jcccnc / about / press / "american rhapsodies" preview concert

SAN FRANCISCO (May 21, 2004) – The Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC) presents A preview concert of American Rhapsodies performed by Anthony Brown and the Asian American Orchestra. This ensemble will be demonstrating their talents at JCCCNC on June 26 at 1PM. This event is free and open to the public. Bento lunches will be served for $8.00 per person and must be pre-ordered.

American Rhapsodies concert is performed by a twenty piece intercultural, intergender and intergenerational ensemble, and scored for jazz orchestra and traditional instruments from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East. Gershwin's original Rhapsody In Blue is essentially a piano showcase. Brown's American Rhapsodies democratizes the soloistic features by extrapolating improvisatory passages for various instruments from Gershwin's score, and replaces the original piano with two Chinese hammered dulcimers, a Chinese harp zither, and Trinidadian steel drums.

The JCCCNC preview concert will focus specifically on Gagaku, the ceremonial music of the Japanese Imperial Court. Musicians Anthony Brown, Mark Izu and Masaru Koga will demonstrate the ways in which Gagaku elements and traditional Japanese instruments are incorporated into the recomposition of Rhapsody in Blue. Further, the musicians will explain how these elements and instruments are integrated into the jazz and classic American composition.

To reserve a seat to this free preview concert and order a bento lunch, please call: JCCCNC at (415) 567-5505.

The world premiere of the full concert of American Rhapsodies will be presented at San
Francisco’s Stern Grove Music Festival on July 4, 2004. For more information on this concert and more, please visit www.sterngrove.org or www.anthonybrown.org

American Rhapsodies Background

In his “American Rhapsody,” George Gershwin intended to mirror the tenor of his times and a progressive attitude toward race relations in a musical vision blending the styles he knew best: European and African American. Gershwin wrote Rhapsody In Blue, the final name for his new work, to be premiered by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra in a commemorative concert for Abraham Lincoln’s birthday in New York City on February 12, 1924.

Surprisingly, the most popular ensemble version of Rhapsody In Blue is the hasty
original orchestration by classical composer Ferde Grofé from Gershwin’s stillwet
manuscript for two pianos; the composer never orchestrated his own masterpiece. Despite its initial mixed reception, primarily due to its creolized (European-African American) and hybridized (literate-vernacular) lineage, the enduring melodies and rhythmic vitality of Rhapsody In Blue have come to represent the spirit and musical legacy of our country in the twentieth century. Composer and historian Gunther Schuller differentiated Whiteman’s and Gershwin’s 1920s “symphonic jazz” from a 1950s music known as Third Stream on the basis that their music contained no improvisation. Schuller described the Third Stream as a synthesis of the essential characteristics and techniques of Western concert music (First Stream) with those of the African American vernacular traditions, primarily jazz and the blues (Second Stream).

With American Rhapsodies, Anthony Brown ushers in the era of the Fourth Stream, a new musical language blending an equal balance of instruments, conventions and sensibilities of world music into the Third Stream. This intercultural recasting of Rhapsody In Blue more closely mirrors the contemporary demographic profile of our planet—one of nearly every three people is an Asian Pacific Islander--and particularly its microcosmic reflection of the San Francisco Bay Area, “Golden Gateway to the East.”

About Anthony Brown

Brown earned Bachelor degrees in music and psychology at the University of Oregon, and then lived in Athens, Greece and Heidelberg, Germany as an Army officer for five years before returning to San Francisco in 1980 to pursue a professional musical career.

Dr. Brown’s treatment of Rhapsody In Blue completes a uniquely personal trilogy of homages to American composers. Smithsonian Institution Curator John Hasse claims this process of reinterpretation, re-arrangement and reorchestration is most accurately described as recomposition. Brown developed his interpretive process while researching and working with manuscripts at the Duke Ellington archives during a Smithsonian doctoral fellowship in 1989, and continued to develop his approach during his subsequent employment at the Smithsonian.

About the JCCCNC

Envisioned by the Japanese American community, JCCCNC will be an everlasting foundation of our Japanese American ancestry, cultural heritage, histories and traditions. The JCCCNC strives to meet the evolving needs of the Japanese American community through programs, affordable services and facility usage. The JCCCNC is a non-profit community center based in San Francisco.

For more information, please contact:

Lori Matoba, Director of Programs
Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC)
415.567.5505