April 1, 2010

$10 Admission

5-9 PM, Asian Art Museum

Click here for more information

Mark Izu performs with singer Coco Zhao, dubbed the “boy Billie Holiday” in conjunction with special exhibition Shanghai. Jazz thrived in Shanghai’s colorful cabarets and dance halls during the ‘20s and ’30s. Suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, it’s enjoyed a renaissance thanks to a new generation of young jazz musicians. Zhao cross-pollinates Mandarin vocals with the distinct sounds of contemporary American jazz; a unique heritage (both parents were in traditional Chinese opera) is infused his with youthful interpretations. Zhao’s distinctive style transcends cultures, as evidenced by his sensational reception at the 2007 Montreal Jazz Festival and his performance at the Kennedy Center.

About Matcha Night: MATCHA isn’t just a mixer—it’s what makes your visit to the Asian Art Museum downright exhilarating. Experience mesmerizing performances, create your own art, embark on gallery tours, see the latest special exhibition, sit in on a talk, mingle with friends over cocktails, enjoy what the DJ is spinning, and much, much more.

A Boy, A Girl, and A Promise…

World Theater at California State University Monterey Bay

Thursday, April 15 from 7:30-9:30PM

World Theater at California State University Monterey Bay – 5260 Sixth Ave., Bldg. #28, Seaside, CA, 93955.

The Legend of Morning Glory is a story from the kabuki about a rich girl and a poor boy who promise to love each other forever. A kabuki taiko oratorio featuring master storyteller Brenda Aoki Wong; Asian jazz pioneer Mark Izu; dynamic women drummers Maze Daiko; shakuhachi/ Saxman Mas Koga; and dancers Kai Kane Aoki Izu and Emma Lanier. Written by Brenda Aoki Wong; directed by Obie-award winning Jael Weisman; choreography by Tony-nominated Kimi Okada; original music by Mark Izu; Janet Koike.

Public Information: Tickets prices are $40 Gold Circle, $30 General Public, $25 Senior Citizens (55 and older) and Fort Ord Alumni Association Military with ID, $20 CSUMB Faculty, Staff, Alumni, $15 Student with ID, Young Adult (Ages 13-17), and $10 CSUMB Student, Children (12 and under) and can be purchased by calling the Box Office at 831-582-4580 or visit https://secure2.ticketguys.com/worldtheater/

Please stay for the entire show so that you do not distract from the performance by entering and exiting. For more information, visit www.brendawongaoki.com or call 415-750-7694.

Media Contact: Hamilton Ink PR – (415) 381-3484 – clara@hamiltoninkpr.com

Morning Glory from BrendaAokiMarkIzu on Vimeo.

Mark Izu received a Northern California Regional EMMY® Award for outstanding Musical Composition/Arrangement for his score for Bolinao 52, a film about the Vietnamese Boat People. The film also received an EMMY® Award for Outstanding Documentary.

Mark is available for commission.

More about Mark Izu compositions

“The Dragon Painter” is the prototype for a silent film project by Mark Izu, featuring live performance with an original score to films.

Based on the success of “The Dragon Painter,” Mark Izu is currently involved in a multi-year international collaboration to create contemporary scores, perform and tour with a trilogy of Asian silent films that are currently lost treasures with the intent to premiere, tour, record and finally distribute the new scores with the films via DVD in Asia and North America.

Goals of the Silent Film Trilogy Project are to:

• To Commission new music for a trilogy of lost treasure Japanese Silent Films
• To Record and premiere new music with films
• Release newly scored films via DVD in North America, Japan and Asia
• Release film scores via CD in North America and Japan
• Tour the films to venues in North America, Japan, Hong Kong & Singapore

Principal partners:

• Center for Asian American Media
• First Voice

Secondary partners:

• Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley
• Digital Meme, Tokyo (Asia Distribution)
• Milestones, New York (National Distribution)

Brenda Wong Aoki, the foremost narrative voice working in America today.”
Robert Shay, CEO New Line Cinema

… Stories, ancient and new… dominated by women battling the odds with a strength bordering on obsession.”
The Washington Post

The haunting eloquence of Brenda Wong Aoki’s ghost stories masterfully performed in concert with Asian Jazz pioneer Mark Izu and the thunder drums of Japanese Taiko.

