Patrick Shiroishi - Hidemi
A Closer Listen
Hidemi is a timely and relevant release, an album accompanied by a special edition chapbook. While the name of the label is American Dreams, the subject of the album is dashed American dreams. Patrick Shiroishi‘s grandfather Hidemi was incarcerated along with other Japanese Americans during World War II. And since the beginning of the pandemic, violence against Asian-Americans has exposed buried bigotries, flamed by the very government sworn to protect all of its citizens. The pain is evident across the essays of the appropriately-titled Tangled, as Asian-American artists wrestle with their love of a country that has in many ways betrayed them. And yet, while one might expect the overall tone to be injured and accusatory, Shiroishi uses his platform to educate and encourage, while sharing an uplifting surge of saxophone energy that serves as a dual metaphor of heritage and perseverance.
So let’s start with the music. The album begins with three long blasts, like a foghorn, or a ferry to Ellis Island. But just as quickly, “Beachside Lonelyhearts” turns wistful and gorgeous, layer upon layer of breath-infused notes sounding a clarion call, the promise of a new beginning. The center of Shiroishi’s quintuple saxophone cake is joyful, its far edge reflective.
What must it have been like for people with such high hopes to find themselves behind barbed wire? “Tule Lake Like Yesterday” builds on the phrase, “I remember it as if it were yesterday,” the anguish rising to the surface generations later when Shiroishi asks his grandmother about the experience. The music is confrontational and dramatic, swirling like dueling thoughts.
“What Happens When People Open Their Hearts,” Shiroishi asks a couple tracks later, providing the first solid hint of hope. In essay after essay, poem after poem, a wide array of authors convey their own internal struggles while memorializing the external struggles of their recent ancestors. Kozue Matsumoto’s “This Moment in My Life” is a legitimate blast of anger directed at those who sympathize more with a white shooter than an Asian victim. But she is also a teacher, responsible for the molding of young minds. Given the choice of bitterness or resolve, she lands on the latter, despite the emotional toll.
Another respite arrives in “Without The Threat Of Punishment There Is No Joy In Flight,” a title which may spark debate, but a song that sounds like listening, a rare feat. Shiroishi writes in his essay that the time for gaman ~ “to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity” ~ is over, although for years it was considered a virtue. Through Tangled, he provides an platform for artists to unload their experiences: classmates pantomiming Asian stereotypes and repeating ugly names; parents sworn at by bigoted cashiers; loving a country while perpetually labelled as foreigners instead of, as Dustin Wong writes and hopes, humans.
I will play music and break stereotypes, writes Matsumoto. These artists ~ poets, essayists, and musicians ~ make declarative statements of pride, energy and determination. What better way to honor Hidemi’s post-incarceration life than to live, truly live? In the closing track, Shiroishi shouts into the whirlwind, “Is this the end of the storm?” The finale’s title, “The Long Bright Dark,” leaves the ending wide open. But the entire project leads to this shining thought: these artists are not just looking forward, but walking forward, leading so that others may follow. (Richard Allen)
Fri Oct 22 00:01:42 GMT 2021Avant Music News
Mon Dec 27 10:25:00 GMT 2021
The Free Jazz Collective 90
By Keith Prosk
Patrick Shiroishi composes and performs nine songs for overlaid solo saxophone on the 25’ Hidemi.
Shiroishi has recently released a long string of moving statements documenting a creative boom yet I would consider Hidemi a touchstone among them. While it doesn’t showcase his breadth of technique for any single saxophone, its overlays of alto, baritone, C melody, tenor, and soprano saxophones at once convey the multi-instrumental character of his practice and an impressive compositional vision in the arrangement of their sonorities.
And with a throughline in Descension for solo tenor, effects, and voice, No-No / のの for alto and tenor with percussionist Dylan Fujioka, and i shouldn’t have to worry when my parents go outside for multi-instrumental arrangements with the voices of Crystal Chou and Asa Nakagawa, it is the most recent in an important thread of Shiroishi’s work that grapples with violence against Asian-Americans. These works process the generational trauma of America’s concentration camps but also more insidious and current contexts like the retaliation against Asian-Americans as a poor proxy for COVID-19 or the racist caricaturism that most recently culminated in the deaths of Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue. Previously these subjects were briefly discussed in liners but Hidemi expands on them with an 82-page companion chapbook, Tangled, containing reflections from Asian-American musicians, including Shiroishi, Fujioka, Jon Irabagon, Kozue Matsumoto, Lesley Mok, Paul Lai, Tashi Dorji, Mai Sugimoto, Dustin Wong, Eyvind Kang, Amirtha Kidambi, Sharon Chohi Kim, Pauline Lay, Susie Ibarra, Jason Kao Hwang, Che Chen, and Rob Sato. The notes do convey that these nine songs imagine the experience of Shiroishi’s grandfather, Hidemi, after getting out of a concentration camp.
Among its nine tracks none is greater than four minutes. And this song length manifests the concision of songs from what might seem like song forms. Beyond a general melodicism, sprightly tempi, and impactful moments that stick in the memory, most of these tracks at some point feature a soloing line over a repetitive base, a kind of chorus where all lines feel active, and bridges of sometimes abruptly contrasting material. Soulful saxophone solos with the weighted cadence of despondent pause and tenderly bending sustain might evoke strong emotions but more than any one line the arrangement of them yields the catharsis. The shaking volume and ensconcing depth of their unison. Their simultaneous break from repetition into independently radiating lines. The step-pattern layering of them - three voices dropping out to silence for five to return in a kind of triumph. The building and expanding of them. Emotivity in music is an experiential thing but I imagine it would be difficult to not have an emotional reaction to the buoyant counterpoint of “Beachside Lonelyhearts,” the divergent density of “To Kill A Wind-Up Bird,” the chorus of swells of triadic spirals of “The Long Bright Dark.” And every track has its own moment of release. But it is always fleeting. Always tempered with another moment of its dissonant souring or its discordant unravelling as if to recognize and despair the trauma at the roots of the release. It is a kind of narrative of baggage in a largely non-textual music that I think is only driven home when, after Shiroishi’s one sung line translated from Japanese as ‘is this the end of the storm?’ in the notes, the final moments of the record end with hard blows in alarm just as it began. The trauma continues and it is not forgotten.
Hidemi by Patrick Shiroishi