New album from Portland artist shines a light on Asian American history

Julian Saporiti found a lot of Asian American songs and musicians when he was doing research for his PhD in American History. But the lack of popular understanding of that history was frustrating. In response, Saporiti founded No-No Boy, a Portland-based music and multimedia project that combines vivid narrative storytelling with Asian American history. Saporiti joins us to play songs from his newest album, “Empire Electric.”

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller:  This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Most doctoral dissertations don’t turn into popular culture. They are created by and for the world of academia. But that’s not the path that Julian Saporiti took. In 2012, the indie rock musician stopped touring to pursue a PhD in American Studies at Brown University. He focused on the history of transpacific musical cultures, the back and forth influences between the US and Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines and other Asian countries. In addition to the standard footnoted version of a dissertation, Saporiti created a documentary film, podcasts, an immersive multimedia concert project, and albums. All based on turning the history he was uncovering into songs and stories for the rest of us. He called the overall project No-No Boy. This week he’s releasing a new No-No Boy album. It’s called “Empire Electric.” It is a sonically rich genre hopping collection. It marries autobiographical lyrics with elements from Oregon’s own Japanese American history. Julian Saporiti joins us now along with his co-produced and wife Amelia. It’s great to have you on the show and right here in studio.

Julian Saporiti:  Thanks for having us, it’s a blast.

Miller:  I thought we could start with a song. “Western Empress” is one of a few different Oregon centric songs on this new album. What should we know before we hear it?

Saporiti:  You should know that there’s a very visitable place called the Gresham Pioneer Cemetery from where we sit today. And in that cemetery there is a very important tree, a Japanese cedar tree. And this was planted to mark the space where Miyo Iwakoshi, who was the first Japanese settler in Oregon who came over in 1880 with her Scottish husband, Andrew McKinnon. It was planted to mark her grave because when she died, like a lot of places in Oregon, it was a whites-only space. And it was only years later when a headstone marking that she was the first Japanese settler was erected there.

But she’s buried there and she was sort of buried secretly. It was such a powerful story. Also, just for me as an Asian American, walking around the Oregon woods all the time, rethinking who this landscape has always belonged to. Obviously the Native history but many different kinds of people, including this woman who came over and started the sawmill in Gresham. So that’s what the song is about? It’s just about her, her adopted daughter, Tama and her husband Andrew coming over from Japan. And her nickname was the Western Empress. So it goes like this:

[Music playing]

Oregon Nikkei

First of the forest

Steam-powered sawmill town

Patience and patience now

Samurai plowshare

Old Nagasaki

The Scotsman makes funny sounds

Turnin’ the language round

Learnin’ enough for asking her out

Rafts made of hardwood

Wide as the river

Orient girls confound

Like Monarchs on frozen ground

Miyo buried Andrew’s body

Gresham Pioneer

Tama and the Kyoto salesman

Married earlier last year

(Whistling)

Pose for a photo

Oh, how the years go

Flanked by two grandsons proud

Jewels and a modest gown

But long for the islands

Welcome the workers

Burnish a simple crown

Patience and patience now

Patience and patience now

Hakujin lover, baby, let’s go, oh,

Trail blazed and timbers down

Fifty years before the expo

Western Empress brought ‘em underground

Miyo said I crossed the ocean for you, fool

I ain’t leavin’ now

Bury me, Japanese cedar tree

Bury me, Japanese cedar tree

Miller:  That’s my guest, Julian Saporiti, who performs as No-No Boy with his partner Amelia, who has brought a lot of other sounds to this, including some sampled birds that we’ll get to and percussion and keys. So, I’m curious, Julian, what your process was from learning about this woman’s story to inhabiting it in your own way and then turning it into a song in your own words. What’s your process for that?

