Serving Up the Blues With Sweet and Sour Pork at the Tea House

When Aaron Song took over his family’s Chinese restaurant, he decided to change the menu that for decades had been dominated by the usual dishes of sweet and sour pork, Sichuan beef, kung pao chicken and the like.

It was time, he decided, to give the Tea House Restaurant in Torrance a little taste of the blues.

“I just wanted the place to have a funkier edge,” said Song, who in 1998 assumed the reins of the restaurant his parents founded 45 years ago.

In putting his own stamp on the place, Song took advantage of one of the age-old secrets of big-city life: Some of the most fun comes when cultures mix.

Song wanted the restaurant to rock with the sounds of his youth. So he reached back to the sounds he heard as a 10th-grader at Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw District, where the Song family lived until the mid-1970s.

“I grew up listening to James Brown, Otis Redding and Sam Cook, Motown with the Temptations, the Dramatics,” said the 38-year-old restaurateur, rattling off some of the names of his idols. “I listened to the music of the streets growing up.”

He felt the music would elevate the 120-seat Tea House, with its black vinyl booths, waterfall fountains and reproductions of ancient emperor statues to something more than just another Chinese restaurant. Good sounds would combine with good smells in luring new customers to his business in the Rolling Hills Plaza, along the flight path of the Torrance Municipal Airport.

So often, it is the mixture of cultures in a diverse region that gives Los Angeles its most distinctive flavor. And that is something Song wishes more people would embrace and experiment with.

“I’m asked all the time, ‘Why are you doing blues in a Chinese restaurant,’ ” he said, scratching his head. “The answer is simple. This is Los Angeles. We take things we like and then junk the stuff we don’t like.”

The sounds of the predominantly Asian and African American neighborhood where he grew up were the sounds of his family. His sister, Cheryl Song, gained international fame as the longhaired Asian American girl who danced every week on TV’s “Soul Train” for years.

And Aaron Song, a Columbia University graduate who majored in economics, had worked for a large electronics firm but he never really felt comfortable with corporate life. So he picked up the harmonica and guitar and began singing in his own Chinese Blues All-Star Band.

So Song began to scour the city to book live music nightly except for Mondays. (Monday night football replaces the music this time of year.) He even hired one man he overheard humming in a movie theater.

“I said, ‘You sound good. Can you sing?’ ” Song recalled asking. “He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been singing for 25 years.’ ” Now James Woods runs the restaurant’s soul review on Thursday nights.

On Sunday nights the Chinese Blues All-Star Band hits the stage. Song is the only Asian American left in the seven-member group. “We had more but they all left,” he said. “The guys I had were all blues purists and I’m not like that. I only wanted to have fun.”

Fun can mean everything from R&B; to current hits, said Song, who prefers playing songs by earlier blues artists because he likes the songs that speak of stormy relationships. That’s the blues.

But not all music at the Tea House is low-down.

Nearly a year ago, three musicians, longtime friends who called themselves Gravity, walked in looking for a hide-out to practice their material.

They picked the Tea House because they wanted a place where they could rehearse in front of audiences without feeling Hollywood pressures. For nearly a year at the Tea House, Gravity graced the stage on Wednesday nights, bringing a mixture of positive jazzy, pop, R&B; and Caribbean rhythms.

“We deliberately wanted it to be an off-Broadway location so we could do our thing,” said guitarist Harold Payne, a noted vocalist and songwriter whose songs have been recorded by numerous artists, ranging from Patti LaBelle to Rod Stewart.

In addition to Payne, there were Clydene Jackson Edwards on keyboard and vocals, and Oliver C. Brown on percussion. Edwards’ smooth, clear voice can be heard in the movie “The Lion King” and “Armageddon.” And Brown toured with artists ranging from Al Jarreau to Fleetwood Mac.

“Gravity,” explained Brown, “is something we could live up to--the most powerful force in the universe, a little of everything, just as we’re a little of everything.” One of the group’s goals is to promote positive music and positive relations between people of different backgrounds. Brown and Edwards are black and Payne is white.

“We are like one big family,” said Edwards of the group and the relationship it tries to build with its audience.

Heidi Singh and her teenage son travel to the restaurant from Marina del Rey once a week--only if her son’s homework is complete.

“The music is inspirational,” said Singh, quietly tapping her chopsticks on a plate of Sichuan vegetables on a recent Wednesday.

Sue Bohn, a Torrance resident and another regular, agreed.

“You feel at home here,” she said. “You feel at home. It’s like a little-known secret.”

Payne challenged the audience to pick a song title and said he would write a tune off the top of his head. “How do we kill our husbands?” a woman shouted out.

Payne scratched his head, laughed and took up the challenge with a reggae beat.

How can we kill our husband?

How can we do them in?

Do we shoot them with a gun or put poison in their gin?

How can we kill our husband, how can we put them away?

How can we kill our husband?

I’m only collaborating, what can I say?

By the end, Payne suggested that the deed be done with love and kindness and the crowd erupted in cheers.

Off to the side, Song was taking it all in.

“It’s the reason we make music,” he said. “To bring people together, to bring cultures together.”