Anthony Brown talks to the audience at the Rosa Parks Elementary School auditorium.

by J.K. YAMAMOTO
Hokubei Mainichi

Musician and composer Anthony Brown, who will celebrate the 10th anniversary of his Asian American Orchestra on Thursday, Sept. 11, at 8 and 10 p.m. at Yoshi’s San Francisco, has a new way of looking at 9/11.

“The date of 9/11 has very tragic associations, just like Dec. 7 does,” he said. “For me, they’re both very tragic in that they’re events that precipitated our government to use race as a reason for incarceration. What I look at the date of Sept. 11, I think of it as a day of reflection and also of celebration ... almost in the same way as a New Orleans funeral. They’re burying somebody but they celebrate their life.

“So you have this tragedy but you celebrate the thought, the belief, the optimism that there can be a better world, that these kinds of events as heinous as they are, do not cause governments to react in a way that is unjust and unconstitutional, particularly here in this country.”

Speaking at Rosa Parks Elementary School, where he and members of his orchestra gave a mini-concert along with storyteller Brenda Wong Aoki on Sept. 9, Brown also said the Yoshi’s event is designed to serve as a bridge between Japantown and the Fillmore.

“There’s a geographical and psychological barrier called the Geary Street divide,” said Brown, the son of a Japanese mother and an African American father. “Even though the geographic is obvious, sometimes the cultural divide isn’t. Maybe I’m a little bit more sensitive to it because I see some conflicts between the two communities. I work as a musician and I’ve seen the power of music to bring people together.

“I think jazz is one of those types of music that seems to captivate audiences around the world ... Jazz particularly has a history in this area of having brought the communities together. So I'm just hoping that jazz can once again serve as this cultural bond between the communities that will help people overlook their differences and really celebrate and rejoice in their commonalities ...

“I think that’s what we’ve been doing in the Asian American jazz movement for over 30 years, and this is kind of a culmination after 10 years of being with the Asian American Orchestra. We hope to keep that spirit alive.”

The orchestra, which combines Asian and Western instruments, was established with a grant from the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which was part of the same legislation that provided redress and an apology to Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. The AAO's first album, "Big Bands Behind Barbed Wire" (1998), was a tribute to the Nisei musicians who formed bands to make life more tolerable in the internment camps.

The 1999 album "Far East Suite," a tribute to Duke Ellington that combined jazz with instruments from Iran, China and Japan, was nominated for a Grammy in 2000.

Under its current label, Water Baby Records, the orchestra has released "Monk's Moods" (2002), "Rhapsodies" (2005) and "Ten" (2008). The latest album includes reinterpretations of the classics as well as material from Brown's score for Philip Kan Gotanda's "After the War," a play about relations between Japanese Americans and African Americans in Japantown and the Fillmore in the late 1940s.

Because of AAO's connection to the internment, Brown said, "the spirit of social justice, I think, pervades and infuses and informs everything this orchestra does."

A reception will precede the show at 6 p.m. in the Fillmore Heritage Center's Lush Life Gallery. Yoshi's is located at 1330 Fillmore St. at Eddy. For more information on the concert, visit www.yoshis.com or call (415) 655-5600.