Moments of Freedom

It’s 1943 in the large wooden gathering hall of a Japanese internment camp in one of the Western states. Despite the bleakness of the surroundings, music fills the air, as a collection of young Japanese musicians plays “In the Mood” in front of a dance floor crowded with jitterbugs.

What’s going on here? Obviously, these are not prisoners of war. They are, in fact, Japanese Americans. In 1942, an executive order defined an area of the West Coast from which all people of Japanese ancestry were to be excluded. The Army executed the order by forcibly moving 110,000 evacuees, mostly American citizens, to 10 relocation centers. For the next two years, Japanese Americans, raised in an environment of swing music, lindy hopping and cheeseburgers, were forced to live in camps as government internees.

“The interesting thing,” says drummer / composer Anthony Brown, “was that, for most of the people there, swing music was the main entertainment diversion available in the camps.”

Friday night at El Camino College, Brown and the Asian American Jazz Orchestra will present “Big Bands Behind Barbed Wire,” a concert commemorating the music of the internment camps.

“You have to remember,” Brown says, “that the Japanese American kids were listening to big bands just like the American kids. A guy who played trombone in his high school band was going to want to be Tommy Dorsey, so he had the arrangements and the records. And with 10,000 people in a camp, there pretty much always was going to be enough musicians to form a band. Sometimes they may not have had a bass player, or they may have only had one trumpet, but they were playing swing music, and they were dancing to it.”

Brown, of mixed African American / Native American and Japanese parentage, lived in Japan for four years while growing up. So he is particularly familiar with both cultures. VWith pianist Jon Jang, of Chinese descent, and bassist Mark Izu, of Japanese descent, he will provide several compositions that employ a fusion of jazz and traditional Asian instruments and musical forms.

The works were supported by the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund. Brown submitted the project and received a grant to tour a multimedia, multidisciplinary project that included music about or inspired by the internment experience. But he saw an opportunity to do more than simply replicate the kinds of music played at the camps, opting instead to celebrate the events in the camps with new music.

Brown’s “E.O. 9066,” which refers to the executive order creating the internment camps, is a good example. A review of a performance of the work in Chicago two weeks ago described the “siren-like horn calls that open the work, the relentless train rhythms in the ‘Loco-motif’ movement, the imploring lines played on two shengs . . .

“There’s no denying,” wrote critic Howard Reich in the Chicago Tribune, “the emotional power of the subject or its treatment by Brown.”

Izu’s “Last Dance” is another intriguing example, blending snatches of “Tuxedo Junction” and “In a Sentimental Mood” with bits and pieces of jazz improvisation, the rich timbres of taiko drums and readings by former internee George Yoshida.

Since Jang, Brown and Izu have all tried, in the past few years, to maintain a continuing Asia / jazz musical interface, the current funding is particularly encouraging. It allows the continuation of the Asian American Jazz Orchestra, a remarkably multicultural ensemble that includes, in addition to Brown, Jang and Izu, Hafez Modirzadeh and Francis Wong, woodwinds; Liu Qi-Chao, sheng and other Chinese instruments; Wayne Wallace, trumpet; and John Worley, trumpet.

“There are some unusual commonalities between jazz and the other musics we’re exploring,” Brown explains. “The folk traditions in Asia have a very significant amount of improvisation. We’ve found, for example, that the musicians from both cultures get along better with each other than the dancers or the members of other cultural disciplines. They seem to be able to share in music making instantly.

“We found, in some of our encounters with musics from traditional cultures, that we could sit down, the drummer would start some kind of groove, the Indian tabla players would elaborate on it, there might be a drone coming in, and then people would just layer ideas. It was truly conversational, as people interacted with each other. That process of music making exists in both traditions, and that is the common thread that joins them.”

Much of that sense of musical unity, of cultures coming together, will be present in the “Big Bands Behind Barbed Wires” concert. Brown and his associates view the concert, and the work of the Asian American Jazz Orchestra, as a kind of expression of an idea whose time has come. They believe that the small seed that was planted when young Japanese American musicians played swing music has now blossomed into an important life of its own.

“The evolution of jazz in the 20th century,” Brown says, “can be traced through the sounds of its instrumental combinations--from . . . Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton, through . . . the Duke Ellington Orchestra to the intergalactic extravaganza of Sun Ra’s Arkestra.

“In the global community now perched upon the threshold of the 21st century, the Asian American Jazz Orchestra presents another exciting new sound.”

BE THERE

The Asian American Jazz Orchestra with members of San Jose Taiko in “Big Bands Behind Barbed Wire.” Marsee Auditorium at El Camino College, at the corner of Crenshaw and Redondo Beach boulevards. Tickets, $18 and $21. (310) 329-5345.