Jon Jang Presents Final Shenson Faculty Concert

Last night at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the Community Music Center (CMC) presented the last of its four free concerts. (The venue was selected because the CMC Mission Branch is currently undergoing alterations.) When this series was announced at the end of last June, the final offering was described as a program entitled Civil Wrongs: Music about Black American & Japanese American Incarceration, performed by Chinese-American composer and pianist Jon Jang. Fortunately, any intimations of agitprop were, for the most part, casually dismissed in favor of a performance that was almost entirely about the music.

Furthermore, for most of the evening, Jang did not perform as a soloist. Instead, he led a jazz quartet, whose other members were Erika Oba on flute with rhythm provided by Gary Brown on bass and percussionist Deszon Claiborne. In that setting Jang kept his politics to a relative minimum, acknowledged primarily by a performance of his composition “Reparations Now 1987.”

On the other hand he opened the evening with a medley of tunes by Charles Mingus, beginning with “Meditations on Integration.” My knowledge of the Mingus book is not as thorough as I would like it to be. As a result, I am not sure how many other tunes were in the set. The one that certainly registered with me was “Fables of Faubus,” also listed as “Original Faubus Fables” on the Candid recording. I suspect that Jang is a bit too young to have been around Arkansas in the late Fifties; but that was a time when Governor Orval Faubus was as much a factor in “civil wrongs” as were the incarcerations that took place during World War II.

Jang wrapped up the evening with his one solo performance. He selected “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which Richard Rogers composed for the musical Carousel. Once he moved from the tune to improvisation, he played out a thoroughly engaging deconstruction of one of the most familiar tunes in the American Song Book. It almost seemed as if he saw “Broadway optimism” as an attempt to sugar-coat a “social order” that had no trouble dismissing communities of Blacks and Japanese as non-PLU (people like us). To his credit, Jang never lapsed into soapbox rhetoric; but he certainly knew how to harness his music to express his opinions.