Densho Digital Archive - George Yoshida Interview (denshovh-ygeorge-01-0047)

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AI: You were, you were there in Japan with your family for a year. You came back to Berkeley in 1964.

GY: Yeah. '63, yes, '64 -- yes, roughly.

AI: And so I'm going to kind of ask you to, to move into the era of music in your life and kind of bring it up to date from, from the '60s up the present because you became very engaged with music and jazz, and please just tell us some of the highlights.

GY: Yeah. After the camp experience and camp band experience, I wanted to do something about continuing the work, but in raising a family, I didn't have much time to play instruments or to get, work with a group. And I didn't know too many people who were doing that at that time -- most Niseis were very busy regaining some kind of mental state to work and to earn a living, to get married and so forth and so on. But I would say about '60, '61, I started to become interested and to have some time away from children and to take some drum lessons. That was something I dearly wanted to do. A black friend of mine, Earl Watkins, who taught at one of the music schools, real nice cat who was responsible for my joining a black musicians' union in San Francisco. Anyway, I advanced -- I didn't advance too much, but -- in terms of my technique, but nevertheless, I met more and more people like me, so, this kind of thing. And I met the person whose name was George Takamoto, and I knew of him -- not really personally. He knew me because he was in camp, too, at Poston. And he had picked up the trumpet and became rather good and eventually became a professional musician. And he was in San Francisco. And somehow we got together. And there was another guy who played at Topaz -- in Topaz. You can set up, matters of networking. Oh, here's so-and-so, so forth. So there was a quartet, and so I played with George's quartet for some time, playing in Chinatown or restaurants, JACL meetings and dances, things like that. And so got a little bit better with the drums and improved my technique a little bit, but mostly self-taught.

One thing left -- oh, yes. Another important event in terms of my life and music is that while at Washington School, there came a new principal one, one fall, and his name was Herb Wong. And it turned out that Herb was a DJ, a disc jockey, for KJAZ at that time. Very much a devoted aficionado of music and swing, and rather influential in this position. And decided that Washington School to start a jazz education program for elementary school kids. And so we did a survey, wrote a survey, wrote curriculum guides, introduced children to jazz through recordings, instrumentation, difference between classical and jazz in terms of instruments, how it sounded, some blues. And it was really kind of a neat program. And he invited Oscar Peterson and his trio to take -- perform for the kids. Now, that was really an exciting event for the kids but especially for me. Another outstanding musician is Roland Kirk, and local musicians. We even had a faculty band, made up of fac -- our faculty, other faculty members. We had a janitor, black janitor -- there were always janitors around -- who played a wonderful saxophone. And, that was kind of neat, too. We played one or two concerts. But that was, again, fun to rehearse.