Yesterday, Liz and I performed at the Asian American Music Festival as part of the Pan Asian Arkestra, which was put together for this show by Gary Fukushima. The festival is a 3 day event featuring Asian American music of various genres. The event took place at JANM's Democracy Forum.
The festival has 5 "movements" and we were a part of the second movement. It started off with Gary's GF3 Trio, featuring Gary on piano, JP Maramba on bass, and Miles Senzaki on drums. Liz and I sat in the audience and watched their performance. So awesome!!
Then, we were up. The Pan Asian Arkestra performed Jon Jang's Reparations Now! Concerto for Jazz Ensemble and Taiko (which was composed in 1988 to bring attention to the Japanese American reparations movement), and Hitomi Oba's new piece, The Generation Tree. We shared the stage with the Trio, Hitomi, Ian Vo, Michael Birnbryer, Josh Aguiar, and Nick DePinna.
What an awesome experience! It was an honor to perform with a group of such amazing musicians!
As I stated here, it was the first time that I collaborated with a Jazz ensemble, so I was a little bit nervous at first. Not only that, Liz and I had to read music with Western notation (we mainly learn taiko music through kuchi-shoga). It's a good thing both of us played piano and flute! It's been like over 10 years for me....and it was like riding a bike....ha! We practiced and practiced (thanks Gary and Hitomi for meeting up with us to go over the music!) and we became familiar with the music.
I had a lot of fun at this performance and was kind of sad when it was all over!! We made new friends and I'm totally inspired! As we loaded our drums and left the venue, Liz and I talked about how awesome it would be if we could do something like this again some time.
Thanks Gary for bringing us on board! And thanks Paul (Festival Director) for putting together a great event!
Fun fact: one of the people working on sound at the theater was Joel Mankey, a former TP member! :)
Another fun fact: Liz and I shook hands with Jake Shimabukuro!
A few photos!
Gary's GF3 Trio performing.
Jon Jang on piano
Me and Liz with Gary
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1 comment:
Nice work, Yuri and Liz! I wish I could have seen the performance... it sounds like a the music was really interesting. From what I could hear through the closed door when you guys were practicing, the rhythms were complicated and fast. :) Here's hoping we indeed get more opportunities for this kind of collaboration!
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