The Multimusicverse of Jon Jang

Author's Note: A version of this essay was previously published in a series of essays for the ezine EAST WIND: Politics & Culture of Asian America, under the general title of “Sounds of Struggle.”1“I personally do not believe in the word style.”2—Bruce LeeDuring the 1960s and 1970s, my mother singlehandedly raised my brother, my sister, and me in Palo Alto, a quiet, predominantly white middle-class suburb about 35 miles south of San Francisco. Today, the area is famous as the heart of Silicon Valley, but at the time it was known simply as the home of prestigious Stanford University. It was a difficult adjustment for our mother because she grew up in a completely different world—as part of a Chinese immigrant working-class family in segregated San Francisco's Chinatown during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.After my father died in a commercial airplane collision over the Grand Canyon in 1956, my mother wanted to live closer to her father and brothers, who lived together in a family-owned building in San Francisco. In 1960, we moved north from Southern California. Because my mother and my relatives didn't like to drive a car, my mother chose to buy a house in Palo Alto—it was one of the few towns that had a train station stop, and it was my mother's dream that her three children would someday attend Stanford University, located there. Years later, I learned that my mother's decision to live in that town was because of the train stop.In 1963, the year the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA) was founded, I was nine years old. Living in Palo Alto, I was often reminded that Stanford built the railroad. By the time I was in the fourth grade, in 1963, students had learned to sing children's songs about building the railroad such as “I've Been Working on the Railroad,” “John Henry,” and “Paddy Works on the Railway.” But there were no children's songs that valorized the Chinese immigrant workers who built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. In May 1969, I read an article about a ceremony in Utah to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the completion of the Central Pacific Railroad. I was shocked to learn that it was the Chinese immigrant workers—not Stanford—who built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. I was also shocked to learn that the ceremony's keynote speaker from the US government declared several times that it was “American workers who built the railroad.” One of the leaders of CHSA was my Uncle Philip Choy, who was angered by the US government's complete erasure of the Chinese immigrant contribution to building the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. At the time, I was the ninth-grade president at a predominantly white school in Palo Alto. During the last month of school, I had to spend the remaining weeks in San Francisco because my grandfather, who was the last living Chinese immigrant in our family, was dying. After my grandfather passed away, I returned to Palo Alto—to Stanford, the namesake of the man credited with constructing the railroad. (Nearly 50 years later, I composed the Chinese American Symphony to pay tribute to the Chinese immigrant workers who built the first transcontinental railroad.)My family history is complex, as a result of the US immigration policy. In 1882, the Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which became the first law that excluded people solely because of their race. After the fire from the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco destroyed all public birth certificate records, however, many Chinese immigrants were able to claim they were born in San Francisco. In resistance to the racist Chinese immigration ban, immigrants cleverly created a “paper son slot system” to make it possible for Chinese immigrants to enter the United States.3 My paternal grandfather was an example. His original surname was Woo (Hu in Mandarin). My great-grandfather Jang Kai Yow was born into a merchant family in San Francisco. As a US citizen, he was exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act. During the mid-1890s, he left San Francisco to visit Heungshan (later Zhongshan), a county in the Guangdong Province of southern China. After Jang Kai Yow returned to San Francisco on April 28, 1899, he reported the birth of a son in China to create a slot, even though no son had been born. A merchant broker or a family relative then served as a middleman to sell the slot to a family named Woo in China with no family relationship in San Francisco. Two years after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, my grandfather, who was twelve years old, arrived in San Francisco under the paper son surname of Jang and became a United States citizen.I am the grandson of a paper son. My grandparents, my father, and his two brothers lived a life of hardship in single-occupancy rooms in San Francisco's Chinatown during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882–1943). There were only two rooms. One room was where my father and his brother slept on a sofa bed. This