Mermaid Meat, the title story in this show, was written by Brenda Wong Aoki based on the Japanese proverb, “Eating the flesh of a mermaid is the secret to eternal youth”. Originally commissioned by Kent Nagano, the conductor of the Bavarian State Opera Orchestra in Germany, the piece was first performed with a symphonic score by Mark Izu. It is a tragic tale of a young girl who feasts on the flesh of a mermaid in order to live forever, the story speaks to our collective fascination with youth and beauty.

Mermaid Meat: the Secret to Immortality and other Japanese Ghost Stories features four powerful tales that explore the dilemmas of life that people around the world have grappled with since the beginning of time.

1. Mermaid Meat - A girl eats the flesh of a mermaid and is faced with living forever
2. The Bell of Dojoji - The Kabuki tale of a simple maiden transformed by her lust for a monk
3. Dancing in California - Last dance of a ballerina in a World War II American Japanese prison camp
4. Black Hair - A dead wife’s revenge

View video of Mermaid Meat

A duet for storyteller and acoustic bass, Brenda Wong Aoki is accompanied by award winning composer and musician Mark Izu with a haunting original score, multimedia images of Victorian Japanese photos and original yellow peril journalism

A secret family shame is unraveled to reveal an incredible tale of forbidden love. In 1909, Brenda Wong Aoki’s great uncle Gunjiro, son of a legendary samurai, fell in love with Helen Gladys Emery, the daughter of the Archdeacon of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. Their announced engagement triggered a media blitz of yellow peril headlines, provoked public outrage, death threats and culminated in the loss of Ms. Emery’s citizenship. Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend tells the tale of their epic love and its impact on descendants three generations later.

View video clip from “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend”
View video clip about Gunjiro Aoki from “San Francisco in the ’20’s”

Brenda Wong Aoki completes the trilogy of plays that chronicle her family history and artistic journey with her latest project. “Aoki Mountain” represents the final chapter in the story of her mixed-race Japanese American family and Japanese ancestors. The trilogy goes backwards in time, beginning in Long Beach, California in the 1970’s, continuing back to San Francisco at the time of the Great Earthquake in 1906, and ending (at the beginning) at Aoki Lake in 7th Century Japan.

Aoki describes the journey that brings her to this project as follows:

As a young artist, I was always eager to express my multi-ethnic roots but frustrated by the constraints of European art forms. In the late 70’s I began a seven-year apprenticeship with Yuriko Doi of Theater of Yugen, and through her, I came to study with two Intangible Cultural Properties: Noh Master Nomura Shiro and Kyogen Master Nomura Mansaku. Decades later, my work continues to be enriched by my study of Noh, in which music, dance, and theatre are performed together as equal parts of a whole, and past, present, and future take place simultaneously. The narrator is a critical part of this tradition, and this is how I was led to storytelling and playwriting. In Noh, the narrator’s purpose is to summon the spirits, petition on behalf of the people, and impart strategies for living. This is what I have attempted to do with what I call my Warrior Trilogy.

The trilogy began with “The Queen’s Garden,” a story about a ‘chop suey’ girl (all mixed-up, Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Scots) that takes place amidst the polyglot of cultures that make up a small urban island: Westside Barrio Longo, Long Beach. Working on “Queen’s Garden,” I began to think about how the threads of different ancient cultures had found their way to a Southern California barrio.

After “The Queen’s Garden” I began work on “Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend,” the true story of my Uncle Gunjiro, son of a Samurai who fell in love with and married Helen Gladys Emery, daughter of the Archdeacon of Grace Cathedral, shortly after the Great Earthquake. This was the second in the series, but at the time I had no idea the work was actually a trilogy.

Throughout the development of Uncle Gunjiro’s Girlfriend, I heard family legends that I explored during visits to Japan. The legends said that my Grandfather and his brothers were truly the last Samurai. Way up in the mountains in Shinano-Ken, where the Yamabushi, (Mountain Priests) practiced magic and the Ninjas trained, the three Aoki brothers were trained illegally as Samurai. A generation earlier, the Samurai system had been abolished and Samurai could no longer carry swords or study martial arts. The Aoki Family were Kakurei Kristians (Hidden Christians), who survived the Christian massacres. They were part Inu, the indigenous people of Japan, and learned to read the future from the Ainu women shamans. The Aoki clan goes all the way back to Kiso Yoshinaka, the very first Shogun. If even some of the family legends are true, then what this trilogy will ultimately say is this: if a ghetto girl from the Western Addition is actually descended from one of the first Shoguns, then everybody is somebody.

