This story aired in the February 11, 2026 episode of Crosscurrents.
The Asian American jazz movement has roots in 1970s San Francisco.
It was a dynamic time. The term “Asian American” was first being used, as people were building political coalitions among and across racial lines. Art reflected all of that.
Many Asian American artists and activists found inspiration in Black musicians who used jazz as a tool for social change.
Today, the work continues. The next generation of local Asian American jazz musicians are asking what it means to make music that honors history, and speaks to the moment.
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Story Transcript:
REPORTER: I love live music. Luckily, living in Oakland, it’s never too hard to find a show to go to.
This performance at Oaktown Jazz Workshops in Jack London Square looks like a typical jazz outfit. On stage right is a man on drums and another on bass. On stage left, there’s a piano player. But in center stage is a person playing a koto.
They’re playing jazz renditions of Japanese folk classics, and then some. All of it is the project of composer Erika Oba, a musician telling stories of the Japanese American diaspora.
This show is a homecoming. Erika was raised in Berkeley, and as a teenager, she played with Oaktown Jazz Workshops’ youth education programs.
ERIKA OBA: I started playing jazz when I was in middle school. My sister played jazz and, you know, the schools we went to all had robust jazz programs.
REPORTER: …at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and Berkeley High. And she took every class she could at the Young Musicians Program at UC Berkeley.
OBA: A lot of my most influential mentors were jazz musicians.
REPORTER: And as a middle schooler, she was already sharing the stage. The stage she’s on this afternoon, in fact, with mentors like trumpeter Khalil Shaheed, the late founding director of Oaktown Jazz Workshops.
OBA: Jazz as a practice and music in America has historically been very intergenerational, and this is a big part of it – older generations mentoring younger generations on the bandstand, like through live music.
REPORTER: She says, these kinds of relationships have made her a better musician. Holistically. As a player of the music but also in helping her understand that to be a musician is to be a part of a larger ecosystem that has existed before her and will continue after.
OBA: I feel like this is, I feel like a thing in jazz too, is just like, um, honoring your lineage and ancestry is really important. Our musical lineage and musical ancestry, but also, you know, our ancestor ancestors.
REPORTER: In college, Erika studied both jazz and environmental science, but she was still hungry for more.
She did a masters in Music Composition at Mills College, where she began exploring new possibilities of storytelling.
That’s where she learned about the Asian American jazz movement. Thanks to carefully kept archives, the music and writings from that time are well documented. So Erika dove deep.
She discovered albums like “Big Bands Behind Barbed Wire” by Anthony Brown’s Asian American Jazz Orchestra. She studied Jon Jang’s piano compositions, read the works of Fred Ho, and listened to Francis Wong on the saxophone. Eventually, Francis took her under his wing. She calls him a guiding light.
OBA: I think it was Francis who said they were activists first and musicians to serve that activism. And I found that really, really inspiring.
REPORTER: She connected with their work just when she was asking big questions:
OBA: What does it mean to do this music? And like, what is my place in it? All these questions about like heritage and legacy and, and they, they had a model for it that was really, really exciting.
REPORTER: So she started writing music that explores different social issues. Here’s a piece that draws on her studies of both jazz and environmental science.
It starts with recordings she took from busy Berkeley intersections. Then, a sprawling bassoon.
OBA: I wrote a solo bassoon, an electronics piece called Rockefeller's Ghosts that was kind of dealing with anxiety over living in a, like an extractive, like petroleum world.
REPORTER: Her latest big project was an orchestral piece she wrote with her sister, Hitomi Oba, for the Fresno Philharmonic. The composition is called Meguru: Dreams of Harvest. It tells the story of David “Mas” Masumoto, a Japanese American peach farmer in the Central Valley. It was inspired by Mas’s family history. They were farmworkers who – during World War 2 – were forced to live in prison camps, along with more than 120,000 other people of Japanese descent.
She believes the story is timely. That the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans then is still relevant now.
OBA: So I think that telling these stories and keeping these histories alive through art that takes itself really seriously and is presented well, really matters because it's all happening now again,
REPORTER: She says: the damage caused by such violence lasts for generations.
OBA: In keeping these histories alive, we have to acknowledge how far reaching the damage is and not look away from that.
REPORTER: So, what does this history sound like? How do you tell a story, with specific characters and narratives, without words? And how might you translate that into song?
For Erika, it boils down to one question.
OBA: How do these things make me feel?
REPORTER: She makes it clear that they weren’t looking to make a soundtrack, or a transcription of the story.
OBA: It wasn't necessarily like a one-to-one. This sentence became this musical phrase, you know what I mean? It was more like, well, the emotional feeling from this section made me feel like this. And what does that sound like? Musically, like maybe that sounds like some high strings, you know, like, what does anxiety sound like? What does terror sound like?
REPORTER: The symphony was presented alongside other kinds of programming, like panel discussions, visual art, and community outreach to contextualize the music. She says all of these components set the stage for a political movement.
OBA: The art is the thing that is holding it together and is allowing for people to come together.
REPORTER: I’m struck by Erika’s imagery of the art “holding it together.” It makes me visualize her music as a container. Not just for history, but for the relationships that form and are sustained over time, through generations.
I’m seeing this in real time on stage at Oaktown Jazz Workshops. Erika’s on piano, and Brian Wong is the one playing the koto. His mom is Shirley Kazuyo Muramoto, a well-known Bay Area koto player and a champion for Japanese traditional arts. And her mom learned how to play the koto while imprisoned at Topaz and Tule Lake concentration camps.
I think of the many people and the many hands responsible for the music I get to listen to now, here. The gentle pluck of a string and the quick breath before a beat are all physical reminders of a musical memory that has been carefully passed down from player to player. A huge history, distilled into touch, that becomes sound. It moves me. Generations on a bandstand, and in an audience. This music captures this specific moment, with these specific people, but it speaks to the stories of everyone that has come before.
The music in this piece is a variety of songs composed, arranged, and performed by the following musicians: Erika Oba, Francis Wong, Jamael Smith, Hitomi Oba, Chris Bastian, Jeremy Steinkoler, Brian Wong, and the Fresno Philharmonic.
