Track 2 Jon Jang, "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind" (1984)

Context

The pianist, the conservatory, and the mentor

Jon Jang was born in Los Angeles in 1954 and grew up in Palo Alto. The musician who became one of the central figures of the Asian American Jazz movement did not start playing the piano until age 19. The catalyzing event, by his own account, was a 1973 Rahsaan Roland Kirk concert at the Keystone Korner jazz club in San Francisco, next to Chinatown. He has called it a "bright moment" that "revivified my life" and made him decide that "I want to make music become a crucial part of my life." After eighteen months of study he auditioned at music schools across the country and was admitted to all of them; he chose the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio, where he studied piano and composition with Wendell Logan, the chair of the conservatory's Afro-American Music Department, from 1974 until he graduated in 1978. Jang has described Logan as "a mentor and a father figure," "a visionary leader, a deep thinker, and a courageous warrior with a huge heart." He was, by his own account, one of the few Asian Americans in the Conservatory at the time and one of the first Asian American students to focus on African American music.

Jang's first album Jang (1982, RPM Records) was a piano-trio record that staked out his Black-music inheritance and his political stance simultaneously. The cover featured an illustration of his hands at the keyboard shackled by handcuffs labeled "U.S. Music Institutions"; the back cover photographed him standing in front of a handwritten protest sign reading "Monk Yes, Mozart No." His second album, in 1984, was the recording you are about to hear.

The murder of Vincent Chin and a movement's response

On the night of June 19, 1982, the 27-year-old Chinese American draftsman Vincent Chin was beaten to death with a baseball bat in a McDonald's parking lot in Highland Park, Detroit, by Chrysler plant supervisor Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz, who blamed Asian people for the decline of the American auto industry. Chin had been at his bachelor party with friends; he died four days later. In March 1983 the trial judge handed Ebens and Nitz three years of probation and a $3,780 fine. They served no jail time. The judge defended the sentence by explaining that "these weren't the kind of men you send to jail." The lenient sentencing sparked the largest pan-Asian American mobilization the country had seen, organized through the new American Citizens for Justice (founded April 1983 in Detroit, with the journalist Helen Zia and the lawyer Liza Chan among its leaders) and joined by Asian American student groups, community organizations, and activists across the country.

Jang was in his late twenties in San Francisco when the case broke. He has said in interviews that "I was the same age as Vincent Chin. This was something that was real to me." Throughout 1983 he and the saxophonist Francis Wong performed at Vincent Chin justice events in the Bay Area and Stanford. The composition that became "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind" took shape over the same period, as a fifteen-minute piece that worked as both an artistic response and a political vehicle: long enough to organize as a full-ensemble suite, structured as a 12-bar blues so the political content could ride on a familiar African American form, and explicit enough in its lyrics that a college audience would understand exactly what the piece was naming.

The recording: RPM Records, 1984

The album was released in March 1984 on RPM Records (RPM5), the independent Bay Area label co-founded by the United Front collective: bassist Mark Izu, BAG-affiliated trumpeter George Sams, AACM-affiliated saxophonist Lewis Jordan, and Japanese-African-American percussionist Anthony Brown. The personnel for the title track is the largest on the album: Jang on piano and composition; Izu on double bass; Wong on tenor saxophone; Fred Ho on baritone saxophone and arrangements; Randy Senzaki on alto saxophone; Kash Killion on cello; George Sams on trumpet; Anthony Brown on percussion; Woody Ichiyasu on lead vocals; Bob Matsueda on rap; and the seven-voice "East Wind Blowers" choir of Tiffany Choy, Julie Hatta, Kayo Hatta, Deeana Jang, Louann Nosaka, Michael Pon, and Jennie Traywick.

The album is dedicated, on its back cover, "to those Asian brothers and sisters who are struggling to create a better world." Jang's liner notes argue that "what is significant about this recording is that it is music about Asian Americans, by Asian Americans, for Asian Americans and created from the Asian American community." The musicologist Loren Kajikawa, in the central scholarly study of this music, points out that this self-description is more aspirational than literally accurate: the recording also features the African American musicians Killion (cello) and Sams (trumpet), and the cooperative working relationship between Black avant-garde players and the Asian American Jazz musicians is part of what made the recording possible. The dedication and the about/by/for/from framing belong to a tradition of political-music self-naming that the Movement musicians of Track 1 had also worked inside, eleven years earlier; the cross-racial collaboration that the dedication does not name is the analytical question Kajikawa wants the listener to hold alongside Jang's claim.