Saporiti:  Well, I think it starts with the songwriting because that’s the way I know the world. That’s what I did. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. My dad was in the music industry. So I grew up around country music and my dad’s record collection, classic boomer folk rock stuff. And so it was just in my blood. Just from high school I’ve been making records. So that was the way I knew how to relate to people. So when they said turn this history research stuff you’re doing into a dissertation, it didn’t make sense for me to have to learn a whole new form, this laborious, very jargony dissertation writing.

So I always thought well, let me communicate the way I’ve always communicated. But now I have some more interesting things to say. It’s so for this song in particular. Sometimes people will ask me to write songs out of interesting histories and so this was this guy who plays with Portland Taiko. He actually asked me to write something about Miyo Iwakoshi. So I went through all the archives that the Oregon Historical Society had. Place- based research is really important to me.

So I started writing, out at the cemetery where Miyo [was] buried, [while] visiting Amelia. And I went out there during COVID. Just got out and sang under that tree and captured sounds of the space. And so it’s that combination of place-based research and then archival know-how. And then also, I have to have some kind of connection. I’m not Japanese American, I’m Vietnamese American, but I do sort of look more like Miyo Iwakoshi than the average person and also [I’m] someone who quite frequently inhabits forests and mountains. I’m a big outdoors person. Stories of people like that who also have wandered these landscapes is an interesting way to time travel and put yourself in those shoes. So, yeah: place, history books, all that stuff makes for cool songs.

Miller:  We heard some samples of a recording of birds in that. There’s a lot of water in this album as well and other nature sounds. Where did all of those come from?

Saporiti:  Most of them come from my field recorder. As I would go out and do field work and visit these sites that are historically important, I also wanted to capture the sounds of these places. Sometimes that results in really heavily manipulated banging on an old barrack floor. Barbed wire, and turning that into a drum set or something. But on this album, there’s a lot more manipulation of the ambient natural sounds. So a lot of times the same birds that were singing 120 years ago are still singing today. And I love capturing that.

The dark-eyed junco in the park, or some kind of warbler or chickadee and then manipulating those, pitching them down or pitching them up and you get these interesting instruments you can play on the keyboard. And so even when we play live, although it’s a much reduced setting than what I can do in the studio with all my instruments, Amelia is over there triggering sounds from that very tree and the birds that sang in the wind and the sounds of the ocean for other songs, to help us put sound back into history, so to speak.

Miller:  Do you feel that? I mean, when you were playing just now and those sounds are triggered, does it bring you back to the place?

Saporiti:  It brings me back to not necessarily the place specifically, sometimes it does, but to a different place than just the stage or the studio. So maybe almost like a third space where it’s like I’m on the plane with the history that I know in the place where that history happened. That’s kind of what these sounds trigger in my ear when we hear those.

Miller:  Let’s listen to a track from the album. We’re gonna hear “Mekong Baby.” What do you want us to know before we hear the first minute or so of it?

Saporiti:  Well, I think this is kind of the sonic idealization of what we’re talking about. It was recorded almost completely live at the Tryon Creek State Park over by Amelia’s law school, Lewis and Clark.

Miller:  Three miles from where we are right now?

Saporiti:  Three miles from where we are. I spent a lot of time there because we have one car, so I’ll drop Amelia off at law school and then I’ll go make field recordings in the park. I love birding, or just get my hike in and stuff like that. And so a lot of times I’ll bring a portable sampler synthesizer with me. Just record what’s around me. Turn those bird sounds, pitch them down, turn them into instruments, play on the keyboard, and make chords out of them. In this song, I was by a creek. I was under these trees and I was thinking about the chorus which is, “Sail away Mekong baby.” And that’s the part of the world where my mom grew up, in Saigon. So I think about her and her sister and her mother, these incredible women who had to leave Vietnam because of the war.

But also I’m thinking about just what it truly means to be Vietnamese and Vietnamese American. Not just focus on the trauma of the war, but all the beauty inherent to their existence, to everyone’s existence and the agency they took to make life during such a difficult time. And so there are also samples of artillery fire in the background which make up the rhythm. But juxtaposed on top of that are bird sounds and water and country sounds like my mom would have grown up with, visiting her grandparents.

