Kabuki Cabaret
Kimonos…Passion…Jazz
Brenda Wong Aoki – Writer/Performer
Mark Izu – Composer, Contra Bass, Sho, Sheng
90 min.
Haunting dramatic performance by Brenda Wong Aoki with original music by Emmy Award-Winning composer Mark Izu, in a Kabuki Cabaret of traditional Japanese ghost legends. Featuring Grammy nominated multi-percussionist Dr. Anthony Brown, natori koto master Shoko Hikage, Best Latin Jazz flutist 2010 Mas Koga, vocalist Moy Eng and Janet Koike with PJ Hirabayashi on Taiko.
About Japanese Ghost Legends
In Noh theatre, the dead are more important than the living because the actions of the dead are what brought us to where we are today. Japanese ghosts are usually female – upset females. They are portrayed without feet because they have lost their connection to the earth. They are passionate women on a mission, so filled with love, jealousy or rage; they won’t go peacefully to into the night.
Japanese believe ghosts are people who have died with an unpaid On. On means “debt” or “obligation,” but it is much more complicated. An On carries with it a sacred vow that this debt be repaid. An unpaid debt is passed down to your children and to their children. The On begins to grow, like a snowball into an avalanche with each successive generation. Finally, whole families, villages, countries live under the dark cloud of an unpaid on, because by then, nobody knows how to fix it.
This is where storytellers come in. Storytellers help people remember what happened in the past and how those actions affect the present. Because like autumn leaves falling year after year, people can repeat the same mistakes, follow the same patterns, and create the same stories/histories over and over again. But storytellers remind us that we can change our fate. Love stories soften our hearts. Tales of wonder awaken awe in the world around us. Heroes bring out the heroic in the listener and remind us that one good person can change the world. Ghost stories remind us that what remains after we are dead are the consequences of our actions.
Bios of Collaborating Artists
Dr. Anthony Brown (Multi-percussion): Percussionist, composer, ethnomusicologist and Guggenheim Fellow Dr. Anthony Brown is a seminal figure in the contemporary California creative music scene, directing the Asian American Orchestra in addition to performing with some of the foremost musicians in jazz today. Since 1998, his Orchestra has received international critical acclaim for blending Asian musical instruments and sensibilities with the sonorities of the jazz orchestra. The orchestra’s recording of Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn’s Far East Suite received a 2000 GRAMMY nomination for Best Large Jazz Ensemble Performance.
Anthony Brown has received grants, fellowships, awards and commissions from, among others, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, Meet the Composer, National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, TheatreWorks, and the MacDowell Colony. He has presented master classes, lectures and scholarly papers at the National Academy of Sciences, Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, Columbia University, the Franz Schubert Conservatory (Vienna, Austria), and at every campus of the University of California. Dr. Brown has articles in The New Grove Encyclopedia of Music and The Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History published with Simon & Schuster Macmillan. His book, Give the Drummer Some! The Development of Modern Jazz Drumming, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Shoko Hikage (Koto) began playing Koto at the age of three. Hikage studied koto under Chizuga Kimura of the Ikuta-ryu sokyoku seigenkai in Akita Prefecture, Japan. In 1988, Hikage graduated from Takasaki college with a major in koto music, and she was accepted as a special research student in Sawai Sokyoku In under Tadao and Kazue Sawai where she subsequently received her master’s certificate. In 1992, she moved to Honolulu, Hawaii to teach koto at the Sawai Kotot Kai Hawaii and the University of Hawaii koto class. In 1997, she moved to San Francisco, where she continues her pursuits in improvisational dance and music. www.ShokoHikage.com
Mas Koga (Saxophone/shakuhachi) Multi instrumentalist Masaru Koga has been a part of the creative music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for the past 15 years. He has traveled, recorded, and performed nationally with artists such as Hafez Modirzadeh, Francis Wong, Anthony Brown, Royal Hartigan, John Carlos Perea, Wayne Wallace, Kat Parra, and Fred Ho. He is also the director of SambAsia, an award winning San Francisco-based community samba school, teaching and performing Brazilian drums. Masaru’s goal is to create music that respects traditions and goes beyond styles and idioms, and ultimately help diminish all other forms of social boundaries. In 2011, he was awarded Best Latin Jazz Flutist.
Janet Koike’s (Taiko, Percussion) work and compositions have highlighted San Jose Taiko’s national concert tours from Arsenio Hall to Carnegie Hall. Blending traditional training with custom built techno taiko, she has performed with D’CuCKOO at the Cleveland Bicentennial and Macy’s Passport with Cirque du Soleil. Janet has toured Indonesia with Keith Terry’s Body Tjak, Hong Kong “New Dimensions Festival” with Mark Izu, and Brenda Wong Aoki, she has and performed with Jennifer Berezan, Kenny Endo, Ondekoza’s Marco Lienhard, Anthony Brown with the Asian Jazz Orchestra and Theatre Yugen. She is the founder of Maze Daiko, an ensemble that combines an exciting mix of traditional and non-traditional instruments and rhythms with the physical elegance and powerful sounds of taiko. Maze Daiko just returned from performing at the North American Taiko Conference in LA.
Janet is also the founder of the Rhythmix Cultural Works (RCW) a new community art center in Alameda
PJ Hirabayashi (Taiko, Percussion) is a founding member and Artistic Director of San Jose Taiko. She directs the performing company’s artistic programming, workshops, master classes, and audition process. PJ is recognized for her distinctive performance and teaching style that combines movement, dance, drumming, fluidity, joy, and energy. One of her current projects, “TaikoPeace”, has evolved to extend the reach of the Charter for Compassion, a document that transcends religious, ideological, and national difference. Supported by leading thinkers from many traditions, the Charter inspires worldwide community-based acts of compassion.
Moy Eng (Vocals): A cultural bureaucrat by day, Moy Eng is a jazz and classical singer during nights and weekends. She studied classical voice and piano as a child. After a long hiatus, Moy began singing and learning the American Songbook during her three-hour commute on New York City’s West Side Highway. More recently, she performs in intimate and larger venues in California including San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose and Los Angeles, musically cruising through jazz, classical, funk, and r&b. Moy can be heard also on spoken word artist Diem Jones’ latest CD, Spirit of Oui track: “Haiti Revisited”, and on fundraising commercials for KFJC.
For more information contact: aokizu@firstvoice.org
