Dark chapter in history inspires a lively SF jazz concert

Given just days to pack up after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 empowered the military to detain and relocate Japanese Americans living on the West Coast, 19-year-old George Yoshida grabbed his most precious possessions.

“We could take to the camp only what we could carry,” the late drummer, educator and historian told me in a 2001 interview for the Contra Costa Times. “I took a box of 78 rpm records. I still have them — Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie, Duke Ellington. My sister was very upset because here we’re taking bedrolls and utensils and clothing and I’m taking my records, but I couldn’t part with them.”

In the years after World War II, when Japanese Americans reintegrated into American society, many of Yoshida’s fellow internees resisted talking about their experiences in the camps. Not Yoshida, who died in 2014 at the age of 92. At the urging of bassist/composer Mark Izu, he documented the history of the dance bands in internment camps as part of a broader survey in his 1997 book, “Reminiscing in Swingtime: Japanese Americans in American Popular Music, 1925-1960.”

On Saturday afternoon, Presidio Trust presents “Music Makers: Bands Behind Barbed Wires,” a free jazz concert inspired by the legacy of Yoshida, who played drums in a big band while incarcerated at the Poston Internment Camp in southwest Arizona. Led and assembled by drummer Akira Tana, the program focuses on the swinging hits that dominated the pop charts during the war.

In a nod to the Issei, the first generation of Japanese immigrants to the US, Tokyo-born percussionist Jimi Nakagawa plays an opening set with his taiko duo. And the Presidio Officers’ Club exhibition, “Exclusion: The Presidio’s Role in World War II Japanese American Incarceration” can be visited Saturday 11 a.m.–4 p.m.

A San Jose native who grew up in Palo Alto, Tana became a top-shelf accompanist during his two-decade tenure in New York City, touring and recording with jazz legends like Zoot Sims, Art Farmer, Jimmy Heath and James Moody.

Since moving back to the Bay Area in 1998 he’s become an industrious bandleader spearheading numerous projects, several of which have established tight bonds with Japan and Japanese musicians (like Otonowa, a prolific ensemble initially assembled to offer comfort and raise funds for northern Japanese communities devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami).

For “Music Makers,” Tana made a point of including musicians with Japanese ancestry, like ace trumpeter John Worley, pianist Ben Stolorow, and bassist John Wiitala, “whose mother was Okinawan,” Tana said. The ensemble encompasses a multi-generational cast of other top-shelf players such as trombonist Charles Hamilton, trumpeter Mario Guarneri, and tenor saxophonist Jason Hayashi, who just graduated from the San Francisco Conservatory’s Roots, Jazz and American Music program.

The ensemble’s alto saxophonist Stuart Yasaki supplied the arrangements from a “huge trove of stock big band charts from this era,” Tana said. “I choose about 10 famous tunes, Ellington, Goodman, Glenn Miller, Count Basie charts. Basically swing stuff.”

Some of the charts might be the same ones that Yoshida played at Poston.

“The Recreation Department handled the music, entertainment and talent shows,” he said. “Some of us had instruments and they provided us with some funds to buy music stands and helped us to form a swing band called the Music Makers. We bought arrangements by mail and played dances for the other young people.”

Tana knew Yoshida and performed at his memorial, though the two drummers never had a chance to play together. He was fascinated by “Reminiscing in Swingtime,” as Tana knows first-hand how hard it could be to coax stories out of elders who went through the internment experience.

He was born years after the war, and his parents were already married when they were relocated to different camps. Tana only got a detailed portrait of his parent’s life during the war when he read an academic paper about his father’s extensive diaries that his mother had published in Japan many years later, “A Neglected Diary, A Forgotten Buddhist Couple: Tana Daish’s Internment Camp Diary as a Historical and Literary Text.”

In a perfect pairing, Tana recruited Bay Area vocalist Kim Nalley to perform several songs with the group. In addition to her career as an international jazz artist she joined the history faculty at Cal State East Bay after earning a PhD from UC Berkeley. “Music Makers” isn’t only situation in which her two paths converge.