So again, it’s using nature, using historical samples, and then some pretty harmonies, trying to make sense of an interesting history.

Miller: Let’s have a listen.

[Music playing]

Ngày xưa ta rất dại khờ

Sail away Mekong baby

Cùng ra khơi

Cháu con dòng Cửu Long

Sail away Mekong Baby

We were lovers once

Ngày xưa ta rất dại khờ

Cháu con dòng Cửu Long

And I was younger once

How your charm offensive tested

And you were younger once

All I own are second guesses

And so it goes

Fighting on the beach

And so it goes

Violence in our teeth

Cháu con Cửu Long sông

Cháu con Cửu Long sông

Sail away Mekong baby…

Năm mươi con có về vùng núi non

Nửa bầy con năm mươi về đại dương

Sail away

Cháu con, Chàu con Cửu Long sông

Mekong Baby

Miller:  You’ve noted once that even some of the “American” instruments on this album have histories that are more complicated than a lot of listeners may assume. What do you mean by that?

Saporiti:  Well, where I grew up in the home of country music and old time and bluegrass and stuff. Grew up going to a lot of barn dances and hearing people playing western swing down at some of the clubs. And the instruments that you’ll see are banjo, you’ll see pedal steel. So let’s just take those two instruments, for instance. A friend of ours on our label Folkways named Jake Blount has made a career recently out of helping to illuminate that the banjo is actually an African instrument with African origins. It’s through slavery and colonialism that it was brought over.

Very similarly, the steel guitar is a Hawaiian instrument. It’s a Pacific Island instrument, an invention that I loved growing up. I loved the form of the pedal steel guitar. It’s so beautiful and sad and never really sticks on one note. And I only realized, when I was getting a degree in ethnomusicology years later, that this is actually what they call an API instrument, invention.

And so between that and then something like using a tom-tom and a drum set, that’s from the Chinese tom-tom that was brought over to be added on to the more European military base drum and snare drum that ultimately became our drum kit in America.

It’s all of these instruments woven together by imperialism and migration and globalization. And I think that’s absolutely fascinating. Once you give historical credit to where these things come from.

Miller:  A lot of the songs in this album, there’s some break in them or some big change. And the version that we just heard of “Western Empress,” it was more acoustic than the one on the album where two-thirds of the way through drums and electric guitar come in. You have another one, “Jakarta” where there’s two minutes of a kind of dreamy background and found-sound feel and then your lyrics start. And then you eventually go back to that sort of dreamy part for the last part. Why do you think you’re drawn to these hybrid songs, each one of which can contain a couple different parts?

Saporiti:  I think because of the songs. Going back to when I was an academic, I guess I still am a little bit. I tour too much to teach full time. But in my academic training I found that the prose that we put out in our books or our peer reviewed articles, a lot of times just have to hammer home an argument. So they can’t quite capture the multiple truths held in any history at the same time in the way a song can. So what you’re talking about for me is the song or the recording’s ability to juxtapose, like in “Mekong Baby”. Samples of American artillery fire underneath beautiful water sounds from a state or from a national park in Vietnam or the sounds of Tryon Creek that I was recording live.

All of these things exist at once in my own Vietnamese American identity. It’s very complicated. I’m a hybrid person myself. So hybrid musicality, I think, is a very good way to do that. And that’s what recordings can allow you to do if you stretch beyond just the instruments and the tonalities in front of you and just maybe branch out a little bit.

Miller: Can we hear another song?

Saporiti:  Absolutely.

Miller:  You’ve called “Little Monk” the heart of this album? What do you mean by that?

