From the Hokubei Mainichi, Thursday, October 21, 1999

		Asian Improv to Present Multicultural 'Saxophone Summit' The Asian Improv Saxophone Summit Number One, featuring tenor sax players Francis Wong, Jeff Chan, and Hafez Modirzadeh, will take place Friday, Nov. 5, at 8 p.m. at Clarion Music, located at 816 Sacramento St. in San Francisco's Chinatown. "The summit will showcase the 'state of the tenor.' as well as pay tribute to the heritage of sound and culture given to us by Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Fred Anderson, along with countless other dedicated musicians who have not received the recognition which they are due" stated a spokesperson for Asian Improv Records, sponsor of the event. "This very special concert follows a modern-day , musical 'silk road' with influences from Persia, Asia, as well as America, shaping the dialogue between the three performers. Each of these musicians has developed a unique sound and innovated techniques that come out of their individual cultural sensibilities, as well as the need to create something original and relevant to the times as we enter the 21st century." "It is appropriate that this performance is taking place in Chinatown... a symbol of the multicultural experience that has shaped all of these musicians. One would be hard-pressed to think of anyplace else in the world where this music can happen." Francis Wong has been a part of almost every major development in Asian American creative music in the last 15 years, beginning with his debut on pianist Jon Jang's ground-breaking 1984 recording, "Are You Chinese, or Charlie Chan?" He has performed throughout the U.S., Canada, Hong Kong, and Europe. His work has been part of over 30 creative music recordings, including works by Jang, Los Angeles-based pianist Glenn Horiuchi, Chicago-based bassist Tatsu Aoki, and his own groups - the Great Wall, Ming, and the Desert Flower Ensemble. As a charter member of Jang's Pan Asian Arkestra and Anthony Brown's Asian American Orchestra, he has participated in seminal collaborations between jazz, taiko, and Chinese traditional instruments. He has studied both Chinese and Japanese traditional music and was a founding member of the San Francisco Gagaku Society. As a saxophonist, Wong has been influenced by the works of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, He was also inspired by Modirzadeh and the late Native American saxophonist Jim Pepper. He has been involved in numerous interdisciplinary collaborations with poets/performers Genny Lim, Margarita Lunes Robles, and Juan Felipe Herrera, choreographers Sachiko Nakamura, Pearl Ubungen and Alleluia Panis; and several California Arts Council Roster artists and ensembles, including the World of Tales (a theater for young audiences) and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He has been awarded grants from the CAC Artist-in-Residency program for 1992-93, 1993-94, 1994-95, 1996-97 and 1997-98. He has served on the music faculty at UC Santa Cruz. Recently, the Creative Work Fund awarded him a commission to work with Thick Description. For the past 12 years, Wong has served as executive producer and artistic director of Asian Improv aRts' concert season, including seven Day of Remembrance concerts. He has also served as a producer on over 30 titles in the Asian Improv catalog. Jeff Chan, born and raised in Concord and currently living in San Francisco, has been striving to express his unique voice in the Bay Area creative music scene. He is particularly inspired by the work of African American creative musicians and is drawn to the spirit of dedication, individuality, expressiveness and freedom that the foremost practitioners of the art exemplify. He counts Coltrane, Rollins, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman as his most significant influences. He is also motivated by the Asian American creative music movement. His goal is to perform music that reflects the inspiration that the masters of music instill in their listeners while creating something personal, original and relevant in the process. This past year, he has performed across the country as both a leader of his own ensembles and as a guest artist with local musicians. In June 1998, he played in the Knitting FactoryÕs New York Jazz Festival where he led a trio featuring drummer Jackson Krall (who currently performs with Cecil Taylor). Five months later, he performed in the third annual Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival, where he led a quartet featuring festival founder Aoki. He also served as a guest artist with the Steven Hashimoto Ensemble as part of the festival. His first recording project, "Winds Shifting" (Asian Improv), has received positive critical notice in both national and international publications. It features all original compositions and such local musicians as Wong, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer/cellist Elliot Humberto Kavee. His current projects include the Jeff Chan Trio, a sax/bass/drums ensemble that provides for Chan the vehicle to exercise his unorthodox methods of leadership and music composition, both of which focus on providing the musicians as much freedom of expression as possible. His other projects include the Damon Smith Trio, which focuses on freely improvised music, and a wind sextet, a cooperative ensemble that performs a mix of compositions and improvisations. Chan participated in Cadence recording artist Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra, a sextet that utilizes many different methods of composition and improvisation. He has also collaborated with such performers as Lim, Jang, Brown, bassist Mark Izu, saxophonists Marco Eneidi and Glenn Spearman, cellist/bassist Kash Killion, drummer Donald Robinson, and trumpeter Clark Terry, and studied with sax players Dewey Redman and Sam Rivers, multi-instrumentalist Oluyemi Thomas, and drummer Victor Lewis. Hafez Modirzadeh, born in Durham, N.C. in 1962, is the son of an Iranian father and a Euro-American mother. After living in France and Iran, he returned to the U.S. in 1977 and became interested in jazz saxophone. As a young Iranian American, he began to identify himself with African American music. He claims that up until 1983, he came to feel every jazz musician resurrected on record to be an extended relative of his own personal family with teachings to impart. Those teachings eventually brought him to realize the responsibility of having to carve his own contribution, which led him to the pursuit of trying to construct a purely Iranian American jazz style. For three years, he studied privately with master violinist Mahmoud Zoufonoun, culminating in a masterÕs thesis on "Style and Interpretation of Iranian Classical Music" at UCLA in 1986. This happened on the rebound of a brief stint of "third stream" studies at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston during the fall of 1983. After UCLA, he spent two years freelancing in New York, which led to performance opportunities with groups such as Charlie PersipÕs Superband and Fred Ho's Afro-Asian Ensemble. From 1988 to 1990, he attended Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he completed his doctoral dissertation, "Chromodality and the Cross-Cultural Exchange of Musical Structure" in 1992. From 1990 to 1998, he worked within the Improvised Music Studies Program at San Jose State University, developing a graduate and undergraduate curriculum. Through various world ensembles and applied systems courses, IMS students collaborated on similar paths towards their own musical self-realization through creative and original cross-cultural practices that explore both traditional and innovative music. He took a leave in 1994 to conduct fieldwork in the Iranian provinces of Loristan, Bakhtiari and Khorassan under the auspices of the Islamic Republic's Ministry of Culture. He returned from Iran with several indigenous wind instruments, which became part of his sonic palette, extending repertoire for his work with various groups, including the Desert Flower Ensemble, Miya Masaoka's Orchestra, Ho's Monkey Orchestra, Peter ApfelbaumÕs Hieroglyphics Ensemble and Ann Dyer's No Good Time Fairies. He formed the Chromodal Consort in 1997 and collaborated with pianist Ramin Zoufonoun on the 1998 work "The Mystery of Sama" (Asian Improv). Currently, Modirzadeh is a jazz faculty member at SFSU.
		top | reviews page | home