Pain of WWII Internment Permeates Music

In pianist and composer Glenn Horiuchi’s music, you can sense the pain of a man still troubled by his family’s difficult past as Japanese-Americans interned during World War II.

Bass strings cry and moan, slashed with a bow. Drums erupt with sudden rolls, cymbals sizzle and crash, and Horiuchi attacks the piano with demonic fury. His left hand delivers chordal blows, his right jabs out fragmented explorations of melodic themes.

Tonight, Horiuchi, who moved from San Diego to Los Angeles last year to pursue film scoring, returns for a performance of his latest work, “The Poston Suite,” in the San Diego City College Theater at 8. The concert is the second in the “Jazz Masters Series” presented by the San Diego Jazz Society.

Horiuchi’s brooding music mixes jazz, classical and Asian folk influences. Many of his original pieces are inspired by the fate suffered by Japanese-Americans during World War II, when thousands were interned in camps throughout the United States.

“The Poston Suite” is dedicated to Japanese-Americans from San Diego interned in Poston, Ariz. Horiuchi will perform with a group including traditional jazz instruments and a string trio featuring the shamisen, a Japanese string instrument.

The 50-minute piece will include plenty of improvisational space for Horiuchi and longtime collaborators Leon Alexander on marimba and Francis Wong on saxophone. Lillian Nakano, Horiuchi’s aunt, will take the spotlight on shamisen.

Although some people choose to forget about the injustices of World War II, Horiuchi feels it is important to keep those memories alive. He spent several years during the early 1980s participating in efforts to win U.S. government reparations for interned Japanese-Americans, and he doesn’t intend to let the memory of wartime hardships die.

Horiuchi, 35, has heard first-hand accounts of those hardships from the many members of his family.

“One of my aunts lost her life. In fact, we lost two people in our family due to those wartime things,” Horiuchi said. The government approved reparations in 1988, but actual payments to war victims have been slow in coming.

“The only one who’s received anything in my family is my grandfather,” Horiuchi said. “He’s 92 now, he lost everything in his life. I feel happy for him. I still feel it was a gross injustice, and you’ve got to stand up for what’s right. Also, it’s something that can happen again.

“Part of the reparations struggle was to make it clear that not only was the government wrong, but to prevent them from doing it again. The only way they’d think twice was if they had to pay through the pocket.”

Horiuchi’s feelings find expression in his aggressive piano work--a visceral attack that calls to mind Cecil Taylor and McCoy Tyner. Although he played straight-ahead jazz dates to earn a few extra dollars while working toward bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UC Riverside and UC San Diego in the 1970s, Horiuchi’s own music is challenging, experimental, often unsettling.

As a result, he has relied primarily on grants to subsidize his composing, and there has been little interest in his music from large recording companies.

His first three albums, including the 1989 “Manzanar Voices,” his latest, were recorded for the tiny AsianImprov label in the San Francisco Bay Area, a low-budget operation run by musicians. A fourth, titled “Oxnard Beat,” will be released later this year on the Italian label, Soul Note.

Last month, Horiuchi learned that he has been awarded $5,500 by the National Endowment for the Arts. He will use the money to compose “The Little Tokyo Suite,” which he hopes to premiere in Los Angeles in October.

Like “The Poston Sonata,” the new piece will use the shamisen as a link between traditional Japanese and contemporary music.

“The thing for me as a Japanese-American--it’s not like I grew up in Japan. I haven’t even been there,” Horiuchi said. “But growing up, you hear different things. When I was a kid, my grandfather used to sing traditional Japanese songs, but at the same time, one of my aunts used to play Stravinsky and Beethoven, and on the radio I was hearing Motown and rock ‘n’ roll. Those are the kinds of influences I’ve gone through.

“I want to try to articulate that experience, at least for myself, in some coherent whole.”

Horiuchi was born in Chicago, but grew up in Los Angeles.

“My grandfather was a musician. He played shakuhachi (a Japanese flute) on Hawaiian radio in 1930s. He was later interned in Jerome, Ark., from 1942 to 1945.”

Horiuchi started piano lessons when he was 6, and started playing jazz on his own in high school. He took classical piano lesson during college, but is self-taught when it comes to jazz. He was especially influenced by the great jazz players of the late 1950s and 1960s: Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders.

“In the beginning, McCoy Tyner and that classic Coltrane quartet were really important to me, not so much stylistically, but artistically. Coltrane tried to make music that would really better the world. To quote from Coltrane, ‘There are two kinds of forces in the world, evil and good. I want to be a force for good.’

“Cecil Taylor’s concept that interested me was the whole notion of using the piano keys as 88 drums. I was interested in developing my own concept, and the taiko drums were most interesting to me from Japanese music, so that notion of 88 drums hit home.”

Horiuchi moved to San Diego in 1977 to attend graduate school but returned to Los Angeles last year to pursue film work. Last summer, he wrote the music for an as-yet-unreleased documentary on poet Janice Mirikitani by L.A. filmmaker Russel Leong, and he hopes to write music for larger budget features.

“First of all, film work pays money, which is something you can’t say for a lot of creative endeavors,” Horiuchi said. “I don’t want to be an impoverished musician for the rest of my life. Also, I’ve always wanted to to have an impact with music, and films reach a lot of people. Of course, a lot of movies aren’t worth the price of admission, but I hope to get an occasional chance to do something really meaningful.”