bedroom was also the family dining area. The other room is where my grandparents slept in a bed and my father's youngest brother slept in a crib. In a separate area, away from their single-room occupancy (SRO), my grandparents had to share a community kitchen with other SRO tenants who lived in the building. Whenever my grandparents traveled back and forth from Zhongshan to San Francisco, they had to undergo intensive, traumatic interrogations in the US immigration station on Angel Island (in 1914, 1916, 1921, 1933, and 1937). In 1995, the Kronos Quartet commissioned me to compose Island: The Immigrant Suite, No. 2, for string quartet and a Cantonese opera singer. I wanted to create a work that would memorialize the Chinese immigrants who were incarcerated on Angel Island, and so I selected Chinese poems that were published in English translation in a book called Island: History and Poetry of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940, edited by Him Mark Lai, Judy Yung, and Genny Lim. These poems by Chinese immigrants had been carved and painted on the walls of Angel Island. They expressed the sorrow, anger, and defiance they felt during imprisonment. The Kronos Quartet (David Harrington, violin; John Sherba, violin; Hank Dutt, viola; Joan Jeanrenaud, cello) and the Cantonese Opera singer Eva Tam premiered the work at San Francisco's Cowell Theatre in May 1996.4Around the time I was living in Palo Alto, Black Revolutionary Politics and Black Liberation Music became popular social phenomena. Chimera Books and Music carried books and recordings about both topics. In his By Any Means Necessary, Malcolm X acknowledges the vital role of Black music in Black liberation.5 Speaking at the first public rally of the Organization of Afro American Unity in New York, in June of 1964, Malcolm X explained that Black music was the only area of American culture in which Black people had been free to create and demonstrate mastery.During that period, six crucial books about Black music were written by Black writers. Blues People and Black Music, by LeRoi Jones, were two important, especially life-changing books for me. After the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, Jones rejected his name, with its slavery-era surname, changing it to Amiri Baraka and becoming the Father of the Black Arts Movement, as well as one of the important voices in the Black Liberation Movement. The other four crucial books were The Music of Black Americans: A History, by Eileen Southern; Music: Black, White, and Blue, by Ortiz Walton; Black American Music: Past and Present, by Hildred Roach; and Black Music: 4 Lives, by A.B. Spellman, whose 1964 interview with Malcolm X was published in By Any Means Necessary. There were also white writers who wrote persuasively about Black music; for example, Ben Sidran's Black Talk and Frank Kofsky's Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music.From 1972–73, after graduating high school, I attended the University of California at Berkeley, which delighted my mother; it was my late father's alma mater. Because the University of California, Berkeley, was a large university, I felt isolated living in a compact, cubicle dormitory space, and often escaped to San Francisco on weekend nights to attend concerts at Keystone Korner, the iconic jazz club located in the North Beach area. In June of 1973, I attended one of Rahsaan Roland Kirk's Bright Moments concerts, which was later produced as the album of the same name. Rahsaan created a sonic universe filled with multifarious sounds, what can be called “shining sonic stars,” from his array of woodwind instruments. The sounds of Rahsaan's ensemble moved in perfect alignment. His spoken, storytelling introductions would be sometimes deadly serious, sometimes humorous, and sometimes both. This memorable concert was a “bright moment” that revivified my life, pushing me forward to envisage a decision: I wanted to make music a crucial part of my life.To the disappointment of my mother, who hoped that I would study to become a scientist like my late father, I dropped out of Berkeley and lived at home in Palo Alto, beginning my piano studies at age 19. I remember my older brother's skeptical words: “Not everyone can be a Van Cliburn.” “I do not want to be a Van Cliburn!,” I exclaimed. “I want to be Jon Jang!”By coincidence, my first piano lesson happened to fall on July 17, 1973, the sixth anniversary of John Coltrane's passing. Three days later, my hero Bruce Lee, who spiritually lifted my Chinese American head up high, died unexpectedly and mysteriously at the young age of 32. In the same month, I saw the McCoy Tyner Quartet (with saxophonist Azar Lawrence) perform repertory from Tyner's Enlightenment album at the Keystone Korner. In August, Bruce Lee's final film, Enter the Dragon, opened at theaters in the United States. During that one month—mid-July to mid-August—I rode an emotional roller coaster. Two months later, the Wailers released their Burnin’ album, which included the song “Get Up, Stand Up,” by Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. Black music, Bruce Lee: Lead me to free me in ’73!We'll tell the story how we've overcome,for we'll understand it better by and by.6—from “We'll Understand It Better By and By,” by Charles Albert TindleyAfter a scant 18 months of piano study, I flew to New York and Ohio to audition at music schools and was accepted into all of them. I chose Oberlin College in Ohio, not only because its music conservatory is excellent, but also because the college is among the top small liberal arts colleges in the country. Having been accepted as a piano performance major in the conservatory, I could spend half of my course credits in piano performance every semester, investing longer hours of practice and study on the piano.I had the best of two worlds, studying music with Professor Wilbur Price and Dr. Wendell Logan. With Wilbur “Bud” Price, I studied piano works by French composers: Maurice Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901), Claude Debussy's Études (1915), Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux (1956–1958). And Eric Satie's absurd Embryons desséchés (Dried-up Embryos) (1913). Although I was a piano performance major, I did not limit my course studies to Western classical music. I was the only nonwhite student who performed on the kora, a West African 21-string harp-lute instrument, in the Oberlin Mandinka Ensemble and the Oberlin Javanese Gamelan Ensemble.Dr. Wendell Logan (1940–2010), a composer, saxophonist, and the chair of the Afro American Music Department at the conservatory, was my mentor and a father figure. He was a visionary leader, a deep thinker, and a courageous warrior with a huge heart. Dr. Logan encouraged us to explore the highest truthful level within ourselves—whatever we expressed, though the music had to come from a place of honesty and purity. He nurtured us, instilling values of integrity, respect, dignity, leading by example. Wendell Logan carried a powerful sense of nobility. During my first year at Oberlin, in 1975, I was the only Asian American student who performed in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music's Large Jazz Ensemble, as well as in one of the Oberlin Small Jazz Ensembles. Dr. Logan would create brilliant, engaging orchestrations of Charlie Parker's “Au Privave” and Ornette Coleman's “Lonely Woman” for the Oberlin Large Jazz Ensemble.When I raved about LeRoi Jones's books, Blues People and Black Music, in the Afro-American music history course taught by Dr. Logan, he responded, “There is a need and recognition to analyze the music.” Later, in the Conservatory Library, I found a music composition by Dr. Logan that Olly Wilson analyzed for the book The Black Composer Speaks.7 Wendell had been Wilson's student at Florida A&M—they were close friends. In the same book, Dr. Logan analyzed a music composition by Wilson.During my three years at Oberlin, Dr. Logan invited internationally prominent musicians and composers to act as artist-in-residence, including Jackie McLean, Barry Harris, Leroy Jenkins, Sam Rivers, and Anthony Braxton, who made a historic recording with four orchestras comprised of students at Oberlin. Braxton recruited four students to tour in his Creative Music Orchestra in Europe during the summer. Years later, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius” grant. Dr. Logan's vision and practice of exposing his students to a diversity of Black musicians’ activities was profound. While Jackie McLean encouraged us to learn “Donna Lee” by listening to the 1947 recording by Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Anthony Braxton's 1974 recording inspired us to change our interpretation.When pianist-composer Sir Roland Hanna was artist-in-residence at Oberlin in 1976, I was one of the student pianists in the official Oberlin Conservatory of Music Jazz Ensemble who rehearsed his composition The Legend of Nat Turner in the orchestra rehearsal space. It was poetic justice that we would rehearse a work about a Black man who led an 1831 slave rebellion against white Virginian slave-owners in this particular space, where we often felt like we did not belong. The work opens with spoken-word narration over a funk vamp in the rhythm section. Then the music transitions to an instrumental version of “Deep River,” the beloved spiritual that had been arranged as an art song by Harry T. Burleigh and was reharmonized here by Sir Roland. A fellow student, Jose Negron, began to sing: “I was born, born to harvest the corn.” It was a symbolic, transformative moment that we would never forget.Unlike the present, during my years of study (1975–78), there were very few Asian American students in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Sachiko Hayashi and I were the only two Asian American students out of a class of 170 (1.2 percent) who graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1978. I was the primary pianist who performed many of Logan's “classical” works at the Faculty Composers Concert series. Oberlin planted the seeds for an exploration of my own multimusicverse based upon the diverse music-making courses there. One fellow student described me as a “Chinese Frank