Saporiti:  Amelia was also at Brown with me. That’s where we met. And when I was at Brown University getting my PhD my thinking got really deep, as it should, otherwise I would have gotten kicked out. That’s what PhDs do I guess. But I also realized my thinking had never been more narrow. I had never been more narrow minded than when I was engaging in this really dense, very politicized history of war, trauma, race, all this kind of stuff. And I wanted to, I guess, refresh. And so we went to one of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist’s monastery in America called Blue Cliff in upstate New York.

His books had been very important to me from when I lived in Wyoming and I was kind of a dirtbag climber. I just would take his little books and read them at the bottom of crags and sort of became a thrift store Buddhist. So we went to his monastery for a week to sort of empty out. Because at Brown, this was the height of the Trump ascension, at a very liberal lefty place like that, there were student protests every day about everything except for class, of course, since they’re one-percenters. And I just wanted to be more down the middle. I’m a Tennessee guy. I lived in Wyoming, you know. I like Oregon partially because it has a diversity of political thought. I’m a very liberal person but I grew up in places where compromise had to happen. And there’s no better place than a Buddhist monastery to get back to that because they’re all about this middle path thing. So that’s what this song is about. It was written shortly after we left the monastery. Holding multiple truths at the same time, having real deep empathy for other people’s opinions, believing in things like restorative justice, not just cutting people off automatically and seeing if there’s like a more middle pathway that, at least, I can go through in my life.

Miller:  Let’s have a listen.

[Music playing]

So, it’s the end of the world, once again

What is it this week?

Protests over this

Riots over that

Do you remember at the monastery

When the outraged child cried

And Little Monk just sweetly smiled back?

Oh, how and when do I get so zen?

Light the way from your small apartment

Quiet days, worry within your reach

Tend your garden, do not harden

At the cruel and constant spinning of your mind’s demands

Pro-tip for a good heart

Be where your feet are now

So, it’s the end once again of the world

the sophomores bellyache

And demonstrate

Over everything but class

Red suns and ash cover

Half the state of California

Little Monk just meditates

And slowly walks the path

I can’t control what I can’t control

Light the way from your small apartment

Quiet days, worry within your reach

Tend your garden, do not harden

At the cruel and constant spinning of your mind’s demands

Pro-tip for a good heart

Be where your feet are now

So it’s the end of the world

But I don’t feel so anxious this week

Drawing Canvasbacks and sitting on the grass

Watch as they sweep the park

Trash the tents while it’s still dark

Though once I lived out of a car

I wouldn’t say I’m mad

To have the sidewalk back

Miller:  We just have time to hear a little bit more about this album. The last track on it is called “1603.” What’s the significance of that date?

Saporiti:  1603 is a date that I think should be a starting point for any Asian American history course in any Oregon public school. The cool thing about being a historian, one of the very few cool things about being a historian, is you get to meet these geniuses who are digging up stuff that no one ever knew before or had forgotten and no one you know alive had ever known. And so Diego texted me one day. He did his PhD with me at Brown. He’s a professor in Boston now and he texted me.

He’s like, “Hey, dude, the first ship that ever saw the coast of Oregon, non- native discovery of Oregon was a ship in 1603 and there were seven Asian dudes on the crew list. I just found the crew list in Seville, Spain, in this archive. We gotta go there, check it out because this is 200 plus years before Lewis and Clark, before the Oregon Trail is even an idea.”

These foundational mythologies of Manifest Destiny and the building of the iconography of the West in America. And to know that there were guys from India or the Philippines on this ship, a lot of them, brought over as slaves and not just on this voyage, but the entire Spanish galleon trade was mostly populated by Asian folks. And these are the first Asians in the Americas. It completely pushes back the start date for Asian American history to the 1500s, 300 years before these Chinese miners and railroad folks. So I had to put that into a song and that’s what 1603 is about.

Miller:  Julian Saporiti, thanks so much.

Saporiti:  Absolutely.

Miller:  Julian Saporiti is a songwriter and project creator for No-No Boy. “Empire Electric” is the new album. It is coming out at the end of this week.

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