Jang honors S.F. Chinese activist Lum
“Chinese American history was invisible when I was growing up in the ’60s. Asian American history was taboo,” says Jon Jang, the noted San Francisco composer and pianist who eventually became immersed in that history and came to know of the subject of his latest epic, “Walter U. Lum: Chinese Times!”
Lum was a celebrated civil rights activist and journalist born in San Francisco in 1882, the year Congress passed the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, which wasn’t repealed until 1943, when the Chinese were allies and thousands of Chinese American men (including Jang’s uncles) began serving in the U.S. armed services.
Jang’s mother, Etta, became a Victory Garden Pinup girl during World War II to “boost the morale of Chinese American soldiers,” says Jang, whose grandfather was a member of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance that was founded by Lum and others and that beat back a 1913 effort to deprive the vote to California citizens of Chinese
ancestry.
Lum started the Chineselanguage newspaper Chinese Times here in 1924, died in ’61 and became the first Chinese American to have a street named after him — the alleyway adjacent to Portsmouth Square. Jang’s piece inspired by him was commissioned by the Chinese Culture Center for its eighth annual Chinatown Music Festival, where it premieres Aug. 12 in the historic alley Waverly Place.
Jang is writing the piece for his quintet and poet Genny
Lim, in the personal idiom he calls “a hybrid of Cantonese melodies, black music traditions, European classical music.” Some of his other music has a vibe he calls “James Brown in Chinatown,” but his work with Lim more often draws on music and literature of resistance, he notes, mentioning Charles Mingus and Langston Hughes.
This piece includes Lim poems like “Yellow Woman,” which she and Jang recorded 20 years ago. It seemed right for this setting, which leans musically toward the modal intensity of John Coltrane.
“It’s already a piece that speaks to Chinese exclusion,” Jang says.
For more information, go to www.cccsf.us.
Songs for meals and resources
They’ve lined up some superior talent, including singers Paula West, Lisa Vroman, Maureen McGovern and Levi Kreis, for the 23rd annual fundraiser for Meals on Wheels and Positive Resource Center, “Puttin’ on the Glitz,” at the Green Room and Herbst Theatre in the Veterans Building Aug. 20.
For more information, go to www.reaf-sf.org/help-is-on -the-way-xxiii.html.
Jazz in the valley
The August jazz series at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek sounds promising, too. It starts Aug. 5 with trumpeter Terrell Stafford’s quintet (he’s the artistic director of the Jazz Orchestra of Philadelphia).
Then comes French-Dominican singer Cyrille Aimée, Jamaican-born pianist Monty Alexander and, closing the series Aug. 26, a quintet led by two prime musicians from the SFJazz Collective, pianist Edward Simon and vibraphonist Warren Wolf. They’ll be joined for the occasion by alto saxophonist Tia Fuller, who in addition to touring with Beyoncé teaches jazz ensemble playing at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
For more information, go to www.lesherjazz.org.
Roots money
Los Cenzontles, the invaluable San Pablo cultural arts organization, has until Friday, July 28, to raise $8,000 to meet a matching grant from the East Bay Community Foundation Fund for Artists, to be used for the group’s “Raices, Reconnecting Mexico’s Early Music Roots” project.
For more information, go to www.loscenzontles.com.
Grace film
Ever-engaged Grace Cathedral continues its inaugural Summer Social Justice Film Festival on Sunday, July 30, with “We Came to Sweat: The Legend of Starlite ,”a feature documentary about the first black-owned gay bar in Brooklyn.
On Aug. 6, the festival concludes with director Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary “13th,” which delves into the connection between mass incarceration and racism. The title refers to the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which freed the slaves and outlawed slavery — “except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted,” a clause, DuVernay posits, that would lead to the creation of the American prison industry. The commentators cover the spectrum, from Angela Davis to Newt Gingrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Van Jones.
For more information, go to www.gracecathedral.org.
Jesse Hamlin is a Bay Area journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.