Zappa.” Why can't I just be Jon Jang? A professor of piano performance gave me an offhand compliment that I looked more like I was in the College than the “Con,” because I grew a mustache and wore a beret and a T-shirt with the image of Bob Dylan.With my scholarship funds running out, I had to perform my senior recital in September, after only three years of study at Oberlin, and two years of private piano study in Palo Alto prior to that. During the summer of 1978, the conservatory building was closed, and I needed a piano to prepare for my senior recital. I posted an advertisement in the town's only bank and received a response from a Black woman who worked as a music teacher. Because she was about to undergo surgery followed by a rehabilitation period, she said I could practice at the Rust Methodist Church in exchange for taking on the role of accompanist at its Sunday services until she recovered.On my first day, the Black church congregation was shocked. After a while, they accepted me into the community. When the time for my senior recital came around, I invited the church congregation. They all came to listen to me perform works by Beethoven, Ravel, Schönberg, and Thelonious Sphere Monk. For an encore, I improvised on Chopsticks. Dr. Logan explained to me: “If you give to the [Black] community, they will give back.”Dr. Logan fought to grant Black music its rightful place at the conservatory and thereby honor the tradition of great artists like Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and Roland Hayes, who performed Black spirituals in concert halls, “because they belong here,” as Paul Robeson stated many times. Logan's incredible history course gave me the opportunity to reread Jones's Blues People, which had a profound impact on me. Jones notes that Black slaves brought their work songs from West Africa to the United States.8 This made me consider the possibility that Chinese immigrant workers who built the railroad may have brought their work songs from China to the American West. Dr. Logan introduced the class to a recording of William Grant Still's Afro-American Symphony (1930). After the class session was over, I stopped in front of a sculpture commemorating the Underground Railroad that stood across the street from the conservatory. I had an epiphany: Someday I could compose a Chinese American symphony, which would pay tribute to the Chinese immigrant workers who built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. After many rejections, the dream came true: Thirty years later, in 2007, I received a commission from the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra and the Oakland East Bay Symphony to compose my Chinese American Symphony—a symphonic work that pays tribute to the Chinese immigrant workers who built the first transcontinental railroad in the United States. The Chinese American Symphony belongs to my multimusicverse, which memorializes and celebrates transnational Chinese American history.In the spring of 1981, I worked at Stanford University in interdepartmental mail and later became a labor organizer for United Stanford Workers SEIU Local 715 (now Local 680). Around that time, the Stanford Daily, the student newspaper, posted an announcement about an Asian American Music Workshop meeting at the Firehouse, the space where the Asian American Student Association (AASA), a student activist organization, frequently met. When I showed up to the meeting, there was only Francis Wong and me. As usual, I dominated the conversation, and Francis quietly listened to my stream-of-consciousness talk about Black Liberation Music and Black Revolutionary Politics from John Coltrane to Amiri Baraka. After an hour of his tolerating my long-winded talk, I asked Francis, “What are you into?” He pulled a copy of the Unity newspaper out of his backpack and showed me an article written by Baraka. I had a feeling that Francis was in the know. That moment was the beginning of our long, close friendship and shared history of music-making.Later, in October 1981, Francis and I attended the first Asian American Jazz Festival in San Francisco. We were inspired and transformed by the creative power of performances by two Black Asian music ensembles: United Front and Russel Baba's ensemble (Baba later formed a music ensemble called Legal Aliens). Their humor, whether expressed musically or theatrically, became a part of Francis's and my shared values. United Front, a leaderless music ensemble collective, performed non-standard repertory, featuring works by each member in the ensemble.9Shortly after the concert, I invited United Front to record two of my music compositions. In February 1982, I recorded my eponymous album, Jang, on the eve of Thelonious Monk's transition to ancestry. In defiance of the annual Mostly Mozart Festival, a photo on the back cover of the vinyl album shows me with a placard that reads: “Monk, Yes; Mozart, No.” On the front cover, there is a drawing of a piano, with the brand name “Jang” replacing “Steinway,” and my hands in handcuffs. An inscription on the handcuffs reads, “US Music Institutions.”10 In December 