Premiere Short Film Documentaries From Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra’s 2018 Performance with Angela Davis and Janice Mirikitani Followed by a Live Performance
May 17
7:00 pm8:30 pm
Free
Premiere Short Film Documentaries From Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra’s 2018 Performance with Angela Davis and Janice Mirikitani Followed by a Live Performance
Join us for a screening of two short films of Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra performance in 2018, Go For Broke! and Down By The Riverside, featuring Janice Mirikitani and Angela Davis. Followed by a live performance by Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra and Voices Of A Dream.
This event is part of OACC’s ongoing initiative to support, highlight, and cultivate Black and Asian solidarity within our Oakland and greater Bay Area communities.
Go for Broke! is dedicated to the courageous Japanese American men and women who served and died for their country in World War II while their families were imprisoned. In this film, Janice Mirikitani shares her mother’s memories of their incarceration and her own testimony. “Go for Broke” was the motto of these brave soldiers in their fight to defend democracy.
Down By The Riverside – Requiem for a King commemorates Dr. Martin Luther King’s life and work, and the 50th anniversary of his assassination. Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra premiered Down By The Riverside at the 2018 San Francisco International Arts Festival. Featuring spoken word by Dr. Angela Davis, the documentary includes Spirituals and Gospel songs performed by Voices Of A Dream.
ABOUT ANTHONY BROWN
Composer, percussionist, ethnomusicologist, Guggenheim and Ford Fellow, Smithsonian Associate Scholar, and GRAMMY® nominee Dr. Anthony Brown has collaborated with Max Roach, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, Zakir Hussain, Steve Lacy, Anthony Davis, and the San Francisco Symphony. Dr. Brown holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in music (ethnomusicology) from UC Berkeley and a Master of Music degree in jazz performance from Rutgers University. He is currently Artistic Director of Fifth Stream Music and the internationally acclaimed Asian American Orchestra.
ABOUT ANTHONY BROWN'S ASIAN AMERICAN ORCHESTRA
In the global community of the 21st century, Anthony Brown’s Orchestra presents music that blends the sonorities and improvisational approaches of the jazz tradition with Asian musical instruments and sensibilities. In 1997, leaders of San Francisco’s Asian American creative music movement founded the Asian American Jazz Orchestra (AAJO), under the auspices of a San Francisco-based, federally funded multimedia consortium project to provide education nationally about the Japanese American internment experiences of World War II. The AAJO featured critically acclaimed musicians Anthony Brown, Jon Jang, Mark Izu, Hafez Modirzadeh and Francis Wong, as well as other San Francisco Bay Area jazz and world music artists, many of whom possessed fluency on a variety of traditional Asian instruments.
