Immigrants' Tales at Heart of Composer's Work

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

By Jesse Halim

July 25, 2012

http://www.sfgate.com/music/article/Immigrants-tales-at-heart-of-composer-s-work-3735169.php

Darren Johnston was watching the news around the time Arizona passed that immigration law the U.S. Supreme Court knocked down last month. His buttons got pushed when he heard a newscaster speak of "African Americans, Native Americans and regular Americans."

"This assumption about who is 'American' regularly goes unchallenged, and the term 'all-American' has become somehow synonymous with a thinly veiled attitude of Euro-Christian supremacy," says Johnston, a San Francisco trumpeter and composer whose fluency extends from Balkan dance grooves and Mexican cumbia to Sufi bop and the unbounded music of Ornette Coleman.

Johnston is funneling his feelings about the way immigrants are portrayed into a large-scale choral work called "Letters to Home," which he and Intersection for the Arts are planning to produce, commissioning local immigrant writers to compose letters to the person they were when they first arrived in this country, offering advice.

The composer has seeded that work with a suite of songs, arranged for three singers and five improvising instrumentalists, titled "Songs From Seven Miles," which premieres at 1 p.m. Sunday at the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival. The work is based on interviews Johnston did with immigrants in the Bay Area, most of whom are friends: a gay Peruvian dancer who was granted asylum here, a middle-aged Korean woman who'd broken with family and culture, a Bulgarian drummer, an Egyptian musicologist, a Burmese butoh dancer, a Mexican day worker standing on Cesar Chavez Street.

The Toronto-bred Johnston, who has collaborated with some of the most creative improvising musicians in the Bay Area since arriving here in 1997, among them clarinetist Ben Goldberg, accordionist Rob Reich and the Bulgarian Romani bandleader Rumen Sali Shopov, wrote a song for each subject. It's built on a telling or memorable phrase or expression that person used.

"They're very simple songs for the most part, not really art songs, more like pop songs or folk songs, but I've got these creative improvisers on my team, and I'm trying to give them enough freedom to take the music somewhere fresh," says Johnston, 39, a tall, genial man, sitting in the light-filled living room of his Bernal Heights apartment. Framed prints of Herman Gottlieb's famed photographs of trumpeters Howard McGhee and Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker with Dizzy Gillespie, hang on the wall.

Johnston, a thoughtful player informed by Davis and Lester Bowie, will lead a fertile band featuring Goldberg on B flat and contra alto clarinet, Sheldon Brown on tenor sax and bass clarinet, bassist David Ewell, Howard Wiley (best known for the saxophone) on drums, and singers Tiffany Austin, Briget Boyle and Ruben Fonseca. They're playing music that draws freely on jazz, funk, Arabic, Bulgarian and Latin idioms.

The cumbia that Johnston wrote for Luis, the Mexican day laborer whom he interviewed in Spanish with the help of journalist Julie Caine, is set to lyrics using words Luis repeated: rio, familia, dinero (river, family, money).

"He told me about walking across the desert for four days, crossing the river, and being shuttled for 14 days in vans through all these different states - Texas, Colorado, Utah," Johnston says. He wrote a hip-hoppish thing for Ledoh, the Burmese butoh dancer, whose words had a rap-like rhythm. Peruvian dancer Carlos Venturo's story inspired a sort of jazz waltz.

For Suk Shuch, a South Korean woman who felt repressed until she immigrated to the Bay Area in the liberating late 1960s - "I was kind of on the rebel side," she said, "I didn't like all the traditional ways" - Johnston composed a funk tune in complex meter. For Ivan Velev, his Bulgarian drummer friend, whose words of wisdom were "fly like the wind and savor the flavor," he wrote a bluesy tune built on a copanitza, a Bulgarian dance in 11/8.

"My process was to create these poems out of their words and just start signing 'em," says Johnston, who aspired to be a poet but lost his way at 17 when he tried emulating the Beats. "Trying to copy that style, without having lived that life, leads to very bad poetry," he says with a laugh.

He'd always played trumpet. When he applied to the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, he was turned down by the creative writing program but received a trumpet scholarship. That's when he got serious about music. One of the first jazz records he listened to was Coleman's presciently titled 1959 recording "The Shape of Jazz to Come." Johnston flipped for the rhythmic freedom of Coleman's music.

"I always liked that contrast between strict metric time and that floating thing going over the top. I love that sound," says Johnston, who moved here because his ex-wife, a horse trainer who teaches dressage, got a job in Palo Alto.

He found a rich music scene in the Bay Area. Unlike New York, where musicians often have to fall into a particular scene, or even sub-scene, to get into a community, people here cross a lot of lines.

"I was playing straight-ahead jazz, free-improvised music, Balkan music, a lot of salsa," Johnston says. "You can do a lot of different things. In one of my early bands, United Brass Workers Front, we would cover protest songs from the '60s, some Ornette. I'd write a reggae. Stylistically, the music was all over the map. My hope is that it passes through the filter of my own personality and comes out with its own unifying traits."

As for "Songs From Seven Miles," and the larger "Letters to Home" project, Johnston hopes the parts are simple enough that "everyone in the audience can join in, and it becomes a chorus of hundreds," says the musician, who blew rousing trumpet melodies at the big Occupy march to the Port of Oakland in November. "It can become a real vehicle for social activism. I'm big on that."