1987, I attended a concert given by pianist Miya Masaoka's jazz trio at a bistro in Berkeley. Miya swung hard, especially on Miles Davis's version of “Bye Bye Blackbird.” We became good friends, sharing conversations while sipping cappuccinos at cafes in San Francisco's North Beach neighborhood. Later, I found out that Miya and I shared similar histories as revolutionary activists in socialist organizations. A few years later, she made the decision to change her primary musical instrument from piano to koto. I felt that was a difficult decision for her because she really loved to perform on piano. I don't remember if she ever asked me for my advice on her decision. If she did, I would have responded, “Jazz pianists are a dime a dozen.”A few years later, in 1993, Miya produced her first recording, Compositions/Improvisations, on Francis's and my label, Asian Improv Records (AIR), featuring her ensemble, joined by flutist-composer James Newton. She was shown on the cover with her koto. It's a significant recording, in which Miya clearly advanced the narrative that Asian Americans can be composers and leaders, taking music in new directions. In a heavily Asian American male-dominated field, Miya was a pioneer in recording work experimenting with extended techniques as a koto performer while leading an ensemble. Her Compositions/Improvisations sold out faster than any other AIR release!During the Golden Age of Hollywood, 44 films were made featuring Charlie Chan, a fictional Chinese detective, portrayed by three different white actors in yellowface from 1931–1949. In 1981, another Charlie Chan film was produced, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen, featuring Peter Ustinov and Angie Dickinson in the titular roles, performing in yellowface. A group of Asian American activists formed C.A.N. Charlie Chan, which is an acronym for the Coalition of Asians to Nix Charlie Chan. The strategy of C.A.N. was to organize a national protest campaign to boycott the film. Activists included the Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) and the Asian American Resource Workshop from Boston.A year later, during the summer of 1982, Vincent Chin, a 27-year-old Chinese American, was beaten to death by two white men in a suburb outside of Detroit. Chin was a scapegoat for high unemployment and anti-Japanese-import hysteria. The two white men were essentially exonerated by the US court system, receiving only a $3,700 fine and three-month probation in March 1983. In response to their racist, violent act, I composed and dedicated “Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?” to Vincent Chin and his mother, Lily. The work was inspired by Charles Mingus's “Original Faubus Fables.” To my mind, both works are black comedies.My first two recordings, Jang and Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?, were on the RPM label, which was founded by United Front, an Afro-Asian music ensemble based in San Francisco. Because United Front and RPM dissolved after a falling-out between the ensemble members, Francis Wong and I had to start our own record company to produce my third album, The Ballad or the Bullet?12 We named our record company Asian Improv Records (AIR). (The company was born at a time when acronyms were popular.) Brian Auerbach, who wrote the liner notes for The Ballad or the Bullet?, AIR's first release, described it as “Asian American improvised music.” Miles Davis's 1968 recording, Filles de Kilimanjaro, was among our influences. Francis and I borrowed from the phrase “directions in music by Miles Davis” to create our own mission statement: “New Directions in Music by Asian Americans.”Within the next ten years, other Asian American musicians, such as Glenn Horiuchi, Francis Wong, Tatsu Aoki, Mark Izu, Miya Masaoki, Vijay Iyer, and Hafez Modirzadeh produced their own recordings as leaders on the AIR label. Emphasizing the difference, we all don't sound alike. My works that memorialize and celebrate transnational Chinese American family history encouraged choreographer Lenora Lee to create large-scale multimedia performance works concerning this history by integrating dance, original music, video projection, graphic design, film, and other disciplines. In 2001, through Francis, I met Jen Shyu, who made music at Stanford University in a different way. During the 1980s, Francis and his future partner, Julie Yumi Hatta, had cofounded the Asian American Student Association. Unlike Jen Shyu, who majored in voice in Stanford's music department, Francis's musical activity was more informal, undertaken in collaboration with my cousin Doug Chan (a jazz saxophone student) and me. (At the time, I was working at Stanford.)The first concert that Jen produced was a spectacle. Most young performers try to throw in everything. I did so on my first recording, programming my jazz ensemble compositions alongside solo piano works by Messiaen and Dr. Logan. Jen exemplified the phrase “everything, everywhere, all at once.” She studied three musical instruments seriously, as well as modern dance. She sang, danced, and performed on the piano, violin, and