During my 2007 residency in Japan, I had reconnected with my teacher, Mansaku Nomura who is now a Living Treasure, visit long-lost Aoki relatives, visited my ancestral home and lived at the foot of Mt. Fuji, the home of a goddess, all of which will have a profound impact on the shape of the new work.

It’s always exciting when San Francisco actor-storyteller-dancer Brenda Wong Aoki presents a new work, blending Kyogen and Noh traditions with Western forms and jazz by her no-less eclectic husband, Mark Izu. Adding to the buzz about the premiere of Aoki’s “Ghosts and Girls”…she first heard the story, from – of all people- folk icon Pete Seeger, with whom she was appearing on tour.”
Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle

Aoki encompasses the comic and the tragic with fine, quick, delicate gestures, using everything from her expressive hands and face to her long sweeping black hair…making relevant and magical even the most faraway tales.”
Los Angeles Times, Critic’s Choice

• A tale from the Kabuki written and performed by Brenda Wong Aoki
• Taiko Drummers of Maze Daiko on thunder drums
• Tokyo master shakuhachi artist Christopher Yohmei Blasdel
• Dancer/percussionist KK Aoki Izu
• Under the musical direction of Asian jazz pioneer Mark Izu

The haunting love tale, based on a story from the Kabuki, tells of a girl, the daughter of a powerful samurai, who meets and falls in love with a boy from a poor family. When the boy’s love poem about the morning glory blows into the girl’s boat, she is forever determined to marry him, turning down each of the rich suitors her father has lined up for her. Finally she runs away, determined to marry the boy. Unaccustomed to the world outside her father’s castle, she cries herself blind and makes a living as The Morning Glory, an itinerate storyteller famed for her tale of lost love. In the end, the two lovers meet one last time at a lonely inn on the banks of the Oi River.

View video of Morning Glory

In 1978, Mark Izu began studying “sho” with Sensei, a musician in Japan’s Imperial Court who is a consummate master of both Gagaku (Japanese Court music) and Western orchestral instruments. This ongoing study has helped Izu develop his own musical/conceptual style, one that integrates the “mah” (negative space) and elements of Japanese music, with Western music. His compositions represent an integration of jazz/new music and Asian traditional concepts (the textural, melodic phrase, and the treatment of silence as sound). Izu’s approach to his work is greatly informed by his 30-year study of Gagaku with Togi Suenobu.

To honor Togi Suenogu, Mark Izu has conceived “Songs for My Sensei”. He describes his inspirations and goals for this new project as follows:

Several years ago, Togi Sensei presented me with his own personal sho, an exquisite instrument that had been part of the Japanese Imperial Court for generations. Each time I raise this sho to my lips, I am reminded of all the musicians who have played it before me, think of those who will come after me, and that I am part of a cultural continuum that stretches back over a thousand years.

Sensei Togi Suenobu

My goals with this creative project are to create and perform a new ensemble work that: integrates the Western form of jazz music with the Eastern based art form of Gagaku; documents the legacy of an artist who has had a deep impact on my artistic path, my long-time teacher Togi Sensei; and inspires others in the San Francisco community to learn Gagaku. I will measure the success of this project through the quality of the work itself, audience reaction to performances of the work, if it encourages other of Togi’s former students to step forward and share their experiences, and the creation of an audio recording for archival purposes and distribution to the general public.

During my 2007 residency in Japan, I took traditional Gagaku classes from Togi Sensei and also spent time with him talking about his life and as well as the beauty and specialness to be found in everyday living. I have told many of my own students that in addition to Gagaku, I learned a great deal about life’s journey from Togi; inspiration for my new composition will be gleaned from these insights. Additionally, during this residency, I immersed myself in a whole range of Japanese traditional arts, especially performing arts and music, in order to see culture in the context it belongs in: as a living form. Being in Japan provided me with the chance to check out the contemporary music scene, and to find out who is doing art that integrates east/west concepts and how they are doing it. A lot of contemporary classical music is still deeply rooted in European music and East Coast academia, but I have always felt that the Pacific Rim (including California) has an important part to play in shaping what is truly new and modern in 21st Century music.

Gagaku is one of the oldest classical musical forms in the world, with a lineage dating back through several centuries of Japanese history. Jazz is a distinctly modern medium that is continually being shaped by new cultural and generational influences. By combining these two distinctive art forms within one work, audiences will gain an appreciation of the wide range of possibilities in musical expression, and, I hope, have their interest piqued to hear more of this kind of work.