colombia researching their native folk music and, since returning to the US, has worked with Ray Barretto, Patato Valdes, Abou-Khalil, and Eliane Elias among others.
Asked to describe the Far East Band's music, Hwang said "Our music is within the deep jazz tradition of individualism and emotional truth. Our music is a recognition of spiritual survival and evolution." The Boston Phoenix wrote "Hwang has a sure sense of balance and proportion; he and his bandmates create their own integral urban landscape from their collective personal histories. Unlike other pan-stylistic experimenters, these musicians know their material. Daley is especially rewarding, revealing new levels of lyricism and delicacy." From CMJ: "The salient quality of the Far East Side Band lies not merely in the stretching of musical boundaries or the mixing of cultures, but in the exciting and adventurous music produced by masterful improvisers who make music unlike anything you've ever heard." Or from Jazziz: "[This band] evokes an intimately spacious tonal and textural landscape ... a quieter sound which breathes with space and subtle transformations."
And I'd like to close with a quote from Richard Oyama's liner notes to their first cd: "...it is the music, rather than the body politic, which has fulfilled the promise of the democratic 'American experiment' in its boundless capacity to absorb new cultural forms and sounds, and in that way to continually reinvent and revitalize the textures of American music." So c'mon down to Nelson Music Room on Jan. 15 to hear some democracy in action.
--Walt Davis
Photo credit: Micahel Dames