Korean moon guitar.13 After the concert was over, Jen asked me, “Jon, should I learn jazz standards on voice?” “Jazz singers are a dime a dozen,” I responded. “What you can offer symbolizes the wave of the future by integrating all your disciplines.”During the 1970s and 1980s, I'd searched for books about Chinese music. For example, I became excited when I read Bell Yung's Cantonese Opera: Performance as Creative Process, because the book included music notation and a companion cassette recording.14 In the fall of 1988, the Chinese Progressive Association was planning its 16th-anniversary celebration at the New Asia Restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown. The CPA's director, Mabel Teng, requested that I learn to perform a traditional work, the “Butterfly Lovers Song,” for the audience of Chinese immigrants. I combed the merchant stores on Grant Avenue, San Francisco's main street, in search of a cassette recording of the song, but to no avail. A day before the banquet, a CPA member lent me a vinyl record of the song. By listening to the recording, I learned the “Butterfly Lovers Song.” After I performed the song at the anniversary celebration, I could hear the waiters singing the melody.The legend underlying the “Butterfly Lovers Song” concerns a Chinese woman whose acts of resistance defy patriarchal feudalism. The story dates back to the Eastern Jin Dynasty (A.D. 317–420): a young woman, Zhu Yingtai, disguises herself as a man, because only men are allowed to attend school. While disguised, she meets Liang Shanbo, a young man who quickly learns that she is a woman. They fall in love yet are forced into a separation because of the arranged marriage custom. He dies of a broken heart. As an act of resistance against feudal arranged-marriage customs, she goes to his grave and leaps in, whereupon the two lovers reincarnate as butterflies—an act symbolic not only of transformation but also of freedom. My instrumental rendering of the “Butterfly Lovers Song” was an outcome of my artist-activist connections with the work of various mass movements, such as Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign and the Rainbow Coalition, as well as the CPA. As a result, my reconceptualization of the “Butterfly Lovers Song” evolved into a hybrid of two different music traditions, Black and Chinese.I attempted a syncretism of Asian and Black musics in other works. Jasmine Among the Magnolias is based on the Chinese folk song “Beautiful Jasmine Flowers” (“Mo Li Hua”), which was employed in Puccini's Turandot. My rendering places this popular Chinese folk song within the context of the contemporary Black gospel ballad, in a work that pays tribute to Frederick Douglass and the Reconstruction-era Black Mississippi Senator, Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841–1898), who fought for Chinese immigrants’ citizenship. Similarly, I composed my arrangement of the “Flower Drum Song,” a traditional melody that originated in the Anhui Province. In a D-major section of the work, I harmonized the folk melody using the slash-chord harmony I'd learned from Wayne Shorter's composition Lost.15In January 1989, Representative Andrew Jacobs, a Democrat from Indiana and a combat-disabled Marine veteran, reintroduced a measure in the House of Representatives that proposed to change our national anthem from “The Star-Spangled Banner” to “America, the Beautiful.”During the end of June in 1989, I met with Francis and Joe Lambert, who was the Executive Director of Life on the Water, a mid-sized experimental theater located at Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Life on the Water had received a press release about a multicultural arts festival called Festival 2000 that would present performances and exhibitions during the entire month of October in 1990. It was also announced that, through an application process, Festival 2000 would commission new works to premiere at the festival.At the meeting, we talked about pitching the idea of reconceptualizing the national anthem on our application to Festival 2000. Does one anthem represent all of us? Why can't there be more than one anthem? Does the anthem have to be a song? Why can't it be a poem? Based on my practice of naming musical works using puns and plays on words (e.g., “Are You Chinese or Charlie Chan?” and The Ballad or the Bullet?), I came up with SenseUs!—which could have been written as “SenseUS,” the title being a pun upon the 1990 census.SenseUs! could serve as a clarion call to sense artists of color in the context of the “multicultural arts wars” in San Francisco. It could also suggest a call to sense the democracy of the New American Majority, a multiracial US coalition that encompasses people of color, not just white America. For the music, the primary collaborators for SenseUs! were Max Roach, John Santos, and me; for the poetry, they were Sonia Sanchez, Genny Lim, and Victor Hernandez Cruz. Roach, Sanchez, Santos, Cruz, Lim, and our ensemble performed the world premiere of SenseUs: The Rainbow National Anthems before a multiracial audience of 3,000 at Davies Symphony Hall.