<Begin Segment 20>

PW: I feel like I need to shift over to your partner. Where and when did you meet your future partner?

PY: Sara Chin. So that's, in the early '80s, I'm involved by that time with a lot of Asian American musicians, most notably Russel Baba and Jeanne Aiko Mercer who was their roommate. But there was a whole extensive group of, like, musicians, Anthony Brown, Japanese mother, African American father, Mark Izu, just a whole range of musicians. And forming around jazz, but we're also studying traditional Japanese music, like Jeanne and Russel were kind of foundational people at the San Francisco Taiko. Many of us also studied gagaku. It had been programmed for Buddhist seminarians preparing to go to Japan. Most of those seminarians dropped out and they ended up stuck with all these kind of Asian American musicians and we'd show up at various Buddhist temples, and forms in disarray, and this is not what they were expecting. And Togi-sensei was, we had some really good musicians, so I think particularly Russel and Mark became pretty proficient in their instruments, and Kenny Endo. So formed a really strong musical nucleus for this group of Asian Americans that was attempting to play gagaku. Poor Togi-sensei, just kind of...

PW: But this also led to the formation of an actual Asian American music festival.

PY: Well this is parallel to that. So Russel and Gerald Oshita, like all the people down in Southern California, they're doing all these things parallel to this to kind of like what Togi-sensei is doing and what Mas Kodani is doing. And then they become intertwined. And then people like Mark and Russel and Jeanne and Anthony start using all their combinations of musical experience to kind of like form something that's pretty unique just in terms of their sensibilities and the musical resources that they're drawing upon. Jazz is the foundation, but they're drawing from all these other places. I think what Russel has been doing kind of in isolation up in Mt. Shasta, but what Mark Izu and Brenda Oka continue to do, what Anthony Brown continues to do, became major influences on people like Fred Ho and John Jang. And the kind of person in all that is Gerald Oshita. He was kind of the major influence for everybody, both in Southern California and up here. His wealth of experience and his, kind of, amazing creative abilities as a musician. I don't know if we have any time to get into Gee right now, but it's...

PW: Please, we should.

PY: So Gerald Oshita was, grew up in San Francisco, J-Town, his good friend had a market that was under, the basement of that market was under Bop City. So they could sit in the basement and hear all that music. And they did sit in the basement and hear all that music that's coming there. So Gee as a young person, postwar America, is being absorbed by all this stuff. I think Diane Fujino's done some research on this, on the early days of Asian American music. But Gee always saw his interest in African American improvisational music and his interest in traditional Japanese music and these combinations therefore were just, for him, a no-brainer, yes, I do these things. He acknowledges the foundational aspects of African American music, but he also goes to Japan for several years in the early '60s, and works with, kind of, Japanese avant-garde there, kind of the emergence of Eiko & Koma, comes out of some of, like, what Gee's doing musically back there, I think to provide some of their early music for them. It was the same time, he's kind of fully active, the most advanced improvisational music happening here in the Bay Area and the States. And also he's performing at the Fillmore, and the horn section's for, like, Al Cooper and Michael Bloomfield. So he's got this whole wealth of experience, all the things that he absorbed in that intersection between J-Town and the Fillmore.

PW: And was he central to the Asian American Jazz Festival?

PY: As an influence? Absolutely. Any Asian American jazz musician that came up at that time was, knew of or directly influenced by Gee. And as his way of kind of earning a living, he became a master of repairing woodwind instruments, and he became a specialist in contrabass woodwinds. And so whether you're Rahsaan Roland Kirk, or any kind of musicians for several generations that had anything other than a standard tenor, alto, soprano saxophone, you came to Gee. When you went to his apartment, oh, it was on Laguna, it was filled with instruments, and then it was also, people gave him instruments. So contrabass sarrusophones, there was this whole series of band instruments that have become obsolete that Gee became a master of. So he unfortunately died prematurely but his celebratory concert at the time of his death was kind of like, musicians came from all over the world for that. Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Oliver Johnson, it was just kind of like, flew in from Paris, from Chicago, from New York.

PW: And Sara was part of this scene, then, too, yes?

PY: Well, she was working, came in out of this... she was working on this program called Bean Sprouts, which was one of those early PBS programs that was geared for specifically young Asian American kids. Loni Ding was the producer and kind of fountainhead of that. And through all this cultural activity, there would be occasional rent parties. And so there was a group of Kenny Endo and Gordy Watanabe had a house around, over on, I think, Fourth Avenue. There was a rent party. And so usually a rent party is you know everybody. Sara walks into this party. I was playing, but I noticed her immediately, and she left before I had a chance to talk to her. And I didn't sweat it too much because I knew everybody there. And I thought, "Oh, sure, I'll just eventually be able..." So I went through kind of an extended period of time of asking, because I didn't know her name, I gave a description, they had no idea. And so that actually turned out to be a dead end and then several months later, she walks into City Lights. The first book she bought from me, which is still just, it's another one of those seminal moments. She bought Gabriel Infante, the Cuban writer's Three Trapped Tigers, the Harper edition. It still sits on my shelves. And I said, "Oh, her." And the bought this amazing book. And so I'm trying to talk her up and she's having nothing to do with it. She comes in, buys her books, pays with cash. I kind of surmised in the neighborhood, because I'd seen her on a fairly... and so I'm kind of trying to talk to her. I'm still doing occasional music gigs, I give her, "If you give me your name, I can put your name on the door and you won't have to pay that dollar." Ixnay. Then she made her mistake and she paid with a check. Completely unethical to take a name off a check, and in those days you could backtrack it through the Yellow Pages. So have an address, da-da-da, and you can find a phone number.

So I called her up. Asian American cultural community was relatively small in those days. And so Curtis Choi was just finishing his final cut of his film on the International Hotel that he was doing, and then that was one of the first public screenings was going to be that week. And so I called her up and says, "Curtis's film is screening tomorrow. Would you like to go there with me?" And she said no. [Laughs] But she was going, so I saw her there. I guess we went out for coffee, and she says... I can't actually recall where that screening was, but anyhow, she couldn't shake me loose for the day. I need to go shopping in Chinatown, so I can carry your bags. Roommates are wondering, "What the fuck is this?" And so anyhow, I finally had to leave and I said, well, "Would you like to have dinner?" and she said yes. And she had a car and I didn't, so she was going to pick me up. I was living out on Balboa Street with Russel, Bob and Jeanne Aiko Mercer at that time. And I didn't know at the time, but Sara, she's better now, but she doesn't think about getting someplace until, the meeting's going to start at two, she starts thinking about getting there at two. So she's at least forty minutes late. I was literally walking down the stairs. I told Russel that if this person shows up, tell her I dusted. So she knocks on the door as I'm walking down the steps, so Sara thinks, god, if I'd only been five minutes later. [Laughs] And so she's developing a career as a sound recordist for documentary films, which she did very successfully for many decades.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.