With Julian Saporiti and Emilia Halvorsen
Friday, October 11, 2019
7:30 pm | Grusin Hall, Imig Music Building on CU Boulder campus
Free and open to the public
This performance is sponsored by a grant from the Roser Visiting Artist Endowment.
NPR has described No-No Boy as "An act of revisionist subversion."
NY Music Daily wrote after that "Saporiti’s tunesmithing ranks with any of the real visionaries of this era."
No-No Boy is an immersive multimedia work combining original folk songs, storytelling, and projected archival images, bridging a divide between art and scholarship. Taking inspiration from his own family’s history living through the Vietnam War, as well as interviews with World War II Japanese Incarceration camp survivors and other stories of Asian American experience, Nashville born songwriter Julian Saporiti has transformed years of doctoral research at Brown University into an innovative concert / dissertation, all in an effort to bring this work to a broader audience.
2018 saw the release of the first No-No Boy album, 1942 and an ambitious national tour which largely focused on sharing the collection of songs Saporiti had written about WWII Japanese American Incarceration and the links he saw between that history, his family story and today's immigration policies. In the spring of 2019, Saporiti expanded the project’s scope, embarking with longtime collaborator and photographer Diego Luis and their Brown colleague Juan Betancourt on a trip to the Mexican border. Playing concerts for asylum seekers and aid workers in Laredo, Crystal City (former home of a WWII Internment Camp), and Dilley, TX (current home to the largest family detention center), the experience was jarring, impactful and created an eery sense of deja-vu, walking through and making music amongst overlapping histories, surrounded by lessons seemingly unlearned.
Julian Saporiti (Providence, RI) is a musician and scholar, born and raised in Nashville, TN to an Italian American musician and a Vietnamese painter. In his 20s, he toured North America and Europe with an indie rock band called The Young Republic. After feeling burnt out from the road, he chose a quieter life as a scholar, investigating hidden American histories in the mountains of Wyoming. He then moved to Brown University to continue his research on race, refugees, music, memory and immigration. He has advanced degrees in American Studies and Ethnomusicology as well as a degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston.
In late 2016, Saporiti went back to Nashville and was sitting in his mother's kitchen listening to the dozens of oral histories he recorded of people who lived through WWII Japanese internment. With his headphones on and these stories in his ears, he picked up his guitar and began writing songs. "Music was the way I needed to tell this story," he reflects. "I also looked to my own Vietnamese War torn history and other stories of Asian-American experience." He now has a 70 song collection which combines historical documents, oral histories, archival sound, photography and film, and processes them through songwriting, film editing/projections, and audio production. He will be adding to these collecting more material from Minidoka and Ontario during his residency.
Emilia Halvorsen is a singer/songwriter from Baltimore and a recent graduate of Brown University, earning a degree in sociology with a focus on museum studies. She has been a frequent No-No Boy collaborator since early 2017 and helped co-produce the forthcoming No-No Boy album, due in spring 2020.
"No-No Boy’s work might best be described as an audiovisual soundtrack of the Asian American experience. This multi-media project of music and archival images takes us on a journey to the stories of our parents, our ancestors and ourselves in ways that we haven’t yet experienced...armed with scholarship and creativity, to carry forward the discussion around loss, resilience, and identity." - Riksha Magazine
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