The album's release was timed to the Asian Pacific Student Union conference at Stanford, where the recording ensemble performed and the album was sold and signed at the door. Jang has remembered the conference as the moment the recording arrived in the audience it had been written for: "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? was released in March on the very day of a large APSU conference. The ensemble that performed on the recording performed at APSU. We sold about 60 records at the conference. Students were asking me to autograph the record. There was a tremendous response."

Chinese musical materials, on this album and after

The album's title is in Chinese American English ("are you Chinese or Charlie Chan?" is a question one Chinese American might ask another about their own self-presentation), and the album's politics are explicitly about Chinese American identity in the wake of the Vincent Chin murder. So a listener might reasonably expect the music to draw on Chinese musical traditions in a substantial way. The actual relationship is more layered. The title track itself is heavily a 12-bar blues with full jazz-ensemble instrumentation; the Chinese musical content in the title track is concentrated in the lyrics, the title's critique of the Charlie Chan films (a long-running 1930s and 1940s Hollywood detective series in which Chinese American masculinity was played by white actors in yellowface, with stereotyped fortune-cookie pidgin English), and the cultural address to a Chinese American audience, rather than in the instrumentation or melodic material.

Where the Chinese instrumental material lives on the album is on side B. Mark Izu plays the sheng, a 2,000-year-old Chinese mouth organ made of vertical bamboo pipes, on the album's fourth and fifth tracks ("You Don't Know What Love Is" and "Sheng Illusion"); "Sheng Illusion" further features taiko drumming by Roy Hirabayashi and Gary Tsujimoto of San Jose Taiko, arranged by Jose Alarcon. Taiko is a Japanese drumming tradition rather than a Chinese one, so the album's "Asian instruments" content is multiethnic, and the album as a whole is making the broader Asian American claim rather than a specifically Chinese one. The title track on its own does not bring those instruments into the room.

Jang's deeper engagement with Chinese traditional musical materials came in the years after this album. Through the 1990s and 2000s, working with the Pan Asian Arkestra he founded with Francis Wong, Jang composed long-form works (Tiananmen!, 1993; Island: the Immigrant Suite No. 2, 1996, on the history of San Francisco's Angel Island Immigration Station; the Chinese American Symphony, premiered in 2007 by the Sacramento Philharmonic, on Chinese immigrant railroad workers) that drew much more extensively on Chinese traditional musical materials, on Chinese instruments alongside the jazz ensemble, and on Chinese American historical subject matter. The 1984 album you are listening to is, in this longer arc, the recording where Jang first worked out the compositional model (a politically explicit long-form jazz piece for an Asian American audience, framed around an organizing event) that the later catalog would extend into a sustained engagement with Chinese musical traditions. The Chinese musical materials are present in this album as an opening gesture; they become the central material of Jang's mature work.

What the recording made possible

The album was the first full-ensemble recorded statement of an emerging movement that, by the mid-1980s, had a label, a festival, an explicit political program, and a generation of musicians prepared to carry it forward. (Jang's solo-debut piano-trio record Jang had appeared on RPM two years earlier, in 1982; the 1984 album was the first time the wider United Front collective recorded together as an ensemble.) Mark Izu had co-organized the first San Francisco Asian American Jazz Festival in September 1981 and would direct it through 2000. Jang and Wong founded Asian Improv Records and Asian Improv aRts in 1987 as the institutional home the movement needed after RPM ceased operating, and the imprint has continued to issue Asian American Jazz movement recordings continuously since. Jang's next major work, Reparations Now! Concerto for Jazz Ensemble and Taiko (1987), composed for the Japanese American redress movement in the run-up to the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, took the same compositional model (a long-form work combining a jazz ensemble with Asian instruments and movement-political content) and applied it to the second of the decade's two big Asian American organizing fronts. The album you are listening to was the document in which that model was first worked out.

Things to listen for

The piece is fifteen minutes and twenty-six seconds long. Composed by Jang and arranged by him with Fred Ho on the horn parts, "Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind" is structured as a long-form suite organized around two contrasting modes: a satirical 12-bar blues home base with sung verses, choruses, and a spoken rap interlude; and a dissonant, freely improvised bridge punctuated by four percussion strikes that, Jang told Loren Kajikawa, were composed to represent the four times Vincent Chin was struck with the baseball bat. Personnel are spelled out in the recording paragraph above; bear in mind throughout that this is the largest ensemble in the listening guides so far (eight instrumentalists, two solo voices, and a seven-voice choir), and the piece uses the full ensemble strategically; not everyone plays at once, and the piece's argument is partly built from who is and is not present at any given moment.

