Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
The Essence of Emily
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
“This music is really about honoring my forebearers and expressing gratitude to my parents and my grandparents,” Kono says about Voyages.
(Photo: Tracy Yang)Versatile woodwind artist Ben Kono, a third-generation Japanese American, spent many years as a consummate sideman, recording and playing with Wynton Marsalis, Christian McBride and David Liebman while touring with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and other big bands. But once he stepped out as a composer with the Ben Kono Group, he began delving into his immigrant heritage.
“Paradise In Manzanar,” the centerpiece of Kono’s 2011 debut, Crossing, is set in the largest Japanese internment camp in the U.S. during World War II. “There’s irony in the title, because it was anything but paradise,” Kono explained from his home in Nyack, New York. “It was a desolate area. But people did plant gardens in the tiny plots they had in the middle of the desert.”
Don’t Blink (2019), recorded in response to the first Trump election, didn’t deal explicitly with immigration. But it set the stage for Voyages (2024), inspired by the memoirs of Kono’s grandfather, Juhei Caleb Kono.
Voyages reflects a new musical journey for Kono. Expanding from his longtime collaborators (Pete McCann, guitar; Mike Holober, piano and Fender Rhodes; Jared Schonig, drums; Matt Clohesy, bass), he incorporates a string quartet. “A lot of the pieces started off as string quartets, which I expanded to include the other instruments,” Kono said while discussing the many permutations of immigration Voyages encompasses.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Cree McCree: Juhei Caleb Kono, whose memoirs inspired Voyages, is a very evocative name.
Ben Kono: I was actually named after him. My nickname is Juhei. And he starts his memoirs off by saying this strange name that was bestowed upon me has finally been bestowed upon my grandson. He immigrated to the United States in 1911. Four years after that, the U.S. restricted Japanese immigrants from coming over. But if your father was already here, then it was pretty easy. So his father, my great-grandfather, came over. Then his father went back to Japan, and he stayed and met my grandmother and started our great American family.
McCree: “Bata Kasaii!!,” the second track on the album, is a real ear opener. What does that mean?
Kono: In literal translation, it means “butter, stinker!” [laughs] If you go back far enough in Japan’s history, the Europeans brought over dairy products, which were completely foreign to Japanese culture. And they would say these foreigners smell strange, they smell of butter. So when my grandfather came over here at age 11, and his father brought him to a diner, he said he couldn’t eat the food because it was bata kasaii.
That particular track addresses my grandfather’s work ethic as a new immigrant. In the beginning, it kind of sounds like swing, but it’s actually based on traditional Japanese work songs sung in the rice fields or sugar cane fields in the Pacific Northwest, where a lot of them worked.
McCree: One track that really spoke to me was “Across The Pond.” My grandparents came from Scotland, and that tune sounds a little like a Scottish highland fling.
Kono: That song is the one anomaly on this album; it doesn’t refer to any of my Japanese ancestry. My mother is a first-generation immigrant from England, and she used to talk about how she came over on a freighter with my father, who she met over there. The first thing she saw of the United States were these green, rolling hills of the Chesapeake Bay, which reminded her of the countryside in Kent. That’s one of the pieces that started out as a string quartet, based on Irish reels and English folk songs.
McCree: “Issei” is over 13 minutes long and the centerpiece of the album. It’s very contemplative.
Kono: Those four tunes — “Issei,” “Nisei,” “Sansei” and “Yonsei” — are all part of the Generation Suite, which refers to each generation of Japanese American families. They’re connected by a single melody based on a Japanese scale, which might be the contemplative part you’re talking about. The suite starts as a string quartet with all these themes buried inside. And then you hear this piano playing one single note that’s the bare essence of that theme: the sound of bells in the Buddhist temple, where my grandfather grew up as a child. All four movements go through a lot of metamorphoses, so by the end, it starts to sound very American.
McCree: What was your very first instrument?
Kono: We moved around when I was a kid. And when we finally settled in Vermont, my mother wanted me to belong to some kind of community, not just hanging out with kids on skateboards. So one day I came home and found a little box on my bed. I said, “What’s this?” And she said, “It’s a clarinet. You’re joining band.” [laughs]
My fifth grade band director really lit a fire in all of us, and in high school, I had band directors who were equally inspiring. Some of the band kids went to the Eastman School of Music Summer Jazz program, so it was really my peer group who got me into playing jazz. And once I heard jazz, it was just a fire you couldn’t put out.
McCree: Was there a particular artist or album that was like an “aha” moment for you in jazz?
Kono: When my dad saw me getting interested in jazz — I had just started playing saxophone as well — he introduced me to his collection. The first recording I heard was a cassette tape he got me for my birthday: Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins with Roy Eldridge, Bud Johnson, Oscar Peterson and Jo Jones. It was one of these Verve All Star collections. I listened to that tape so much that I can still, to this day, sing you every song.
McCree: That was from the bebop era, right?
Kono: Bebop meets swing. It was a nice cross section of 1950s jazz. And, my saxophone teacher got me into Dexter Gordon and Sonny Rollins. Dexter was like, for me, the voice of the tenor saxophone.
McCree: What would you like people to experience listening to Voyages?
Kono: I’d like to take the listener from here to there and from there to here. It doesn’t really matter. It’s what happens in between. It’s the journey. DB
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