By Sharon Yamato
I’ve had the pleasure of working with musician/composer Dave Iwataki starting way back in 2009, when I did my first short documentary film on pioneering activist and author Michi Nishiura Weglyn. Managing to piece together a short film with the smallest budget ever ($10,000 and a prayer), I’ve always thought that music can make or break a film.
I turned to Dave, who I then knew only by reputation as the one who created the terrific score for the film “Toyo Miyatake: Infinite Shades of Gray.” I asked if he could “give” us some music that he had already composed to work within our tiny budget, and he gladly agreed to do so.
I’m almost sure his music (along with another freebie from a now-deceased friend, the incomparable jazz/blues singer Ernie Andrews) helped our little film, “Out of Infamy,” win an “Honorable Mention” at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival.
Dave came through once more with another film (“A Flicker in Eternity”), this one on young Stanley Hayami, who was incarcerated at Heart Mountain and drafted into the 442nd RCT. For this, we culled music from “Project J, Justice Barbed Wire and Hip-Hop,” his CD that incorporated music with a hip-hop beat and meaningful lyrics to appeal to a new youthful audience. Songs he wrote like “Democracy Can Be an Illusion” were the perfect fit for our film about a promising young man who dreamt of being an artist and writer before his tragic death at age 19 while fighting in Italy.
Working with Dave, I realized he was willing to help low-budget JA filmmakers because he had that commitment to community that was rare among artists trying to make money in the big commercial world of entertainment. Fortunately, it has paid off for him, perhaps not monetarily, but by his becoming the composer that filmmakers like PBS’ Emmy-winning Akira Boch turn to when they need an effective film score.
You can imagine my joy when I heard Dave was now working on a musical production that put him and his music front and center. After several years of taking a break, he is presenting an expanded version of his production, “J-Town/Bronzeville Suite,” an innovative musical journey through time when Little Tokyo’s streets transformed from a prewar Japanese American community to the wartime African American neighborhood known as Bronzeville (welcoming jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis), then later becoming the intersection of the two cultures when JAs returned after the war.
What better time than now to show how these two cultures and their musical genres finally came together to help repair racial differences, a union that is still being carried out today with such groups as the National Nikkei Reparations Coalition lobbying for Black reparations.
There’s no one better equipped to tell this story than this super-talented musician/composer with deep roots in and around Little Tokyo and who carries with him a family history of wartime incarceration, complete with military service and a strong connection to redress and reparations.
His father Kuwashi Iwataki served in the 100th Infantry and sister Miya Iwataki was a leader of the pioneering National Coalition for Redress and Reparations who is also heavily involved in today’s Black reparations advocacy.
Nonetheless, it was Dave’s love of music that drew him to the project’s subject. As he put it, “The moment I discovered the existence of after-hour jazz clubs in Little Tokyo, I was hooked. Growing up as a musician, I spent late nights listening to KBCA, hearing the names of jazz greats and imagining myself transported to that era.”
What made it even more compelling was his connection to “a deeper story—one shaped by Executive Order 9066, the removal of Japanese Americans from their homes.” He goes on, “This displacement created an unexpected chapter in history as African Americans moved into the vacant neighborhood bringing their own cultural influences, including jazz clubs where the greats I listened to on the radio came to perform.”
It’s clear that Dave has applied what he has learned from jazz to his current musical repertoire. As keyboard player for The Earth, Wind and Fire Experience by Al McKay (who wrote the hits “September,” “Best of My Love,” and others), he currently travels the world accompanying one of the most popular R&B groups ever.
However, “J-Town/Bronzeville Suite” goes above and beyond the musical genres of jazz and soul. As Dave describes it, “The pieces in the first movement use Japanese instruments like koto, shakuhachi, fue or shinobue, and taiko drums to represent the community, especially the Issei, the first Japanese immigrant pioneers who were the foundation of the development of Little Tokyo.”
In addition to Japanese instrumentalists, a notable list of Los Angeles jazz musicians is slated to participate. And if that’s not enough, both classical Japanese dance from Azuma Kotobuki Kai and African American jazz dance from Pat Taylor’s Jazz/Antiqua expand the evening’s diverse entertainment.
Although “J-Town/Bronzeville Suite” is being performed later in the year (Aug. 22) as part of the huge Grand Performance series in Downtown Los Angeles, it’s coming to its rightful home in Little Tokyo on May 23, appropriately at East West Players’ theater.
This venue is especially fitting since it was once the prewar home of the Japanese Union Church and later became the Pilgrim Center, a community center for Bronzeville residents during the war, before it became Little Tokyo’s premier home of the nation’s largest and longest running Asian American theater company.
In the meantime, I hope that Dave still has time to appear occasionally on keyboards around town and to write the score for more low-budget but purposeful films on the Japanese American experience. Thankfully, he’s already agreed to score in his spare time our next film on the eventful life of L.A.’s own 92-year-old former camp detainee June Aochi Berk.
Sharon Yamato writes from Playa del Rey and can be reached at [email protected]. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of TheRafu Shimpo.