First, the timbre of the ensemble. The title track is scored for an African-American jazz palette: a tenor saxophone, a baritone saxophone, a trumpet, a piano playing boogie-woogie figures (a jazz piano tradition from the early 20th century), a cello (here played by the African American jazz musician Cash Killion), a double bass, a hand-percussion battery, and three vocal layers (Woody Ichiyasu's lead vocal, Bob Matsueda's spoken rap, and the seven-voice East Wind Blowers choir). Listen to how the saxophone section operates: Fred Ho's baritone and Francis Wong's tenor build saxophone-section harmonies that are recognizable big-band gestures, with George Sams's trumpet adding a third horn voice. Listen also to the East Wind Blowers choir behind the choruses; they are doing something closer to a Black gospel call-and-response than to anything in a Chinese choral tradition. What makes the piece an Asian American Jazz piece is not the Chinese instruments (those mostly live elsewhere on the album, as the section above names) but the ensemble's racial composition, the audience the music is addressed to, and the political content the music is carrying.

Second, the texture, and the way it changes across the piece's fifteen minutes. The blues sections are dense: full ensemble, sung verses, choral responses on the chorus. Inside the blues sections, the rap interlude pulls back the texture to foreground Bob Matsueda's spoken voice (the choir drops out, the horns step back, and the listener's attention is pushed onto the words). The dissonant freely improvised passage is something else again: collective improvisation across the whole ensemble, with the boundaries between individual lines blurring into a single mass of sound. The four percussion strikes named in the opening paragraph above sit inside this dissonant section. They are, in Jang's account to Kajikawa, the piece's most direct compositional gesture toward the event that prompted it: the dissonant free improvisation evokes the violence of the murder, and the four strikes count the four times Chin was struck with the baseball bat. Listen for them. The contrast between the dense, conventionally-paced blues home base and the unmoored, dissonant bridge is one of the piece's central effects.

Third, the form and the use of the 12-bar blues. The piece's home base is a 12-bar blues. This is the same form we met in "St. Louis Blues" and that Tharpe built her music against; it is the form that the Module 2 framing reading identified as the foundation African American song form. Jang has chosen it deliberately. The piece is satirical, and the choice of a "bouncing boogie-woogie piano accompaniment" (Kajikawa's phrase) under the lyrics about Charlie Chan and Vincent Chin sets the seriousness of the political content against a musical form built for entertainment. The chorus lyric is "Are you Chinese or Charlie Chan? Charlie was a white man. / With his two buckteeth and his eyes pulled back, / Vincent Chin lies dead from his racist attack. / Are you Chinese or Charlie Chan? Charlie was a white man." The combination of the bouncing groove and the lyric naming Vincent Chin's death is one of the piece's central effects; the form is deliberately too cheerful for what the lyric is saying, and that mismatch is the point. The piece slips, in Kajikawa's phrase, between "a conventional blues performance and a dissonant, freely improvised bridge"; the title's slash ("Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan? / East Wind") signals that the piece moves through more than one named section over its fifteen minutes. Listen for the moments where the blues form returns after a contrasting section, and ask what the return does. The piece's macro-argument is partly that the African American song form is the home base, the ground the piece keeps coming back to even after detouring elsewhere.

Fourth, the gesture of using Black vernacular speech in the rap section. The spoken interlude, listed in the album's liner notes as the "no-fortune-cookie-jive-rap," is performed by the Japanese American actors and activists Woody Ichiyasu and Bob Matsueda, who use Black vernacular speech to deliver an exchange that opens with "Yo Brian! What's happenin' man?" and continues "Sheeeeyit. How many Asian brothers you know actually talk like that?" The exchange is doing several things at once. It is critiquing the fortune-cookie pidgin English of the Charlie Chan films (which is part of how Hollywood made Chinese American masculinity grotesque). It is staging a moment of cross-racial linguistic solidarity (the speakers are Japanese American, the speech they are using is Black, and the political issue they are organizing around is Chinese American). And it is naming, with the second speaker's response, the limits of that solidarity (Asian American men do not actually talk like the Black vernacular speech the speakers are performing, and the rap is partly aware of that gap). The gesture is doing what the framing reading argued was the central operation of Asian American Jazz movement music: the piece is built on Black musical and rhetorical traditions, openly and explicitly, and at the same time it is asking what those traditions enable and what they do not, when they are taken up by a different community organizing around a different murder. Pay attention to how the rap arrives in the form (it interrupts the regular verse-chorus pattern of the blues section) and to how it lands rhetorically; the rap is the moment the piece confronts most directly the question of whose vernacular it is using, and on whose terms.